Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 61

A song of AIs and fire

The televisual adaption of Game of Thrones wrapped up a few weeks ago, so I hope I can safely share some thoughts with spoilering. That said, if you haven’t seen the final season, and you plan to, please read no further!

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the style of the final series or two. To many people, it felt weirdly …off. Zeynep’s superb article absolutely nails why the storytelling diverged from its previous style:

For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

Let’s leave aside the clumsiness of the execution for now and focus on the outcomes.

The story finishes with Bran as the “winner”, in that he now rules the seve��� six kingdoms. I have to admit, I quite like the optics of replacing an iron throne with a wheelchair. Swords into ploughshares, and all that.

By this point, Bran is effectively a non-human character. He’s the Dr. Manhattan of the story. As the three-eyed raven, he has taken on the role of being an emotionless database of historical events. He is Big Data personified. Or, if you squint just right, he’s an Artificial Intelligence.

There’s another AI in the world of Game of Thrones. The commonly accepted reading of the Night King is that he represents climate change: an unstoppable force that’s going to dramatically impact human affairs, but everyone is too busy squabbling in their own politics to pay attention to it. I buy that. But there’s another interpretation. The Night King is rogue AI. He’s a paperclip maximiser.

Clearly, a world ruled by an Artificial Intelligence like that would be a nightmare scenario. But we’re also shown that a world ruled purely by human emotion would be just as bad. That would be the tyrannical reign of the mad queen Daenerys. Both extremes are undesirable.

So why is Bran any better? Well, technically, he isn’t ruling alone. He has a board of (very human) advisors. The emotionless logic of a pure AI is kept in check by a council of people. And the extremes of human nature are kept in check by the impartial AI. To put in another way, humanity is augmented by Artificial Intelligence: Man-computer symbiosis.

Whether it’s the game of chess or the game of thrones, a centaur is your best bet.

The schedule for Patterns Day

Patterns Day is less than three weeks away���exciting!

We’re going to start the day at a nice civilised time. Registration is from 9am. There will be tea, coffee, and pastries, so get there in plenty of time to register and have a nice chat with your fellow attendees. There’ll be breaks throughout the day too.

Those yummy pastries and hot drinks are supplied courtesy of our sponsors Buildit @ Wipro Digital���many thanks to them!

Each talk will be 30 minutes long. There’ll be two talks back-to-back and then a break. That gives you plenty of breathing space to absorb all those knowledge bombs that the speakers will be dropping.

Lunch will be a good hour and a half. Lunch isn’t provided so you can explore the neighbourhood where there are plenty of treats on offer. And your Patterns Day badge will even get you some discounts…

The lovely Caf�� Rust is offering these deals to attendees:

Cake and coffee for ��5
Cake and cup of tea for ��4
Sandwich and a drink for ��7

The Joker (right across the street from the conference venue) is offering a 10% discount of food and drinks (but not cocktails) to Patterns Day attendees. I highly recommend their hot wings. Try the Rufio sauce���it’s awesome! Do not try the Shadow���it will kill you.

Here’s how the day is looking:

9:00amRegistration
9:55amOpening remarks
10:00amAlla
10:30amYaili
11:00amBreak
11:30amAmy
12:00amDanielle
12:30amLunch
2:00pmHeydon
2:30pmVarya
3:00pmBreak
3:30pmUna
4:00pmEmil
4:30pmClosing remarks

We should be out of the Duke of York’s by 4:45pm after a fantastic day of talks. At that point, we can head around the corner (literally) to Holler Brewery. They are very kindly offering each attendee a free drink! Over to them:

Holler is a community based brewery, always at the centre of the local community. Here to make great beer, but also to help support community run pubs, carnival societies, mental health charities, children���s amateur dramatic groups, local arts groups and loads more, because these are what keep our communities healthy and together��� the people in them!

Holler loves great beer and its way of bringing people together. They are excited to be welcoming the Patterns Day attendees and the design community to the taproom.

Terms and conditions:

One token entitles to you one Holler beer or one soft drink
Redeemable only on Friday 28th June 2019 between 4:45 and 20:00
You must hand your token over to the bar team

You’ll get your token when you register in the morning, along with your sticker. That’s right; sticker. Every expense has been spared so you won’t even have a name badge on a lanyard, just a nice discrete but recognisable sticker for the event.

I am so, so excited for Patterns Day! See you at the Duke of York’s on June 28th!

Three conference talks

Conference talks are like buses. They take a long time and you constantly ask yourself why you chose to get on board.

I’ll start again.

Conference talks are like buses. You wait for ages and then three come along at once. Or at least, three conference videos have come along at once:

The video of the talk I gave at State Of The Browser called The Web Is Agreement.
The video of the talk I gave at New Adventures called Building.
The video of the talk I gave at Frontend United called Going Offline.

That last one is quite practical. It’s very much in the style of the book I wrote on service workers. If you’d like to see this talk, you should come to An Event Apart in Chicago in August.

The other two are …less practical. They’re kind of pretentious really. That’s kinda my style.

The Web Is Agreement was a one-off talk for State Of The Browser. I like how it turned out, and I’d love to give it again if there were a suitable event.

I will be giving my New Adventures talk again in Vancouver next month at the Design & Content conference. You should come along���it looks like it’s going to be a great event.

I’ve added these latest three conference talk videos to my collection. I’m using Notist to document past talks. It’s a great service! I became a paying customer just over a year ago and it was money well spent. I really like how I’ve been able to set up a custom domain:

speaking.adactio.com

The World-Wide Work

I’ve been to a lot of events and I’ve seen a lot of talks. I find that, even after all this time, I always get something out of every presentation I see. Kudos to anyone who’s got the guts to get up on stage and share their thoughts.

But there are some talks that are genuinely special. When they come along, it’s a real privilege to be in the room. Wilson’s talk, When We Build was one of those moments. There are some others that weren’t recorded, but will always stay with me.

Earlier this year, I had the great honour of opening the New Adventures conference in Nottingham. I definitely felt a lot of pressure, and I did my utmost to set the scene for the day. The final talk of the day was delivered by my good friend Ethan. He took it to another level.

Like I said at the time:

Look, I could gush over how good Ethan���s talk was, or try to summarise it, but there���s really no point. I���ll just say that I felt the same sense of being present at something genuinely important that I felt when I was in the room for his original responsive web design talk at An Event Apart back in 2010. When the video is released, you really must watch it.

Well, the video has been released and you really must watch it. Don’t multitask. Don’t fast forward. Set aside some time and space, and then take it all in.

The subject matter, the narrative structure, the delivery, and the message come together in a unique way.

If, having watched the presentation, you want to dive deeper into any of Ethan’s references, check out the reading list that accompanies the talk.

I mentioned that I felt under pressure to deliver a good opener for New Adventures. I know that Ethan was really feeling the pressure too. He needn’t have worried. He delivered one of the best conference talks I’ve ever seen.

Thank you, Ethan.

Indie web events in Brighton

Homebrew Website Club is a regular gathering of people getting together to tinker on their own websites. It’s a play on the original Homebrew Computer Club from the ’70s. It shares a similar spirit of sharing and collaboration.

Homebrew Website Clubs happen at various locations: London, San Francisco, Portland, Nuremberg, and more. Usually there on every second Wednesday.

I started running Homebrew Website Club Brighton a while back. I tried the “every second Wednesday” thing, but it was tricky to make that work. People found it hard to keep track of which Wednesdays were Homebrew days and which weren’t. And if you missed one, then it would potentially be weeks between attending.

So I’ve made it a weekly gathering. On Thursdays. That’s mostly because Thursdays work for me: that’s one of the evenings when Jessica has her ballet class, so it’s the perfect time for me to spend a while in the company of fellow website owners.

If you’re in Brighton and you have your own website (or you want to have your own website), you should come along. It’s every Thursday from 6pm to 7:30pm ‘round at the Clearleft studio on 68 Middle Street. Add it to your calendar.

There might be a Thursday when I’m not around, but it’s highly likely that Homebrew Website Club Brighton will happen anyway because either Trys, Benjamin or Cassie will be here.

(I’m at Homebrew Website Club Brighton right now, writing this. Remy is here too, working on some very cool webmention stuff.)

There’s something else you should add to your calendar. We’re going to have an Indie Web Camp in Brighton on October 19th and 20th. I realise that’s quite a way off, but I’m giving you plenty of advance warning so you can block out that weekend (and plan travel if you’re coming from outside Brighton).

If you’ve never been to an Indie Web Camp before, you should definitely come! It’s indescribably fun and inspiring. The first day���Saturday���is a BarCamp-style day of discussions to really get the ideas flowing. Then the second day���Sunday���is all about designing, building, and making. The whole thing wraps up with demos.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an Indie Web Camp in Brighton. You can catch up on the Brighton Indie Web Camps we had in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Since then I’ve been to Indie Web Camps in Berlin, Nuremberg, and D��sseldorf, but it’s going to be really nice to bring it back home.

The event will be free to attend, but I’ll set up an official ticket page on Ti.to to keep track of who’s coming. I’ll let you know when that’s up and ready. In the meantime, you can register your interest in attending on the 2019 Indie Webcamp Brighton page on the Indie Web wiki.

Sponsor Patterns Day

Patterns Day 2 is sold out! Yay!

I didn���t even get the chance to announce the full line-up before all the tickets were sold. That was meant to my marketing strategy, see? I���d announce some more speakers every few weeks, and that would encourage more people to buy tickets. Turns out that I didn���t need to do that.

But I���m still going to announce the final two speakers here becuase I���m so excited about them���Danielle Huntrods and Varya Stepanova!

Danielle is absolutely brilliant. I know this from personal experience because I worked alongside her at Clearleft for three years. Now she���s at Bulb and I can���t wait for everyone at Patterns Day to hear her galaxy brain thoughts on design systems.

And how could I not have Varya at Patterns Day? She lives and breathes design systems. Whether it���s coding, writing, speaking, or training, she���s got years of experience to share. Ever used BEM? Yeah, that was Varya.

Anyway, if you���ve got your ticket for Patterns Day, you���re in for a treat.

If you didn���t manage to get a ticket for Patterns Day ���sorry.

But do not despair. There is still one possible way of securing an elusive Patterns Day ticket: get your company to sponsor the event.

We���ve already got one sponsor���buildit @ wipro digital���who are kindly covering the costs for teas, coffees, and pastries. Now I���m looking for another sponsor to cover the costs of making video recordings of the talks.

The cost of sponsorship is ��2000. In exchange, I can���t offer you a sponsor stand or anything like that���there���s just no room at the venue. But you will earn my undying thanks, and you���ll get your logo on the website and on the screen in between talks on the day (and on the final videos).

I can also give you four tickets to Patterns Day.

This is a sponsorship strategy that I like to call ���blackmail.”

If you were really hoping to bring your team to Patterns Day, but you left it too late to get your tickets, now���s your chance. Convince your company to sponsor the event (and let���s face it, ��2000 is a rounding error on some company���s books). Then you and your colleagues need not live with eternal regret and FOMO.

Drop me a line. Let���s talk.

Beyond

After a fun and productive Indie Web Camp, I stuck around D��sseldorf for Beyond Tellerand. I love this event. I’ve spoken at it quite a few times, but this year it was nice to be there as an attendee. It’s simultaneously a chance to reconnect with old friends I haven’t seen in a while, and an opportunity to meet lovely new people. There was plenty of both this year.

I think this might have been the best Beyond Tellerrand yet, and that’s saying something. It’s not just that the talks were really good���there was also a wonderful atmosphere.

Marc somehow manages to curate a line-up that’s equal parts creativity and code; design and development. It shouldn’t work, but it does. I love the fact that he had a legend of the industry like David Carson on the same stage as first-time speaker like Dorobot …and the crowd loved ‘em equally!

During the event, I found out that I had a small part to play in the creation of the line-up…

Three years ago, I linked to a video of a talk by Mike Hill:

A terrific analysis of industrial design in film and games ���featuring a scene-setting opening that delineates the difference between pleasure and happiness.

It’s a talk about chairs in Jodie Foster films. Seriously. It’s fantastic!

Marc saw my link, watched the video, and decided he wanted to get Mike Hill to speak at Beyond Tellerrand. After failing to get a response by email, Marc managed to corner Mike at an event in Amsterdam and get him on this year’s line-up.

Mike gave a talk called The Power of Metaphor and it’s absolutely brilliant. It covers the monomyth (the hero’s journey) and Jungian archetypes, illustrated with the examples Star Wars, The Dark Knight, and Jurassic Park:

Under the surface of their most celebrated films lies a hidden architecture that operates on an unconscious level; This talk is designed to illuminate the techniques that great storytellers use to engage a global audience on a deep and meaningful level through psychological metaphor.

The videos from Beyond Tellerrand are already online so you can watch the talk now.

Mike’s talk was back-to-back with a talk from Carolyn Stransky called Humanising Your Documentation:

In this talk, we���ll discuss how the language we use affects our users and the first steps towards writing accessible, approachable and use case-driven documentation.

While the talk was ostensibly about documentation, I found that it was packed full of good advice for writing well in general.

I had a thought. What if you mashed up these two talks? What if you wrote documentation through the lens of the hero’s journey?

Think about it. When somone arrives at your documentation, they’ve crossed the threshold to the underworld. They are in the cave, facing a dragon. You are their guide, their mentor, their Obi-Wan Kenobi. You can help them conquer their demons and return to the familiar world, changed by their journey.

Too much?

Replies

Last week was a bit of an event whirlwind. In the space of seven days I was at Indie Web Camp, Beyond Tellerrand, and Accessibility Club in D��sseldorf, followed by a train ride to Utrecht for Frontend United. Phew!

Indie Web Camp D��sseldorf was���as always���excellent. Once again, Sipgate generously gave us the use of their lovely, lovely space for the weekend. We had one day of really thought-provoking discussions, followed by a day of heads-down hacking and making.

I decided it was time for me to finally own my replies. For a while now, I’ve been posting notes on my own site and syndicating to Twitter. But whenever I replied to someone else’s tweet, I did from Twitter. I wanted to change that.

From a coding point of view, it wasn’t all that tricky. The real challenges were to do with the interface. I needed to add another field for the URL I’m replying to …but I didn’t want my nice and minimal posting interface to get too cluttered. I ended up putting the new form field inside a details element with a summary of “Reply to” so that the form field would be hidden by default, and toggled open by hitting that “Reply to” text:

Reply to

I sent my first test reply to a post on Aaron’s website. Aaron was sitting next to me at the time.

Once that was all working, I sent my first reply to a tweet. It was a response to a tweet from Tantek. Tantek was also sitting next to me at the time.

I spent most of the day getting that Twitter syndication to work. I had something to demo, but I foolishly decided to risk it all by attempting to create a bookmarklet so that I could post directly from a tweet page (instead of hopping back to my own site in a different tab). By canabalising the existing bookmarklet I use for posting links, I just about managed to get it working in time for the end of day demos.

So I’m owning my replies now. At the moment, they show up in my home page feed just like any other notes I post. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it that way. They don’t make much sense out of context.

Then again, I kind of like how wonderfully random and out-of-context they look. You can browse through all my replies so far.

I’m glad I got this set up. Now when Andy posts stuff on Twitter, I’m custodian of my responses:

@AndyBudd: Who are your current “Design Heroes”?

adactio.com: I would say Falcor from Neverending Story, the big flying dog.

Head���s role

I have a bittersweet feeling today. Danielle is moving on from Clearleft.

I used to get really down when people left. Over time I���ve learned not to take it as such a bad thing. I mean, of course it���s sad when someone moves on, but for them, it���s exciting. And I should be sharing in that excitement, not putting a damper on it.

Besides, people tend to stay at Clearleft for years and years���in the tech world, that���s unheard of. So it���s not really so terrible when they decide to head out to pastures new. They���ll always be Clearlefties. Just look at the lovely parting words from Harry, Paul, Ellen, and Ben:

Working at Clearleft was one of the best decisions I ever made. 6 years of some work that I���m most proud of, amongst some of the finest thinkers I���ve ever met.

(Side note: I���ve been thinking about starting a podcast where I chat to ex-Clearlefties. We could reflect on the past, look to the future, and generally just have a catch-up. Would that be self indulgent or interesting? Let me know what you think.)

So of course I���m going to miss working with Danielle, but as with other former ���lefties, I���m genuinely excited to see what happens next for her. Clearleft has had an excellent three years of her time and now it���s another company���s turn.

In the spirit of ���one door closes, another opens,��� Danielle���s departure creates an opportunity for someone else. Fancy working at Clearleft? Well, we���re looking for a head of front-end development.

Do you remember back at the start of the year when we were hiring a front-end developer, and I wrote about writing job postings?

My first instinct was to look at other job ads and take my cue from them. But, let���s face it, most job ads are badly written, and prone to turning into laundry lists. So I decided to just write like I normally would. You know, like a human.

That worked out really well. We ended up hiring the ridiculously talented Trys Mudford. Success!

So I���ve taken the same approach with this job ad. I���ve tried to paint as clear and honest a picture as I can of what this role would entail. Like it says, there are three main parts to the job:

business support,
technical leadership, and
professional development.

Now, I could easily imagine someone reading the job description and thinking, ���Nope! Not for me.��� Let���s face it: There Will Be Meetings. And a whole lotta context switching:

Within the course of one day, you might go from thinking about thorny code problems to helping someone on your team with their career plans to figuring out how to land new business in a previously uncharted area of technology.

I can equally imagine someone reading that and thinking ���Yes! This is what I���ve been waiting for.���

Oh, and in case you���re wondering why I���m not taking this role ���well, in the short term, I will for a while, but I���d consider myself qualified for maybe one third to one half of the required tasks. Yes, I can handle the professional development side of things (in fact, I really, really enjoy that). I can handle some of the technical leadership stuff���if we���re talking about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, and performance. But all of the back-of-the-front-end stuff���build tools, libraries, toolchains���is beyond me. And I think I���d be rubbish at the business support stuff, mostly because that doesn���t excite me much. But maybe it excites you! If so, you should apply.

I can picture a few scenarios where this role could be the ideal career move���

Suppose you���re a lead developer at a product company. You enjoy leading a team of devs, and you like setting the technical direction when it comes to the tools and techniques being used. But maybe you���re frustrated by always working on the same product with the same tech stack. The agency world, where every project is different, might be exactly what you���re looking for.

Or maybe you���re an accomplished and experienced front-end developer, freelancing and contracting for years. Perhaps you���re less enamoured with being so hands-on with the code all the time. Maybe you���ve realised that what you really enjoy is solving problems and evaluating techologies, and you���d be absolutely fine with having someone else take care of the implementation. Moving into a lead role like this might be the perfect way to make the best use of your time and have more impact with your decisions.

You get the idea. If any of this is sounding intriguing to you, you should definitely apply for the role. What do you have to lose?

Also, as it says in the job ad:

If you���re from a group that is under-represented in tech, please don���t hesitate to get in touch.

Head’s role

I have a bittersweet feeling today. Danielle is moving on from Clearleft.

I used to get really down when people left. Over time I’ve learned not to take it as such a bad thing. I mean, of course it’s sad when someone moves on, but for them, it’s exciting. And I should be sharing in that excitement, not putting a damper on it.

Besides, people tend to stay at Clearleft for years and years���in the tech world, that’s unheard of. So it’s not really so terrible when they decide to head out to pastures new. They’ll always be Clearlefties. Just look at the lovely parting words from Harry, Paul, Ellen, and Ben:

Working at Clearleft was one of the best decisions I ever made. 6 years of some work that I���m most proud of, amongst some of the finest thinkers I���ve ever met.

(Side note: I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast where I chat to ex-Clearlefties. We could reflect on the past, look to the future, and generally just have a catch-up. Would that be self indulgent or interesting? Let me know what you think.)

So of course I’m going to miss working with Danielle, but as with other former ‘lefties, I’m genuinely excited to see what happens next for her. Clearleft has had an excellent three years of her time and now it’s another company’s turn.

In the spirit of “one door closes, another opens,” Danielle’s departure creates an opportunity for someone else. Fancy working at Clearleft? Well, we’re looking for a head of front-end development.

Do you remember back at the start of the year when we were hiring a front-end developer, and I wrote about writing job postings?

My first instinct was to look at other job ads and take my cue from them. But, let���s face it, most job ads are badly written, and prone to turning into laundry lists. So I decided to just write like I normally would. You know, like a human.

That worked out really well. We ended up hiring the ridiculously talented Trys Mudford. Success!

So I’ve taken the same approach with this job ad. I’ve tried to paint as clear and honest a picture as I can of what this role would entail. Like it says, there are three main parts to the job:

business support,
technical leadership, and
professional development.

Now, I could easily imagine someone reading the job description and thinking, “Nope! Not for me.” Let’s face it: There Will Be Meetings. And a whole lotta context switching:

Within the course of one day, you might go from thinking about thorny code problems to helping someone on your team with their career plans to figuring out how to land new business in a previously uncharted area of technology.

I can equally imagine someone reading that and thinking “Yes! This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I’m not taking this role …well, in the short term, I will for a while, but I’d consider myself qualified for maybe one third to one half of the required tasks. Yes, I can handle the professional development side of things (in fact, I really, really enjoy that). I can handle some of the technical leadership stuff���if we’re talking about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, and performance. But all of the back-of-the-front-end stuff���build tools, libraries, toolchains���is beyond me. And I think I’d be rubbish at the business support stuff, mostly because that doesn’t excite me much. But maybe it excites you! If so, you should apply.

I can picture a few scenarios where this role could be the ideal career move…

Suppose you’re a lead developer at a product company. You enjoy leading a team of devs, and you like setting the technical direction when it comes to the tools and techniques being used. But maybe you’re frustrated by always working on the same product with the same tech stack. The agency world, where every project is different, might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Or maybe you’re an accomplished and experienced front-end developer, freelancing and contracting for years. Perhaps you’re less enamoured with being so hands-on with the code all the time. Maybe you’ve realised that what you really enjoy is solving problems and evaluating techologies, and you’d be absolutely fine with having someone else take care of the implementation. Moving into a lead role like this might be the perfect way to make the best use of your time and have more impact with your decisions.

You get the idea. If any of this is sounding intriguing to you, you should definitely apply for the role. What do you have to lose?

Also, as it says in the job ad:

If you���re from a group that is under-represented in tech, please don���t hesitate to get in touch.