Why I Became a Web Geek

Amber asked for web dev origin stories. Here’s mine.

In the late 1940s, in the parts of the world that mattered, the end of WWII and the atomic bomb had brought the philosophical shift we now label post-modernism into the cultural mainstream. But in rural Tennessee, just down the road from the house I grew up in, my grandmother was being loaded onto a wagon to make the 5-mile trip “in to town.” My dad was a breech birth. Home birth had taken a turn for the worse and they needed to get a doctor involved. 40 years later my dad bought about 42 acres of farm land he occasionally plows with a team of mules just for the fun of it. This is just a hobby. He earned his living by dismantling nuclear weapons in the same facility that enriched the uranium for Fat Man and Little Boy.

This is the culture that produced me. About 5 years after I was born, satellite dishes cropped up like kudzu and started piping in the culture of the greater global village. It was amazing to watch the communication/information explosion transform this area.

For example, I found the CBC fascinating. I didn’t understand all the politics involved, but I knew they had a station that broadcast in French because that was the primary language in Quebec and that they had a station out of the North West Territories that featured a lot of content relevant to the First Peoples population there. I didn’t really see that same kind of diversity in American media. We had a lot of forced tolerance, but as we tried to blur lines based on gender and race we drew a greater distinction along class lines. The prevailing message was small towns and small people didn’t matter.

That could be do in part to the overall wealth worship fetish America had in the 80s. Compare Bill Cosby’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable to Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids from the decade before. I could (and still do) identify with the Cosby Kids despite geographic and racial boundaries. The Huxtable kids lived in a different world and that had very little to do with race. The Cosby Kids were a rare example of the not-rich and not-famous among pop culture characters; and closer to my day to day reality than Larry, Darryl and Darryl.

Getting rural areas and poor areas connected to the mass media grid gave these marginalized populations a window to the world. Getting connected to the internet would give us a voice. I wanted to be part of that.

Also, growing up on a “farm” affected my work ethic. I don’t miss manual labor under the blazing Tennessee sun. It was 80 degrees at 8 am today, and it’s not even truly summer yet. I feel most fulfilled if I can point to something at the end of the day and tell myself “I made that. That didn’t exist this morning and now it does.” Luckily I discovered that digital artifacts scratch that psychological itch just as effectively as a freshly planted row of crops. And with significantly less sun burn. If only typing code burned calories as effectively.

On top of that, I’ve been extremely lucky to be in the right place at the right time both educationally and professionally. Everything fell into place and I feel like I’ve found the perfect fit to do what I am.

My dad’s birth story sounds like a scene from a John Ford movie and I earn a living building communication systems out of ASCII characters. That’s a huge jump in just 2 generations. I have 2 kids of my own. I can’t imagine what their adult lives will be like.

Image Evolution

Ten days ago... No, wait. That's something else.

Eight days ago, I stumbled onto Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa. I thought it was pretty awesome. Today, I stumbled upon this simulation of the same idea you can run in your browser. Doesn't work in IE, but I really hope anyone reading this isn't using IE (any version) as your default browser anyway. Right now, mine is at 1,077/17,000. That means out of 17,000 “mutations” 1,077 have been an improvement over the previous best fit. I just hit 90% fit. Which looks like 005874.jpg on the example shots from the original post. That leads me to believe the offline version is a bit more efficient than the online version, since it's taken about 3 times the number of mutations to get there. But that's to be expected.

I think the ability to watch it develop over time in your own browser hammers home the idea a bit better than the static example provided in the first post from Roger Alsing. But I think there's still room for improvement. For one thing, Roger's program makes it look like it would take almost 1,000,000 generations to get a decent replication of the low res detail of the Mona Lisa he used as his example. That's a necessary abstraction to get this kind of simulation to run on a computer. In real evolution, each generation produces several nodes, each with their own mutations. The node tree would fork out to very huge, very quickly, due to exponential growth.

But applying survival of the fittest to the tree structure would get us to the best fit much more quickly. The version that runs in a browser addresses this somewhat with the x/y display. I'm currently at 91.10% with 1238/23000. On average so far, it's taken about 18.5 generations to find a better fit. If we could fork that into a node tree, even a simple node tree of 2 child nodes per parent node, we'd hit the first improvement in about 5 generations. Actually, we'd almost hit the first 2 improvements in 5 generations. After 5 more generations, we'd be hitting quantum leaps where over 2,000 mutations are tried. And that number doubles every generation.

Ok, I'm proving to not be a strong enough math geek to really get these thoughts out of my head in a way that makes sense. But the way these programs are running is a bit like selection sort whereas the node tree approach is more like heap sort. In another browser tab, I just hit ~94% fit after ~ 50,000 mutations (but only 1900 improvements). Selection sort has an efficiency rating of n². So if it's taken ~50,000 steps to reach ~94%, that means n is about 224. Heap sort runs at n(log n), so to reach ~94% using that method would only take about 527 steps rather than ~50,000. That's a closer fit to the number of true, natural generations it would take to get the same sort of results through evolution.

A better approach to visualizing this sort of thing would allow for multiple source images and create a node tree instead of using the linear approach. The multiple source images would allow for a simulation of speciesization. The node tree would be less of an abstraction from the natural processes (although still astronomically simplified in comparison) and give a more natural indication of true “generations” required to reach a goal. Ideally, the number of descendant nodes would depend on past history of improvements. So “blood lines” that have produced a high number of improvements in the past would be more fruitful. Those with poor histories would get fewer chances, and eventually die out. There would also need to be a threshold after which a given line is only compared to the source image it seems to be naturally drifting towards. This would simulate the migration into more specialized environments over time. It would also cut down on the processing power required to make it all run, but such a system would experience exponential growth and would quickly overrun any processor or pile of RAM currently available. As abstract as such a program would still be, it would require hardware we won't see until quantum computing becomes a reality.

When it rains it pours

Getting caught up on my blog reading, which always gets me thinking, and once my comments to the entries of others grow longer than the entry to which I am replying, I figure I'm better off putting it here.

I have both a 2 year and a 4 year degree in web design. As in, the word “web” is actually printed somewhere on my physical degrees. One says “Web Development Technology” and the other says “Web Design”. I got a lot out of my education because the timing and my mindset were right for it. I had a few years of field work under my belt, so even when the course work did a crappy job of tying the concepts to real world examples I was able to fill in those gaps.

The downside is at the undergraduate level classes have to assume no prior knowledge on the part of the student, at least nothing above and beyond what is taught in high school. In other words, the first few classes assume you can type and that's about it. The problem there is some of the most promising students will be turned off early on in such a program, say to hell with it, and go get a job with the basic skills they already have. The other edge of that particular sword is you quickly go from the early hand holding courses to being expected to understand stuff like the OSI Model or object oriented programming in detail. If I were playing a video game with a learning curve that steep, controllers would be bouncing off walls, likely in multiple pieces. But my prior experiences made things more manageable and I was mentally prepared for the challenges that came up.

A lot of people would not be. That doesn't make them bad people or somehow less intelligent than me. If anything it indicates that the traditional academic model is poorly suited to cover highly technical disciplines like web design.

I say the timing was right because the 2 year program had just entered a stage of growth and was updating its curriculum to be more relevant. The first semester I was in that program the textbooks and course materials were very 1996. Browser sniffing, tables for layout, optimizing animated gifs; scary stuff. By the time I graduated they were offering classes on CSS and XML. Still far from cutting edge, but they managed to advance their curriculum about 7-8 years in the 3 semesters I was there. The problem is the nature of most colleges and universities make it very hard to do such changes more often than once a decade or so.

The 4 year program was brand new. I'm the 6th person to graduate with that degree. Since it was so new, the curriculum had not yet had time to get stale. The director of the program was also both knowledgeable and passionate, and he personally taught most of the core classes in the program.

In a single lecture we might start out talking about the Iliad and how it's an example of an epic, then move in to how the structure of an epic is guided by oral traditions. And just when you're starting to wonder why the hell we're talking about this stuff in a class on web design, we shift to talk about how communication on the web shares a lot of characteristics with oral communications (you and I are having a type of conversation right now). From there we talk about how the structure of an epic poem can be seen as an early prototype of hypertext with the various ways the narrative loops back on itself and includes passing references to other epics from the same cannon. And I use phrases like "we talk" for a reason; the courses were very much structured around discussion and team work. I learned more from my fellow students than from the professor and that was by design. My current graduate program hasn't managed to pull together ideas as seemingly disparate in 2 years as Bob routinely did over the course of an hour.

But literally the day I graduated the director of the program packed his bags and drove several hours north to become the new Director of Graduate Studies at Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, NY. Without his leadership, I don't know how well the content of the courses will be kept up to date or how well the structure of the courses will translate to new professors covering that material. I'm very lucky to have gone through the program when I did.

Charging more to support craptastic and/or old browsers

Good God. I literally started writing this entry a month ago, got busy, and left it suspended in draft mode for ages. Let me brush off the dust and get this bad boy ready for publication...

This started as a reply to a post from Philip Beel, which was in turn explaining his thoughts in response to item #10 on Ten Web Development Tips I Wish I'd Known Two Years Ago over at hackification. By the time my comment hit it's 6th paragraph, I figured I'd be better off just putting my thoughts into my own blog post. Ain't the web grand?

Philip says in part:

Consider that you were sold a car, but told you could only drive it on motorways, as the wheels may fall off if you drove it on any other roads.

But I think that's the wrong way to look at the situation. My thinking is a bit closer to the hackification article, which states in part:

Explain to the client that since older browsers work in a different way to modern ones (which they do), that’s extra work and hence extra cost. (I’d suggest approximately 10% on top). Explain that IE6 has approximately 25-30% market share, and let them make the cost/benefit call. Money has an amazing focusing effect: it forces people to really think about what they want and need. (emphasis added)

As designers, we're concerned with stuff like use experience, so we tend to think of things in terms of the end user/consumer. But our clients are often business people, so I think it's more effective to talk to them in the language of business people.

I think the “buying a car that only works on motorways” example wouldn't work well on most clients. The situation is more akin to opening a new convenience store 7 years after the last gasoline powered car has rolled off the assembly line. Would you want to take on the cost of installing and maintaining a gas pump for a market segment that is no longer in the majority and will be forever dwindling? Even installing just a single pump alongside the hydrogen system (or quick charge stations or whatever the new technology happens to be) would require redoing a lot of the same type of work. The systems aren't interchangeable or compatible. There would be redundant systems; more things to build and eventually need repair.

I think most clients would understand that analogy. It probably would not be hard to come up with one more targeted towards their own business model.

But another problem is that consumers are better informed as to the cars they drive than the browsers they use. The owner and employees of the hypothetical fueling station above would probably never have to deal with an irate customer who doesn't understand why the hydrogen hose or quick charge plug won't fit into his gas tank. Sites like Browse Happy can come in handy for educating consumers, but the kind of people who are the most problematic (don't even realize browsers and other software are entities separate from “the computer”, never update whatever shipped with their operating system, etc) are the least likely to go there or truly understand the content once they get there. So the ethical considerations are still not dodged.

But I think the ethical issues are drastically different from the issues involved in getting clients to understand the cost associated with “supporting” old browsers. And a lot depends on how you define “support” as well.

If you want the 0.1% (or hopefully even lower than that) of folks still surfing on Netscape 4 to be able to use some Ajax based enhancement, that's gonna take a heck of a lot more work. What's the return on investment of that work? Expecting the 21.53% (and dropping) of IE6 users to see rounded corners exactly like what someone on Safari 3 sees is like expecting a 1993 Geo Metro to handle and perform just like a Tesla Roadster.

In my current work with jQuery, I'm noticing drastic performance difference even between IE6 and IE7. The features work in IE6, but it's not as smooth nor as quick. With the move towards just in time scripting execution in Google Chrome and future browsers, such performance differences will become even more noticeable. So what's the acceptable level of differences in appearance and performance from browser to browser? That will change from project to project, but the price tag for the work we do needs to also change to reflect the shift in work load (be it up or down).