I finally watched this YouTube talk with the writers of the Expanse series, one of my favorite Sci-fi series of all time (mostly through the TV show but I did end up reading 2 of the 3 books beyond the TV series). The video is from 8 years ago but the ideas shared were pretty timeless. My best friend and I have talked for years about writing a sci-fi book together but have never gotten past a few ideation sessions (too many personal projects 🙂 )

Some interesting notes from the talk:

Birth of the project:
The work started as an MMORPG game that didn’t happen, which then resulted in a tabletop game and then finally the book. The book was more of a “we have all this world already created” moment than a fresh attempt at a book.

Collaboration
The two writers (yeah I thought it was one writer but turns out James Corey was just a pen name) worked together to create an outline of events and then wrote alternate chapters (each focusing on the events of their own character) and then gave it to each other to edit. Creative collaboration is hard and this seemed like a great way to do it.

On creating Sci-fi stories:
Unlike other genres, sci-fi doesn’t have a default plot type and you can bring in other genres. So book 1 is “sci-fi noir”, other books are “sci-fi westerns”, “sci-fi-political thrillers” etc

On why Fantasy seems more popular than Science Fiction
Interesting perspective on why sci-fi kinda lost to fantasy: Sci-fi became more focused on the science and math aspects of their ideas and telling really depressing stories to a point that the authors were mostly writing to impress each other. Fantasy stories focused more on the characters and plot and were a lot more upbeat.

Why do creative collaborations fail?
One of the many reasons collaborations can fail is because the collaborators may have different ideas about the work (the kind of story or message they are sharing). The alignment on the world early on helped steward the effort towards success

On the limits of “Hard Sci-fi”
The writers don’t consider Expanse “Hard Sci-fi”, they just got a lot of credibility by keeping the stories anchored in general scientific ideas. That said, they never let the scientific aspects limit their creative work. Also keeping the limitations of science made for interesting plots that couldn’t be just solved with miraculous technology

I am really relieved to finally have a new version of Grocery Timer on TestFlight ( link )

This was supposed to be a quick update to handle a few annoyances and one new feature: the ability to add multiple shopping lists since I do shop for American food and Indian food at very different stores.

En route to that feature, I just ended up changing a bunch of UI, from better styling the app popups, to some visual changes to the forms to allow for faster data input.

Here is a list of everything that has changed:

New Features

• Ability to create multiple named shopping lists
• Items in your shopping bag are now grouped by recommended locations
• Snooze items in your shopping bag to never be tracked (do you really need to know when your soda is going bad?)
• Set shelf lives for expiring items using buttons with pre-set values (you can still add custom values that will bring up the numerical input UI)

Visual overhaul

• Redesigned “Update Values” screen
• System popups are now consistently styled
• Redesigned “Recipe Details” screen
• New cross-tab persistent UI when you have items that need to be organized in your pantry

Bugfixes

• App doesn’t show an error when two instances of exactly the same item are added to the pantry list

If you are interested, give the beta a shot and let me know if you find anything that seems worth addressing.

The first time I really understood Mark Zuckerberg’s ambition was when he announced Facebook login. I had been developing prototypes on the Facebook platform for a bit but the idea that Facebook would scale its infrastructure to support login buttons and the friend graph everywhere on the internet blew my mind.

Whatever you may want to accuse Mark Zuckerberg of, lack of ambition cannot be one of them. And he pairs that with an uncanny ability to be right in the long term while being ridiculed by folks steeped in the conventional wisdom of the time (Instagram for a billion? WhatsApp for 18B?)

So I am mulling over Facebook’s pivot to the Metaverse pretty carefully. While I am excited about the possibility of the Metaverse, and having previously worked with VR for a couple of years, do find it a lot of fun, I am not convinced of Facebook’s current idea of the Metaverse in general or Horizon in particular.

Metaverse, metaverse and Horizon

So there are 3 ideas that often get intertwined in my head:

• The metaverse (lowercase m) – A realm that merged digital and physical as originally defined by Neal Stephenson and imagined by a lot of technology pioneers since.
• The Metaverse – As imagined by Meta: a constellation of VR specific apps that people will jump around. Guess we can call it the Meta-Metaverse, not confusing at all
• Horizon – a VR social app. Horizon is also feels like a metaverse … that lives inside a larger Metaverse? Kinda like Facebook on the internet, or it would be if only Facebook could allow what pages could go on the real internet.

Meta-Metaverse

My primary gripe with the larger Meta-Metaverse is the app model. The iPhone, when it launched, launched with a lot of content: the entire internet. One of the biggest joys of owning the original iPhone was the ability to use the web, not a neutered mobile-centric version. Over time, native apps supplanted web experiences by delivering more dedicated versions of the experience, but that came afterwards.

The problem with going app-first is that it is hard given the current SDKs and workflows. And while WebVR kinda helps, there are very few tools that let novices design good VR experiences. This makes making VR apps expensive and since the only apps that make money on VR currently are games, VR starts feeling more like a game console than a smartphone.

Meta’s primary goal needs to be to figure out a way to bring the web into VR.

Of course, the challenge is that the web isn’t really designed for VR, just as the 2006 internet wasn’t really designed for mobile users. But you gotta pull a page out of Apple’s book and create UI elements around those limitations. Just as the iPhone replaced the combo box with the iconic tumbler wheel.

Oculus should supply a whole range of controls that replace web elements and offer opportunities to interact with content in a VR-specific way, for example:

• Create a VR specific form controls that replace on-page controls like combo-boxes, text inputs, date-fields etc. Not just functional but fun to use.
• Convert on-page text to speech
• Open image carousels automatically
• Make embedded video that you can control (i.e not YouTube embeds…unless you can) open in the virtual theater experience. Fill the virtual theater with others who are watching the video at the same time
• Allow web developers to control the above aspects via html meta-tags

etc etc…

Basically do everything to break outside the 2d window that current VR browsers offer. I think there is a lot of experiments that can be done there.

Horizon

The primary challenge to Horizon I feel is the synchronous nature of it (at least as shown by the demos shared so far).

Facebook social experiences that became huge were asynchronous. Words with Friends for example was an async version of Scrabble. Farmville didn’t require all your friends to be online at the same time. Most of my social experiences today are async.

By contrast, Horizon experiences seem to require everyone to be online and dedicated to the experience (i.e not multitasking) at the same time. The success here would depend on really killer experiences and/or a big leap in VR multi-tasking capabilities, both technically (i.e being able to run many apps at the same time) and experientially.

We don’t know much about Horizon yet, so I’ll end with my feeling that Horizon feels very reminiscent of the web portals where you could interact with a few dedicated experiences. In the long run, that isn’t what is going to win.

… guess we’ll see…

I think it’s interesting to realize that I am now much older than when I first got on Facebook and might be lacking the less-critical optimism that you need in the early days of any technology. But, like most geeks I guess, I have always enjoyed the idea of a metaverse. I just think it needs to be a very different thing than currently being imagined.

Or I could be wrong and will be eating these words in 5 years or so ⏰

Yesterday I attended the L3 AI online conference on digital assistants organized by RASA. I am still working on the notes from that conference that I’ll share here at some point but I was really pleasantly surprised by the format of the conference. While the current pandemic has forced a lot of conferences to go online, most have just become Zoom calls and honestly are exhausting for more than an hour. I actually attended the conference for the whole day yesterday and it was the best online conference format I have seen so far.

The conference was powered by Accelevents, so good job folks, though I am sure they have competition in that space. I have also heard of good things for Run the World (actually, I haven’t. The only thing I have heard of them is on their investment with a16z 😁. But the features listed on their site look interesting).

So here are some thoughts on my experience with L3

Pre-Conference

Both Accelevents and Run the World allow users to create a profile ahead of time. This lets users reach out to others who may share the same interests during the event or when they are algorithmically paired (see below). RTW lets you create video profiles as well, which is cool

Socializing

Connecting to others is probably the most important part of a conference (most session videos end up online anyway). The Zoom experience is to just have as many videos of people as possible. That doesn’t really work since only one person can talk at the same time and a number of people are either multi-tasking or feel otherwise hesitant to share their video

The L3 conference page had a link to socialize which would randomly pair you with another attendee. I didn’t use it but mostly because there wasn’t much between sessions during the day. Instead of one-on-ones, I would have liked small groups that I could be joined with which would have felt a little less intense.

Prerecorded Scheduled Sessions

Most of the talks were just prerecorded sessions with the speaker and other attendees discussing the talks in a chat window next to the video player. The sessions unlocked at different times, so it did feel a bit like a conference track.

The advantage of the prerecordings was that

1. You could pause and rewind the sessions right there if you missed something
2. The video-audio quality of the sessions was good (none of the “can you hear me now” moments).
3. Some presenters had even done some post-production work on their videos which was nice

The event page included a video page and a side panel that included tabs for chat, polls, attendees and questions. As with a lot of tabbed interfaces, the out-of-sight / out-of-mind thing happened and I never looked at the non-default (chat) tabs.

Unlike video, chat allows for many people to talk to each other at the same time which is better I think. So I was able to see some interesting discussions between the attendees on various topics.

Expo

An interesting aspect of the conference was a virtual expo tab where every company that was sharing their products could have people available for a Zoom video chat (yeah, they were using Zoom which I didn’t know could be embedded in a webpage). That was neat.

Final thoughts

I really got a lot out of this conference and enjoyed the format. With a lot of conversations going on right now on how virtual conferences could be more like real ones, I think we should also think about how they could be better than the real thing. For one thing, your audience can be a lot bigger, more diverse and inclusive.

There is also a lot of innovation going on right now in the chat experience in general (emojis, virtual gifts, etc) that could make text chat more lively as well.

There needs to be a new middle ground between video and text chats (maybe digital avatars?). I like looking at people’s faces but I also understand the multi-tasking thing when in front of a laptop. VR chat rooms get across a lot of feeling of presence by just using eyes for example.

I enjoyed the timed sessions, though I struggled to attend any of them totally in sync with their start times as there was a lot of stuff happening at home (work emails, etc).

I am really curious where the virtual conference ideas go from here. At the Philly GDG which I help run, we have transitioned our events to Zoom events and were planning to do the same thing for future “conferences” (like DevFest etc), but this has given me a lot to think about.

If you have other ideas about the opportunities here, drop in a comment below 🙂

For the last few years I have been thinking quite a bit about how we enable more people to learn programming. As an industry, we need more programmers universally and there seems to be a huge number of people who would want to come in. Unfortunately though we can’t seem to connect the 2 sides of this equation effectively.

Specifically I have been thinking about learning curves. Until recently I believed learning curves to follow a close-to-linear relationship with time. You learn a little bit at the beginning and are work on simple ideas and learn more and more as time goes by.

This seems to be codified in most programming books too, which introduce simple ideas at the beginning and then move towards more complex ideas

However, lately I feel a more honest representation of this learning curve we expect a newcomer to master would look something like this.

The initial hump in that graph represents a mountain of complexity that junior programmers are immediately handed before they can do anything with code. A lot of times this hump represents meta-work: things that are not core to the technology but elements like build systems or frameworks for testability, coding standards, etc

Take JavaScript for example. A “Hello world” JavaScript experience requires you to either start coding the way the industry strongly dislikes, the old fashioned way with script tags and vanilla JS, or learn the complexity of modules, package managers, build systems etc.

Same goes for mobile app development. For example if you are looking to make your first Android app, a brand new Android project using the Android Studio wizard drops you into a mess of Gradle, Java, Kotlin and XML files.

Tools like XCode and Android Studio also are extremely complicated for any beginner to use, with a ton of panels and tools to tap on without knowing what they do. Ironically, most of the teams building these tools have User Experience professionals on them and yet the ideas of progressive disclosure and first run experience, that as an industry we keep touting for our end user apps, are never considered.

Technology Complexity Cycle

Reflecting on my own learning-programming experience and talking about this with a few other people, I realize that another thing that got me into programming was also working on a technology (Flash) that wasn’t as mature.

When I started playing with Flash, it was back in the Flash-4 days with a very simple programming model where most of the code was written in small scripts attached to the timeline that just controlled the position of the animation playhead. My learning-to-code experience happened almost in-sync with the addition of complexity to Flash. Towards the last part of my experience with Flash, it had gotten complex enough with ActionScript3 and the need to become a “real” programming platform that it started to lose people.

I feel this happens a lot. Early versions of a programming platform are simple and functional and then, if it gathers attention of the “serious” programmers, way too much complexity gets added. This complexity makes the technology a daunting beast to new entrants.

The point is …

I had a couple of thoughts for new programmers that became the primary motivation for this post:

1. Survive the initial hump: Getting started with learning programming is a lot harder in the beginning so stick with it. It does get easier as you cross the initial hump of tools and meta-work that goes into starting a project and very rarely revisited once the project is in active development
2. Play with emerging technologies: Emerging technologies don’t often have a lot of initial hump as tooling and other meta-work hasn’t been invented yet. Technologies like WebVR, Blockchains, Flutter etc are great candidates to play with now and grow your skills as the technology matures.

And for those of us who have been in this industry for a while and may have the power to influence tooling and/or methodologies of how code is written, lets endeavor to make these more welcoming to folks with different levels of experience with tech.

Drumroll!!! The next GDG Philly meetup will the 🎉100th official meetup!!!

And we have a good one lined up with some of the biggest tech leaders in Philly on a panel on managing your career as a technologist. If you are a developer or are looking to become one, you should definitely sign up.

For me it’s certainly a time for some celebration and reflection. Corey and I started Philly GDG, or rather its previous incarnation, AndroidPhilly, in 2011 when both of us had just about started working on Android and realized there wasn’t a local community where we could learn from each other. And considering how minimal technical documentation and user experience guidelines were back then, a local community was sorely needed. The group transitioned to an official GDG at some point which meant we got a lot more support from Google in terms of speakers and schwag.

Thinking back, there are a lot of things that worked well. The consistency of the day (last Wed of every month) and location (Comcast Center) every month definitely was a good idea and built up a monthly habit for the regular members. Comcast was great about sponsoring this event every month since it’s inception, and my managers, former and current, were very supportive of letting me run this. Other companies in Philly have been fantastic supporters as well including Promptworks, Chariot, Candidate and others who have hosted or supported us with food and beverages over time.

We are also a better balanced community as far as gender goes with more women participation than a lot of other communities. A lot of credit there goes to Corey for leading the outreach in early days, and always making sure we had women as part of the leads. It’s something the current leads, Yash, John and Ruthie, continue to champion.

There have also always been a lot of challenges, some similar to those faced by other groups while others unique to our own. Sourcing speakers every month is hard, specially when your community is much smaller than those in cities like SF and NY. Creating a channel for the community to keep the conversation going has also been challenging with Slack becoming a defacto communities platform that doesn’t really work if you aren’t paying for it (I am starting to look at other platforms like Discord, but a lot of people may not be willing to install another app). Trying to balance the level of talks has also been a concern: we want to have intro level talks to bring new people in but also more advanced sessions for folks who have been coming here for a while. If you have ideas on any of these, I am all ears.

I made a lot of friends thanks to our group. From other past (Corey, Chuck, Dallas) and present (Yash, John, Ruthie and Kenny) fellow organizers who helped run this group to regular members who have been attending our monthly meetup for years.

I am looking forward to how the group evolves going forward. In the meanwhile, if you are in the neighborhood, join us for our 🎉100th event. It promises to be a great one

I spent the whole day today working with Strings being sent between a JavaScript serverside app and a Dart clientside app. As an industry we have been doing this forever, so you’d think it’d be easy but then along came emojis to muck up my day 🤬

Instead of writing my own primer on Strings here (and doing a bad job), let me just link to Joel Spolsky’s excellent post on the subject

This really old post still does a great job of bringing us up to speed to the Unicode world we live in today. And then came Emojis

There are numerous posts of the pain of dealing with Emojis whenever you have to because it does screwy things like combining neighboring characters to form a single emoji. This means that the length of a string, if it is just a measure of the unicode CodePoints used is different from what you would count on the screen.

This gives you whacky results like “💩”.length == 2 and generally makes working with strings just a pain even to the extent of crashing your iPhone. On the flip side some things like being able to delete family members from the 4 member family emoji with every backspace are kinda amusing, since it is it’s actually 7 characters: 4 ‘normal’ people characters and 3 invisible ‘joining’ characters in between.

If you try to delete the family emoji in whatsapp you kill them off one at a time from funny

Which brings me to today. I am playing around with moving a client/server app from JavaScript everywhere to JavaScript server and a Dart client app. In the previous iteration, strings that needed to be sent had special characters that needed to be escaped and sent across: no problem. JavaScript’s escape/unescape worked pretty well.

Moving to Dart though was a challenge, because there is no escape/unescape method. Turns out escape/unescape is best avoided anyway, and encodeURI/decodeURI is a better option. Dart has a decodeFull method on the Uri class that does the job pretty well.

Except that the characters in the list also included emojis and Dart’s Uri class doesn’t work with anything more than UTF-8 characters and crashes when encountering strings with emojis that are just ‘escaped’. This, as it turns out, is as per spec and all those fancy emoji domains that I thought used Unicode in the URI, use a different idea around Internationalized Resource Identifiers and Punycode. Thankfully passing in a URI encoded string with emojis seems to work fine and emojis come out 👍on the other side of the decode process.

While this seemed to work at that point, passing the decoded string to my Yaml loader crashes the app again (is Yaml supposed to be restricted to Ascii/Utf-8 ? ). But that is a problem for a different day.

For now, I have decided to just convert emojis to shortcodes for the transit and remap them to emojis on the other side. Its not pretty but it works.

Oh and in the meanwhile, if you want to know how to loop through a String with emojis in Dart, you can do that by looking through the Runes in a String:

	String s = "😀 hello";
	s.runes.forEach((int i){
	String x = String.fromCharCode(i); // Get emoji as 1 string and now 2 CodePoints
	}

view raw emoji.dart hosted with ❤ by GitHub