wonko.com

In November I gave a talk at YUIConf 2010 introducing the new AutoComplete widget I wrote for YUI 3.3.0, which we’ll be releasing soon. The video of the talk is now up on YUI Theater for your viewing pleasure. The slides are available on SlideShare.

If you didn’t attend YUIConf and haven’t yet had a chance to check out the videos, you should. The conference was packed with excellent talks this year, including quite a few about topics not directly related to YUI, so there’s sure to be something there for you even if you’re not a YUI user.

The most common argument I see in support of the TSA’s authority to require passengers to undergo screenings that would, in other circumstances, be considered a violation of their Constitutional rights, is that traveling by air is a privilege and not a right. Since travelers choose to travel by air and are not required to do so, it’s legal for the TSA to require them to submit to X-rays, pat downs, and any other screening procedures the TSA deems necessary before they may board a plane.

This is a good argument. In fact, it’s so good that it has allowed the TSA (and its privately operated predecessors) to operate for years in the face of frequent legal challenges and protests.

It’s also a dangerous argument: it sneakily undermines citizens’ Constitutional rights by declaring those rights to exist only within certain boundaries—boundaries that are defined by the government from whom those rights are supposed to protect us, and defined in a way that bypasses the checks and balances required by the Constitution.

Flying was once a luxury, in the same way that traveling by automobile was once a luxury. Fifty years ago, few people could claim that their livelihood or their well-being required them to travel by air. One hundred years ago, the same was true of cars.

Today, though, air travel is commonplace. Many people have jobs that require them—require them—to travel frequently across long distances. In a large country like the United States, without any ground-based high speed transit infrastructure to speak of, flying is often the only realistic option. A trip that takes hours by plane may take days by train or by car.

To a casual traveler who objects to being X-rayed or patted down, this may seem like a relatively easy choice. Take fewer trips, or budget more time and turn them into road trips. To someone who is required to travel as a condition of their employment, this choice isn’t so easy. Budgeting time for road trips isn’t likely to be an option. This person is faced with a more difficult choice: they can forfeit their civil liberties or they can find a new job.

It would be unwise to assume that the TSA will be content to limit their screenings to air travel. With a strong foothold in all of the nation’s airports, it’s only a matter of time before the TSA asserts the authority to require screenings for rail travel. If things continue in this vein, we’ll see mandatory TSA checkpoints on major interstate highways within the next thirty years (the justification: drivers don’t have to take the interstate).

One thing history has taught us is that people who willingly give up their freedoms rarely have an easy time getting them back. Nobody wants to make it easy for evildoers to smuggle weapons onto airplanes, but we need to find better solutions than the ones the TSA claims are necessary, and these solutions need to be balanced with the actual risks they’re intended to guard against.

Freedom makes a terrible currency. Using freedom to buy safety only leads to bankruptcy.

My former coworker Isaac Schlueter is flying today and brought some copies of the UCSF letter with him. While waiting in line at the TSA checkpoint, he struck up a conversation with the family behind him:

Turns out she’s a breast cancer survivor. And her doctor has told her to avoid x-rays, even at the dentist, unless absolutely medically necessary. And she didn’t realize that “millimeter wave digital backscatter detection” used x-rays, because the TSA doesn’t actually put that on the sign.

She did the rest.

When we got to the scanner, I opted out. Then they opted out. She’d already convinced the family behind them to do the same. Her response to the TSA agent was awesome, I wish I’d thought of it:

“Ma’am, please step over here.”

“No thanks, I’ve already had cancer, just feel me up or whatever.”

After the first 4 “OPT-OUT” calls, they just passed us all through the regular metal detector. No one got groped.

Internets, please do more things like this.

I just got back from a trip to Sunnyvale for YUIConf 2010.

Since I work remotely, I typically fly to California every few months for a week in the office. I’ve always had decent luck at not getting selected for “enhanced” screening by the TSA, and this trip was no different. I managed to slip through unscathed, but only barely.

The Terminal B checkpoint at SJC now has a backscatter machine next to each metal detector. Of the two lines that were active when I went through security yesterday evening, one backscatter machine was in active use and another was roped off. I managed to get myself into the line with the roped-off machine, but even so, TSA agents were selecting people from both lines for additional screening.

I wasn’t selected, but as I was putting my shoes back on inside the checkpoint, I noticed that a woman behind me (blonde, wearing a spandex sports bra and shorts, with her midriff exposed) who had already gone through either the metal detector or the backscatter machine (I didn’t see which) had been selected for further screening by a male TSA agent.

She didn’t seem to be objecting, and I didn’t stick around to see what happened, but unless this woman was hiding explosives literally inside her body, this additional screening didn’t make anything safer for anyone.

Until today, I was under the impression that if I were to refuse both a backscatter scan and a pat-down, I would still be free to leave the airport and find another mode of travel. Then I saw this well-documented blog post containing both video (albeit pointed at the ceiling) and audio of a man attempting to do just that and being detained and then threatened with fines and a civil suit simply for trying to leave the airport after refusing to allow a TSA agent to give him a pat-down.

That changes the entire game. Now, merely entering the line at a security checkpoint apparently makes you a prisoner of the TSA. You either do whatever they tell you to, even if it means allowing them to shoot x-rays at you and scrutinize your genitalia, or you pay a $10,000 fine and fight a legal battle.

Sunnyvale isn’t far enough from Portland that I’m willing to give up both my civil liberties and my dignity to get there. I’ll drive from now on.

Last week I gave an internal tech talk at Yahoo! entitled Achieving Performance Zen with YUI 3. The full video of the talk is now available on YUI Theater. The slides are available on SlideShare (or you can download the Keynote deck).

Synopsis: Following codified guidelines can help you build fast websites, but building applications that are clean, fast and extensible also involves taking a balanced approach to performance at every level of your F2E work. YUI 3 is designed to help you in this process, providing a right-sized abstraction layer with built-in performance magic and a variety of tools that make fast frontend code easy and fun to produce. In this session, we’ll explore the zen of performant JavaScript in the YUI 3 world and introduce you to some of the powerful tools YUI 3 puts at your disposal in every app you write.

I wasn’t at Yahoo! when Paul Graham was. He was there a long time ago. I can’t speak to whether his blog post accurately reflects what Yahoo! was like then. I can tell you that it doesn’t mesh at all with the experiences I’ve had at Yahoo! since I joined the company in early 2007.

The main point of Graham’s article is that Yahoo! didn’t have a hacker-centric culture. If there was a time when that was true, it must have been before I joined.

A company without a hacker-centric culture doesn’t encourage the kind of risk-taking and experimentation I saw when I was at Yahoo! Search. As an engineer, I had direct input into product features at every level, from ideation to design to implementation to launch. If I had a crazy idea, I was encouraged not just to tell people about it (up to and including executives), but to implement it and see if it tested well with users. I was able to add my own personal touch to parts of the product (sometimes big parts) without needing to ask permission or wade through excessive red tape.

This may not sound impressive to someone who’s used to the way things work at startups or small companies. But this was at one of the largest Internet companies in the world, on one of the most visited websites in the world. For Yahoo! to give me and other engineers the kind of freedom and power we had is not normal for a company or a product that operates at this scale.

Earlier this year, I transferred to the YUI team, where I get to work with some of the smartest frontend engineers on the planet on an open source JavaScript library that we develop not just for use by Yahoo!, but also by thousands of other developers around the world. The ideas and the work that I see coming from this team, and from the other teams we work with throughout Yahoo!, are amazing and often groundbreaking.

I have my gripes about Yahoo!, sure. It hasn’t been all kittens and rainbows. But the hacker-centric culture and the brilliant people Paul Graham seems to think don’t exist here are the reason I’ve been here for 3.5 years and counting, and they’re the reason I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora. I thought it was worth reposting here. My opinions, as always, are my own, and don’t necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Like anyone with certain hot buzzwords on their résumé or LinkedIn profile, I’m often contacted by recruiters. Usually they’re perfectly friendly and polite: nice people doing an important and often thankless job. Sometimes they’re less polite, or use sketchy tactics.

Whenever I get annoyed by a recruiter, I try to remember how happy I would have been to have gotten a call from them back in the dark days of ought-one, when much of my time was spent sitting on a ratty couch eating Eggo waffles and watching Zoboomafoo with whichever of my roommates also happened to be unemployed at the time.

There are good recruiters and there are sketchy recruiters, but the worst kind of recruiter is an incompetent recruiter. Like Bjoern, who sent me the following email today.

From: bjoern@[redacted]
To: ryan@wonko.com
Subject: Silicon Explosion? // interesting startup opportunities

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

Already we’re off to a bad start. Bjoern is so certain of his own incompetence at such a simple task as formatting an email that, before even saying hello, he has offered me the opportunity to skip the email entirely and instead view a web page, presumably generated by some automated tool so foolproof that even he couldn’t screw it up. Confidence has not been instilled.

That’s one interpretation. Another interpretation is that the email itself was generated by an automated tool. Which makes it insulting. But for some reason I keep reading.

Hi Ryan,

You stumbled over your profile a couple days ago … I was impressed. Congratulations!

Just one word into the opening sentence, Bjoern has justified his earlier self-doubt.

I’m not sure exactly what Bjoern is accusing me of here—I swear I don’t remember stumbling over anything a couple days ago—but apparently an impressive profile was involved. So impressive that I deserve congratulating. Go me! I must be super awesome.

You probably noticed that recently there was an explosion of freshly funded startups out there looking for senior devs., tech VPs and CTOs.

We are working with a number of funded startups handson and help them to accelerate with funding, people, prototyping, media, going global, etc.

I don’t have the slightest idea why Bjoern thinks any of this is relevant to me, but hey, I’m impressed he managed to string together so many empty, meaningless words. And that “etc.” at the end totally seals the deal. It tells me that he’s doing so many incredible “handson” things for so many freshly funded startups that he can’t even be bothered to list them all. He must be almost as awesome as I am.

Hey, Bjoern? Just one thing. What is it with you and explosions?

Finding good people – as you probably know – is always the hardest part!

The hardest part? Of what? All those things he listed earlier? Maybe just the “people” part? Or did he mean the “etc.” part? I appreciate the implication that I’m smart enough to know what he’s talking about, but since I’m not sure he knows what he’s talking about, I feel uncomfortable jumping to conclusions.

As it turns out it is the best to ask good people for good people. Could you recommend anybody who is looking for a new opportunity? :)

Bjoern

Well shit. Bjoern had me all worked up about how awesome I was, and then he went and dashed my hopes. It wasn’t me he was interested in after all; it was my awesome friends!

Or maybe he’s actually interested in me and is just being really sneaky about it. Is that what the smiley means? Maybe that’s Bjoern’s way of saying, “Hey, I know your boss reads your personal email, so let’s pretend we’re talking about OTHER PEOPLE and not you. Got it? Wink wink!”

If my boss were reading my personal email, you’d think he’d be smart enough to at least delete the recruiter emails before I saw them.

But wait, there’s more good stuff after the signature.

You were recommended to me :)

Unsubscribe ryan@wonko.com from this list.

Our mailing address is:
[redacted]

Add us to your address book

Copyright © 2010 [redacted] All rights reserved.

Forward this email to a friend
Update your profile

I was recommended to him? But I thought he stumbled across my profile? Somebody stumbled across a profile, at any rate. Maybe the smiley after this sentence means that it, too, is code for something? But for what? Bjoern may have overestimated my intuitive abilities, because his encoded meaning is lost on me.

But then, at the very end, there’s a link to my profile. That must be the one someone stumbled over at the beginning of the email! Boy, I sure don’t remember creating a profile, so I’d better click that link and find out what’s going on!

Of course, clicking that link would route me through a tracking redirect and tell Bjoern that I read his message.

So, yeah. Let’s just not click that. Let’s not click that at all.

In my latest post on the YUI Blog, I describe the results of my recent research into mobile browser cache limits for Android, iOS (including iPhone 4) and webOS. Be sure to check it out if you develop websites for mobile browsers.

Steve Jobs describing Apple’s stance on privacy at the recent D8 Conference:

Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly. That’s what it means.

I’m an optimist. I believe people are smart, and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of you asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data. That’s what we think.

The privacy discussion begins at about 1:09:30 into the full video of the interview.

Failing at privacy is easy. Anyone can do it. I can tell you how in a single sentence:

To fail at privacy, make it an attainable state rather than the default state.

As luck would have it, the inverse is also true:

To succeed at privacy, make it the default state rather than an attainable state.

Surprisingly, succeeding at privacy is in many cases easier than failing at it, yet so many products still fail at it. Why? Because they choose to. Privacy and marketing are often incompatible.

If a website launches a new feature that’s disabled by default, most users won’t even notice it’s there and will never use it. So when Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and other websites launch new features, they typically enable them by default and allow users to opt out.

The opt-out model achieves marketing objectives and dramatically increases user uptake of a new feature, but if the new feature involves changes to the handling of information that was previously private, achieving the marketing objectives may come at the cost of violating users’ expectations of privacy and betraying their trust.

With enough time and effort, you can almost always convince a user to try out a new feature. It’s much harder to convince a user to trust you again once they feel their trust has been betrayed.

Unfortunately, in an industry where success is typically measured by how many users have a feature enabled and not by how many users are actually using or deriving value from that feature, conservatism doesn’t pay. If you want the usage numbers, you have to make it hard for users not to use your stuff.

Someone with a more mathematical mind than mine could probably derive an algorithm to describe the typical level of privacy you can expect from any given company or product. A younger, newer company or product will typically err on the side of caution. They haven’t yet proven themselves, so user trust is extremely valuable to them; in addition, they typically have less market pressure to drive massive user uptake of new features, and they tend to communicate more directly with their users, which gives them a better idea of what their users want and need.

Larger, older companies and products have less to lose by betraying a user’s trust and have significantly more to lose by not meeting business objectives, particularly if the company is traded publicly. Products at larger companies sometimes suffer from design-by-committee, and the people at those companies may find it harder to keep in touch with their users’ wants and needs (not surprisingly, the wants and needs of shareholders are often given higher priority).

The value of a user’s trust is something that’s hard to measure, especially in an industry as young as the Internet industry. It’s something that isn’t apparent in the short term, but can slowly become very apparent over the long term. Betraying your users’ trust today might not have any noticeable effect on your company right away or even for a few years, but do it enough and it will eventually catch up with you.

This is a lesson that many Internet companies will soon begin learning the hard way. Some already are. Give yourself an advantage by learning from their mistakes: make privacy the default. Encourage your users to trust you, and reward them when they do by valuing their trust and treating it as your top priority. Think about the future, not the now.

Your users are far more valuable as advocates of your product than as numbers in a usage report.