#brad fitzpatrick

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Google engineer trashes Tony Faddell’s precious Nest smoke alarm

[cfsp key=”adsense_336x280″]”It’s a safe bet that Nest CEO Tony Fadell is not too happy with Google staff engineer Brad Fitzpatrick right now,” Brad Reed reports for BGR.

“Fitzpatrick last week posted a video that showed Nest’s Nest Protect smoke alarms badly misbehaving in his home,” Reed reports. “In fact, despite the fact that his house was not on fire, the alarms kept going off and he was…

Klint Finley

My article for Wired on the Indie Web movement and the IndieWebCamp event:

One guy is wearing his Google Glass. Another showed up in an HTML5 t-shirt. And then there’s the dude who looks like the Mad Hatter, decked out in a top hat with an enormous white flower tucked into the brim.

At first, they look like any other gaggle of tech geeks. But then you notice that one of them is Ward Cunningham, the man who invented the wiki, the tech that underpins Wikipedia. And there’s Kevin Marks, the former vice president of web services at British Telecom. Oh, and don’t miss Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of the seminal blogging site LiveJournal and, more recently, a coder who works in the engine room of Google’s online empire.

Packed into a small conference room, this rag-tag band of software developers has an outsized digital pedigree, and they have a mission to match. They hope to jailbreak the internet.

They call it the Indie Web movement, an effort to create a web that’s not so dependent on tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and, yes, Google — a web that belongs not to one individual or one company, but to everyone. “I don’t trust myself,” says Fitzpatrick. “And I don’t trust companies.” The movement grew out of an egalitarian online project launched by Fitzpatrick, before he made the move to Google. And over the past few years, it has roped in about 100 other coders from around the world.

On any given day, you’ll find about 30 or 40 of them on an IRC chat channel, and each summer, they come together in the flesh for this two-day mini-conference, known as IndieWebCamp. They hack. They demonstrate. They discuss. They strive to create a new set of tools that can give you greater control over the stuff you post to the net — the photos, the status updates, the blog posts, the comments. “The Indie Web is a community of folks interested in owning their own content — and identity — online,” says Tantek Celik, another developer at the heart of the movement.

Full Story: Wired: Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet

See also:

List of Indie Web projects

Wiki Inventor’s Latest Creation Decentralizes the Web

This is part two of "Pizza, Beer & Stock Options Don't Cut It Anymore: Technologists and Social Entrepreneurs" - part I is here. 

In my role with Ethicodes I’m designing a mobile game-type app for ethical and sustainable consumption. In my professional life, I’ve been a designer and programmer for web and mobile. That means I have the unique experience of having been on both the management / programmer table. The work I do for Ethicodes can’t be done alone, and I’ll admit, there are (many) elements of programming that are better left to the specialists. In my juggling of these two worlds, I’ve come across the paradox of social enterprise technology. Most often it comes down to money, understanding and respect. Here’s some advice from both sides of the table.

Part II: Tips for Developers

No Eye Rolling. Sometimes opportunity is about showing up. We understand everyone from your grandmother to your boss is asking you to fix something. But please be open to the possibilities and try to leave the jaded personality at home. It takes a certain type of person to be a programmer—some say it is a cynic's exterior over an incurable optimist inside—after all, it is your job to constantly find ways to break your own code, with the expectation that there is a way to make it logically perfect eventually. I suspect the social entrepreneur is the exact opposite—incurably optimistic on the outside (we can fix the world!), with a constant cynicism on the inside (because the world needs fixing badly).

Consultation Fees. An interview is not a consultation. Everyone understands you are in high demand, and your time is valuable (at least they do if they read the above). However a 1/3 of a total standard consulting fee should be business and overhead related. That means $50 of your $150 fee is there to account for this initial meeting, as well as computer upkeep, and the time it takes to invoice clients. I recently had a very talented developer request a consultation fee before even discussing their skills. They were off the list immediately, but a little further research revealed their skillset wasn't the greatest—which could have been a costly mistake for me. On the other hand, if they had agreed to an initial discussion, they would have gotten the opportunity to convince me otherwise.

Understand business etiquette. As a programmer you have a lot of wiggle room as far as business attire goes. In fact, I frequently feel like the older the t-shirt I wear, the more I am assumed to be a talented programmer. Very few people expect you to show up in a suit (and if the above is true, it might actually work against you). So when I say business etiquette, I am not primarily talking about attire (though sweatpants might not be the best idea). Despite what you learned from your brilliant CS professor, some basic social and conversational skills are necessary. Texting and muttering during a meeting are not looked upon favorably by anyone. Inability to manage your own schedule and terse, incongruous and borderline rude emails (despite a footer that says "sent from my iPhone") are also not working in your favor. You will need to be able to work with other people in some capacity for the rest of your life regardless of how talented you are.

Be clear about your skills. We all know you can learn as you go along, and too often that is what must happen as new technologies and languages arrive. Hiring managers should understand this. That said, be clear about what you know now versus what you can learn. When I worked at LiveJournal, all the programmers had to learn BML (Brad's Markup Language - which only existed in Brad Fitzpatrick's work). Obviously, no one came to the company knowing how to do this (aside from Brad of course) and all of them learned. However, there are always going to be programmers who know Ruby, C+, and all of the main languages better than you. Managers just want to know what they are signing up for in the skills department, so be honest and clear about what you know now and what you would be happy to learn in the future.

Invest in future employers. You undoubtably will come across social entrepreneurs who are hoping that you can "share their vision." Sometimes this means working at a discount or being available for questions when otherwise you would not. You shouldn't do all of their work for free or let them stomp all over you. Make this clear from the start, but also let them know how interested and invested you are in their vision. Try "I {am;am not} really into the goal of {fixing the world;helping the poor;educating children} so I {can help;cannot help}. However I think it would be a good business decision if you hired {me;a specialist;a team} to do x, y, and z." Knowing your investment level from the start will help them gauge how much they can lean on you when the going gets tough, and will prevent any misunderstandings for both sides.

Don't steal ideas. This should be another obvious one, but isn't. You may have the CS talent to bring an idea to fruition with little help. However, social entrepreneurs likewise have talents that you don't have, usually business and field-specific ones. They also (hopefully) had legal agreements, copyrights, and precedent over an idea long before they brought you in on a project. It is a much better option for both of you to work together for a common goal than get into messy legal battles later.

Agree on Baby Steps. Entrepreneurs want a perfect product, and often don't yet have the backing or technical process-knowledge to make it bulletproof. And you might not be sold on their product or time commitment. A good way to start off is to both agree to a minimum viable product - meaning the smallest commitment you as a programmer can get a way with while still testing some of their business and usability assumptions. It might be as simple as a programming diagram, a series of mobile web pages or a pong-level app (free of fancy graphics or complex engagements).Taking a small first step will help everyone figure out if they work well with one another and how on board everyone is. After that, you can throw in the towel or figure out the next small step.

Just like last time, I’d love to hear from other management / developers about experiences, tips, and frustrations in the comments.

Gabe Scelta is the Innovation Director at Ethicodes and Research Associate at the Ethiopian Global Initiative. A fellow at the Emerge Venture Lab, Gabe’s deep knowledge of the technology industry keeps Ethicodes pushing the frontiers of the fair trade industry. He holds a master’s degree from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. He lives in New York City.

Related articles

What is a Social Entrepreneur? (fiwal.org.uk)

Entrepreneurship and the Social Entrepreneur (ruralstops.blogspot.com)

I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I'd be curious to know if it goes back further. The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer.

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The social graph is neither—Pinboard Blog: http://t.co/VCpnI2lJ #arkulus #google #facebook