Transcript

Jen Simmons

This is the Web Ahead. I'm Jen Simmons. A weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. Episode 13. We want to say thanks to today's sponsors Rackspace and Harvest. Bandwidth for this episode was provided by Vidmeup, a free service that allows you to create your own video site. Your videos. Your branding. Vidmeup.com.

Today's guest, special guest is Dan Benjamin. Dan Benjamin, the producer of the whole 5by5 network. Author of hivelogic.com and a whole bunch of other things. Hi Dan.

Dan Benjamin

Hey Jen.

Jen

I thought you were going to interrupt me, during, we had a whole bit.

Dan

I was gonna but I like you. You were doing so well. I mean who am I to interrupt you?

Jen

Yeah… just, you know.

Dan

It sounded great.

Jen

Thanks. Yeah, you know it's next week is the one year from when I was first on The Big Web Show with Jeffrey Zeldman and met you.

Dan

Oh right. Yeah, that's right, Jeffrey found you in some restaurant or something, and said she'd be really good on the show, so we brought you on the show and the next thing you know we do this Daily Edition for a while. How long did we do that for?

Jen

I think it was 37 shows that I was on. So, two months, I think.

Dan

Yeah but we did them every, that's the thing we did them five days a week pretty much

Jen

Yeah, every day. And I missed doing that. When you moved, we stopped recording that show, and I missed it like crazy, it's weird.

Dan

And all you did the whole time all along was say how cramped it was in your schedule to try and fit it in

Jen

How much I hated it, how I really wanted to stop doing it.

Dan

And then I took it away, and you're like, I didn't say take it away. I just wanted to complain. But that's not actually true, you were always a great sport about rearranging your entire schedule around when it was convenient for me to record so I appreciate that.

Jen

It was fun, it was really fun to do and then I wanted to do, I really wanted to do this show. I wanted to do this show even before you invited me to do Daily Edition. And then later, you said well "What do you want to do?" and I was like "I want to do this show" and you were like "Ok."

Dan

Do you want to air some of the name ideas that you had for it, if you still have those handy. Because you had some neat names for it, "The Web Ahead" was just the one that I think stood out the most.

Jen

Where are those? I don't know if I have them.

Dan

Wasn't it the one like, I think it was like, "Grinchy Interviews" or something.

Jen

Oh, ah right, yeah.

Dan

I can't remember, I don't have the list in front of me.

Jen

Yeah. So it's funny to me that there might be people who don't know who you are, who are listening.

Dan

I would love that. That would be fantastic if they don't.

Jen

No new people.

Dan

We got to get the new ones in.

Jen

Well this show is about the web, right, it's about like stuff on the web, and new stuff, stuff that's happening now, stuff that might happen in the future. So I was thinking what do we want to talk about today? With Dan Benjamin. I think we should talk about education. I think we should talk about how is that people learn new stuff as everything on the web changes. How is it that people learn how to do web design, web development, making web sites in the first place. And then how is that people keep up with it as everything changes, and some people like to, and want to, and are good at keeping up with the very, very latest, and a lot of people aren't. They're not really, they don't need to have the very latest, but they still need to keep up some what, as at some point really old technology is just a really bad idea, and you can't be using image slicing and you know table layouts and techniques from 1996 on today's web. So, what do you think about that? What do you think about how it is that people keep up and learn and figure out how they should be doing this kind of stuff?

Dan

Yeah I think it's a really interesting kind of question or way to think about it because if you were to go around and talk to people in all the different industries regardless of what it is, you know, somebody who does automobile manufacturing. Somebody who teaches chemistry. It doesn't matter, if you were to go and ask them, you know. Medicine is another good example. Dentistry. If you were to go and ask them, "Oh, do you feel like your industry is changing?", "Oh yeah it changes, it's so hard to keep up. There's so many new things coming out all the time." So I think, while you were asking me the question, I was thinking well I think the web as far as web development and design, it changes faster than other industries, but I'm probably not qualified to make that statement, because I'm not in the other industries, but, it really does seem like that's the case, that things change and sort of sweep across the industry of web development and design. It seems like they move. When a change happens, it seems like it happens very, very quickly across the board. I'll actually pick on dentistry for example. I used to go to a dentist back in Florida. They actually have dentists in Florida, that was surprising. Because it's just a beach. You have the dentist guy practicing there on the beach. The one dentist I went to, he was an older guy, and he'd basically been practicing the same kind of dentistry, with essentially, really the same tools and equipment that he might have had 10 or 15 years early. And maybe they were using a different kind of numbing agent because over the years they did tests and found that it was better or something. Maybe they switched from the metal fillings to the white ones, but those kind of changes, it's not like, well there's a dentist in Newark, New Jersey, who started using this new kind of filling, and as soon as everybody found out, within a month everybody was trying it out. That does seem to me like what happens on the web when there's a new technique that comes out, very quickly people start to see it and they start to adapt and change and integrate it into the way that they work. Whether this is a code thing, or, you know, as a software developer and a web developer for many years, I think that happens more in the microcosm of web application or web development and design very quickly. So an example of that would be like, a new style of pagination comes out in the Rails community, and within a few weeks "We're using will_paginate now of course!". And a new way to upload a file and perform an operation on it, "Oh I can't believe you're using attachment_fu, paperclip is sooo much better. It's been out like five days, how can you have not switched all of your apps to it?". But that really is the mentality. So the idea of keeping up, that for me is as a, maybe an ex, because in a past life I used to do a lot more development. That was always, I was one of those people that I liked the benefits that you would get from keeping up-to-date and I knew I had to do it. But I always had that feeling, as soon as I was done building something, that it was almost immediately obsolete, or the code within it was, it felt so dated to me.

Jen

Mmm

Dan

So how do you keep up Jen, how do you do it?

Jen

I think for a long time, we all, it was about blogging. It was about you had a little bookmark folder, or even before bookmark folders, you just had a bunch of things bookmarked that you could go to every morning and read the new blog posts from these people, or when RSS showed up, it was like "Oh, well that's what we're going to use RSS for, make that faster". I'm going to read these dozen blogs every single day and find out what's new, and it seems like that's dropped off in a way, like the prominence of blogs, as the way to learn all the new stuff. I think because the advertisement got so obnoxious, and blogs became less about teaching each other great stuff, and more about, many blogs, not all of them of course, but some, more about, you know getting a catchy headline and trying to get as many clicks as possible, and the comments went from feeling like you're in a small community of cool people to feeling like you're in this giant mess of angry jackals or something.

Dan

Right.

Jen

Strangers that you don't know. I don't know. Somehow the blogs as the centre of everything kind of eroded. And there's still some great, great, great blogs and there's still some resources that we all go to over our sites, that we go to over and over again, but, it may also be because there just seemed to have been, I don't know, at one point it seemed like there was fifty of them, and you just kept an eye on those fifty. And now it feels like there's a hundred thousand of them, and how could you ever keep up with a hundred thousand? And the one's that you read are not the same ones as your friends read, or the people you work with read. And then Twitter. I think Twitter totally took over as you don't need to keep an eye on these fifty blogs everyday because you can just rely on Twitter to click to articles that are good or things that are good.

Dan

To tell you what to do.

Jen

Yeah, and tell you what to read, or maybe it's a whole bunch of different things. I was thinking about this a lot this week because you know I work sometimes as a developer, sometimes as a designer, sometimes as a consultant and a teacher/trainer, and when I get a chance to work as a developer and I'm working with new teams, it's like new people, all new people, all new skillsets, all new you know. And a couple different times on different projects recently, different clients, I've run in to people who they're smart, and they're willing and they're bright and they're interested in being up-to-date, but they literally are using techniques out of 1998, 1999, 2001, and it's a little shocking, like, you're too young to have learned this in 1998. And you're too bright to have kept doing this out of habit. Where did you learn this? Did you go to college, and you took a web design class in college, and your teacher taught you everything completely wrong in 2007? Or, why, how is it that you've missed we don't use tables for layouts any more, like where have you been? And it made me start thinking, what is it, what resources is it that people need? What is it that would help developers keep up without it being overwhelming? That's a big reason I wanted to do this show, that's what this show is about. But also this show is about big. I think an audio podcast is not the place to learn CSS for layout code, and we could sit here and go well you know you should put "position colon absolute semi-colon". You know, no, no.

Dan

Right, it doesn't work as well if you just read CSS over the air.

Jen

Right. It would be really boring for most people.

Dan

Unless they were really trying to follow along. But then if you say like colon instead of semi-colon, then you'd have to say backspace. That'd be awkward.

Jen

Right, yeah, really awkward.

Dan

You drink a lot during the show.

Jen

You know I do. When I present live I usually go through at least a whole bottle really fast.

Dan

Do you?

Jen

Yeah, I dunno, sometimes I get nervous and I have to chug the water somehow.

Dan

Like dry mouth?

Jen

Yeah so I don't know. You had a blog for a long, long, long time. Talk about that a little. Hivelogic, and what was successful about that? You were teaching developers how to do good development, and then you kind of don't do it any more.

Dan

Yeah I guess. The first post, Hivelogic, the very first post. Well, before that, I had attempted to do a little news site, and so I started the news site in like '99, and from '99 to sometime in 2000, I had a little site that was called dansdailynews.com, which I don't believe exists any more, and I'm really hopeful that it's gone from the Internet. I think that it's old enough, that not, that it's not totally saved, because it was the most inane, stupid crap ever. And then I thought, you know, I wanted to get more serious about things, I wanted to write more about the stuff I was doing, whether it was design, or development, or just articles about things that were interesting to me, and sometime in early 2001 I think is. I mean I was doing things with it in 2000, but that, it's gone, I don't know what happened to it or where it is. So I just I started to get in the groove of writing frequently, almost daily, multiple times a day back in 2000, 2001 time period, and you know a lot of it, if you read it now especially, the earlier stuff, it was very specific to things that were going on back then. So it's kind of interesting to go back and read an article that I wrote about things that they seem so outdated right now. But the articles that I wrote or the pieces that I wrote that were more personal, or not about the technology, those I think are still kind of interesting to read. What I think I didn't like. Well you mention teaching people how to do things. That's kind of the direction that I took Hivelogic later. I thought, you know, instead of just talking about some random topic, or something personal, or some software I found that was neat. What if I put down, 'cos I just spent the last three and a half hours trying to get MySQL to compile on this ancient version of Mac OS X, which was current at the time, and, you know, I couldn't find any good information on how to do this online, so you know I'm just going to write this down as a tutorial, you know. I'm just going to write down everything that I learned in this process and how to do it, step-by-step, and I'll put that out there. So, it quickly, I realised those articles became very valuable resources to people, so whenever a new version of whatever the software was, MySQL or Rails or Ruby or whatever it was, would come out, I'd write a little tutorial, and those things were insanely popular. I mean really, really popular. So I did that for a while and you know then the infrastructure sort of caught up, so that now, to install MySQL, you can use something like homebrew on the Mac, and you can type "brew install mysql" and it just works and people have asked me "Why don't you update your old tutorials?" and I say "You know I wrote those at a time when they're really...building things yourself was the best way for a geek to get that kind of software installed.". And now, they're people much smarter than me, writing software, and a framework, and an infrastructure to make it just easier for people who don't want to wade through this, and cut and paste fifty commands and everything else. Just do it.

Jen

I still think it's a good way to learn though. Well, maybe, you know, you don't need to paste fifty commands to get MySQL installed. But there's definitely other stuff that you need to, you know, it's more complicated, maybe or higher up in the stack, but there's, you know, it feels like doing, and sitting there and fussing your way through it, and you look for a tutorial but you couldn't find a good one, and so you, or you found three, four different tutorials and they all contradicted each other, and you know, you started using one of them, and you realise it's out-of-date, and you figured out what's the new thing. And then yeah, right, pushing to the point where you're able to write up something new and put it on your own website somewhere is a great way to learn.

Dan

Yeah. So, I don't know. I'll tell you what. Long story, short, why did I stop doing it? I stopped doing it because the infrastructure caught up. I stopped doing it because, it, you know, writing, was something I still enjoy a lot, but with things like Twitter and other social networks and things like that, and I'll tell you what else. Look at a site like Daring Fireball. This is a very focused site that John's been doing almost as long as I, almost as early back as I'd started Hivelogic. I mean they started within a year of each other. Hivelogic never had the kind of focus that Daring Fireball has always had, and I had asked John about that early on, "Why don't you write about other things?". He's like "Well that's because that's not what it is to me.". Well I'm like "Where's your outlet for those things?". And he's like "Well, I just, that's what this is.". And, I'm, it's very clear when you look at Daring Fireball, how successful that's become in large part because John is such a good writer, and has such an interesting ability to analyze what's going on in that one specific space. But also, I think because it always stayed on target, and if you look at what I had always done on Hivelogic, I mean sure, there was those tutorials, but there was tonnes of other crap. Nobody knew what kind of crap they were going to get fed that day. And that doesn't generally lead to a very, I mean, I think, the audience that was really there, that really liked it, I mean, they were on board because they said "Oh I just like the stuff that Dan talks about in general.". But, that's always going to be a much smaller subset, I think of people who are coming to expect something, and you know you can pick on Daring Fireball as being that, you can, you know, there's a lot of techn — I mean you're not going to go to Engadget and expect to read an article about, you know, buying a house or something. It's going to be a very specific, targeted, focused kind of audience that goes there. And I think, I'm not saying you should limit your focus on the things you're doing, but you should have a focus, and I think for me, I never knew as an author, as a creator, you know, yeah I can just write about whatever I feel like and people will read it and once in a while one of the posts will get linked and it will get a tonne of traffic. But, as the author, I never felt like I knew what I should be doing, I never felt like I knew what I should be writing and doing, and I'll tell you what, it's different to have a more — Today it's different to have something like a Twitter feed where you can talk about whatever you want and people just like you because they like you, or hate you because they hate you, but I think Twitter is a much easier way to fill that need.

Jen

To do everything about yourself.

Dan

Yeah, and that way people are following you as a person, whereas when they think of a website or a blog, it's not quite — to me it doesn't connect as well to say "I just read this blog because of this person", that can be almost too much of a time commitment for people. So Twitter solves that problem.

Jen

Yeah I mean it seems like in a way maybe part of what happened to all those blogs is that they — some of them grew up and became quite professional, or quite focused, or quite well-written, or quite — like a Daring Fireball or what you just described or other, you know like oh this is a real serious, you know polished blog, which is kind of intimidating for many of the rest of us to say well how can I compete with that, now that there are fifty really awesome blogs in this subject then how can my — why do I want to contribute my — and then it also seems like there's so, so, so many, I don't want to use the word amateur, because it's not amateur, it's just sort of more normal people writing blogs you know

Dan

Yeah, mm hmm.

Jen

It becomes intimidating to say well I don't know if I can write something because I don't know if I'll ever have the audience because there's four million of these already.

Dan

Yeah. Yeah, and I really do think there was a period of time where people just went to Hivelogic. I'm not saying — I feel like I worked hard on it and the writing was good and everything else, but I feel like there was a period of time where just having a blog at all qualified you to earn — you could earn readers and a readership just simply because you where there, and this time period probably ended in the early 2000s, you know 2002 or 2003 maybe, by then if you just had a blog and you could write and you updated it a couple times a week you would have an audience. And now, no way. But, the interesting thing that I find now, and this feels like it's changed, and I know we're probably way off track now. But I feel like there was very clearly back then, if somebody who had a very big blog, an A-list blog linked you, and a couple other A-list blogs linked you, then you could become a B-list blog, and maybe eventually an A-list blog. And now I don't think that's the case. I mean I know people who have a written an article or done something where they've gotten just a tonne of attention, tonnes and tonnes of traffic, you know, whether Daring Fireball linked them or they got Penny Arcade linked them, or one of these big sites that's just got tonnes and tonnes of traffic and enthusiastic — but the thing is that lasts for a few days and then it goes away, and the person is like, they really thought they were a really big deal for a few days, and all of a sudden, maybe they're not that much of a big deal anymore, and nobody is like coming back to their site. And I feel like that's how things kind of changed, because now there are so many huge stories that everybody has to read today, and tomorrow there will be an equal or greater number of "Oh man you must read this today, this is what's important" that those other things kind of get lost in the shuffle, and there really isn't a good mechanism for people to say, I remember that site, that was a neat thing, I want to go back to that. That does happen on Twitter. People will read a tweet that gets retweeted a bunch of times, they'll see it, they'll think it's funny, they click the follow — done. Now they're following that person. On the web, yeah I mean you have RSS feeds, but people are using RSS less and less and less. And I know people who've never used RSS who are very smart and computer savvy, and have no interest or desire to ever even use RSS, but they know how to follow somebody on Twitter and Facebook.

Jen

Yeah, I think Twitter really changed this dynamic, just completely, that we...it used to be that if you wanted to keep up, and you wanted to know more, then you needed to remember to go back to a certain blog, because where else would you go? I mean you weren't going to go to Friendster, you won't going to find that stuff on MySpace, like, email listserve, that was the other place, so people would have a kind of community, and a discussion, an ongoing discussion, in a space that you know wasn't one person's blog on listserve, but Twitter provides this whole other way in which you can go to a site, it's really awesome, you read the one article, you leave. You don't feel like you need to make that website sticky in your own life, in your own brain.

Dan

Right, right.

Jen

You can...you'll just...if they write another awesome article, it'll show up on Twitter and you'll click it then. And it feels like maybe if you click on articles from a certain one blog half a dozen times, that's when you go "Ah, you know that's this person again" or that's this company again, or that's this thing again. Let me put them in RSS if you're into that, or let me, you know follow them, like if I see somebody I really like what that wrote, I'll just follow them on Twitter, and assume that eventually it'll come back around. It's interesting — I mean it feels almost like — I don't know what I would be doing without Twitter. I don't that I would have a career in a way, like if I just really start thinking about the details of, "Well I met this person because I was at this event", and I was at that event because I was following this other person on Twitter and they tweeted about it. On the one hand that's kind of scary. One company — Email is not run by one company. Blogs are not run by one company. Twitter, there's no other platform, there's no — you know — everything's on Twitter. Like if Twitter blew up, or if Twitter sold itself to you know whatever crazy thing. There's no duplicate of it.

Dan

Right.

Jen

But, I mean so is that the advice for the web designer, developer, business person? Like you really need to be on Twitter, and you need to go follow, you need to go figure out industry leaders to follow, and people in your slice of the world that are really good at what you do, and follow them.

Dan

Well I think so, don't you?

Jen

Yeah.

Dan

I don't think there's a better way to have direct — well not everybody follows this, but I think generally speaking there isn't a better way to have direct contact with somebody, especially in web and design and technology. That people make themselves so directly accessible to you with an incredibly low barrier to get started, and such an immediate and direct way. Now the problem is, when people start to get lots and lots and lots of followers, and every single tweet that they create gets dozens or hundreds or more of replies. At that point it almost has to become — and there's just no way to get around this — it almost just has to become a one-way kind of a communication, and it doesn't matter who it is. It doesn't matter whether it's Lady Gaga, or Warren Ellis, or insert favorite person here. When they get more than — it seems like there's a threshold, and the threshold is probably fifty thousand but maybe it's more than that. At that point there's so many followers, and everything you tweet, there's just this barrage of @replies, that you just can't —

Jen

You can't read them.

Dan

You just really can't read them. So then you only want to pay attention to the few people that you follow, and you know, you've got people who — and the other thing that's bad about it — or that you need to watch out for I think — is just that there is so much — and you know this is always the case, we could do a whole show just on this — but especially in little things like that, there's so much hostility out there — it's not the same kind of hostility that you get like on a message board or with comments. I mean the most hostility is in comments. But, you know, the fact still remains that Twitter is essentially an anonymous thing, and there's a lot of people who, for whatever reason, you know they get angry — so you have to deal with that, I just don't want to paint this out as being some amazing place as you go to Twitter and you follow Jeffrey Zeldman and all of a sudden you know, like you're hanging out with him in the coffee shop in Manhattan. It may happen, it may not happen. But there's probably fewer better ways to get in touch with somebody more directly than using something like Twitter.

Jen

Well — and I was — yesterday I needed a slideshow JavaScript library that I could implement very, very quickly and I wanted it to work on touch devices, right. So right there you've — 90% of the JavaScript slideshow libraries out there don't have touch, they don't support touch events so they're done, out. Found — asked on Twitter — I was looking and looking and searching, but really it's much faster to ask on Twitter. Got a couple of great recommendations, checked them out. You know, was replying back to people who had replied to me asking the original question, and both developers of the two libraries that I really liked showed up. One of them first, and he was talking to me about it, and he's explaining why he thinks his is better than the other one, and then I'm explaining to him about what's good about the other one. Not because I wanted to be a jerk, but because I like them both, and I thought, hey you know, this guy's is better in this one way, but if it was also better in these other three ways then it would be you know... and then the other guy showed up and he's like "Hey, don't insult my..." like... And I found it remarkable because I was able very quickly to be in conversation — not just with smart people who gave me advice about what library to use, but the two people who made the two libraries that I was checking out.

Dan

Right (laughs).

Jen

And I could ask them questions. 'Cos I was like "Well, you know, does jQuery this version support this thing?". Like I just asked them really quick on Twitter, without them hopefully being burdened too much. You know, if people are asking me questions on Twitter, it's actually very quick to reply, it's not email, it's not, you know comments on a blog, it's not writing a tutorial that you can take 5...what 30 seconds you can write a tweet. But I just thought it was interesting, like wow, I'm talking to — remembering what it was like 5, 10 years ago, as I was learning web everything, and you know I'm just imagining myself as this little nobody, sitting in this little nobody office in a nobody town, and just being like "I don't know anything" and like "Oh my god these two guys that made these libraries are talking to me!".

Dan

Yeah, but you know I wish that there wasn't that kind of mentality out there, of being "oh I'm a nobody person in a no place". You know everybody is or was at that point and it really doesn't change, and I think there's this... Unless you're some kind of really huge superstar, and I'll go back to Lady Gaga as a perfect example of this. Unless you're like internationally recognized and some kind of pop sensation, everybody's pretty much at the same level, they really are, and that feeling that you describe which I think everybody's had, or has at some level.

Jen

Yeah, usually most people still feel that way, even as they are the person that everyone else looks up to.

Dan

Yeah. That sort of fear or insecurity or whatever you want to call it. That's the thing that I think gets in the way.

Jen

Mmmhmm. Yeah I think it's about humanity and I think that even — you know I started out my first career in theatre and worked in some theatres where some, you know extremely well-known celebrities would come and perform, and also worked with a lot of actors who are not at all known, and realized really quickly that they're the same. They're the same. Then some of the people who are not known are really full of themselves and very hard to work with, and some of the people who are very famous were really full of themselves and hard to work with. And some of the people who are famous and some of the people who are not famous were very gracious, and very — they understood how to deal with the stress of the schedule of mounting a show and how to work with everybody, even, you know, 16 year old kids who were working on the show, like, how to be a gracious person. And there really wasn't any difference. And the celebrity thing is just all about — it's really a business tool to getting better work and getting paid well, it's not a real thing.

Dan

So speaking of getting paid well, aren't you supposed to be doing sponsors on this show?

Jen

Ah I'm supposed to do a sponsor! Yes

Dan

Now they're going to be backed up right on top of each other.

Jen

See, this is — I gotta figure out how to time things.

Dan

How long of a show is this usually?

Jen

How far? Half an hour in?

Dan

An hour? Alright half an hour in.

Jen

So I'm 10 minutes late.

Dan

We're going to have do both sponsors in the second half. Arggh.

Jen

Arggh. Sorry. Well let's start with the first one. Let's talk about Harvest.

Dan

You want to do this?

Jen

So they were talking in the chat room a while back about how college professors let everybody down. Man, I could just rant about college professors who teach web design and development. 'Cos I was a college professor who taught web design and development and I saw what else was passing for web design and development. It's so sad. 'Cos this is what happens Dan. Professors go to college. People who end up becoming professors. They go to college, they really love it. They don't want to go get a real job. So they say I'm going to go to graduate school. So they go to graduate school and they get all these more years of degrees — which I also did at one point later in my life — and then they become — they learn all this stuff, whatever it is. They learn history. They learn English. They learn all about Shakespeare. And they become experts in that field. And then they go and they teach it. And so most college professors, they basically learn everything that they need to know as a Shakespearian PHD student, and then they spend the next 30, 40 years of their life teaching that stuff back to the world. And somehow web design gets into that in the same way. Like "Oh I'm just going to go to graduate school and learn all this stuff about, you know, Director, Shockwave Director, and then I'm going to become a college professor and I'm just going to teach this class about Shockwave Director. I'll just teach the same class year after year after year, 'cos that's what all the college professors do. You can't redo all your courses every semester — that's a tonne of work." So you make a class, it's awesome and you teach it for the next 6 years. Same class, exactly the same, same assignment, same homework, same reading, same for the next 6 years. So the graduate classes that those professors took when they were students were old and out-of-date, and then they go and teach them and it's old and out-of-date, and they've never worked as professional web designers. They've never worked as professional web developers. They don't know much about the industry at all, and they go and teach everyone to use Dreamweaver and table layouts and image slices.

Dan

You're exactly right.

Jen

Shockwave Director.

Dan

Yeah, you're right.

Jen

And just — gah I went to Temple, 2002, and they were using Shockwave, and I was like —

Dan

Temple Owls!

Jen

Arghh, I couldn't, I was like ranting about Director, and right as I was leaving, in whenever that was, 2007 I think, they had all switched to Flash finally, and stopped teaching Director. And I'm like Flash is dead. 2008. I'm like, Flash is over. Like don't — (laughing)

Dan

Well you were ahead of the thinking then in 2008 weren't you?

Jen

I was teaching video blogging in 2006.

Dan

Wow.

Jen

The first ever university course in video blogging. 'Cos I was there to become better at what I was already doing. I wasn't there to become a professional professor. And so I loved this stuff. I loved Blogger and blogging.

Dan

Now why do you think you were — and I mean this in a real way, I'm not — why do you think you were so far ahead of the trend?

Jen

I'm not the only one, there are plenty of people who do teach in university settings who keep up, who are good at this stuff, who want to be good at this stuff, and are good at it in the same way everyone else is, and learn in the same way that everybody else does. And I think I was one of those people. But sadly I think that it's more common, because of the culture of the academy itself, for people to just say "well I'm a multimedia professor, I teach multimedia arts" and then do what everybody else is doing. You know, I mean the film professors were teaching film-making out of the 70s — (laughing)

Dan

Yeah

Jen

— they were not teaching — in fact they were quite — the film professors were quite against video. I mean they were just like "Video is awful. It's terrible. It will never replace film." This is in the mid-2000s. I'd love to see now. If I were teaching there now, I would get all the freshmen film-making 101 students to all shoot their beginning projects on the iPhone, because you know a lot of them would have it in their pocket and they don't have to take the time to checkout equipment.

Dan

(laughing)

Jen

Be like "OK, everybody who can shoot this assignment on your iPhone and then we're all going to go over to this professor and we're going to tell him you shot this on film, and we're going to have a throwdown! Let's have a contest to see if the professors can tell the difference between this brand new digital film." Especially, more than the iPhone, you know some of these film cameras are just gorgeous. The digital SLRs and the lenses that they have, you know, it's crazy how amazing the stuff is. And yet I bet you those film professors are still over there telling everybody, all the seniors, gosh those seniors would spend — they'd take out student loans and spend 5 to 10 thousand dollars on their senior projects so they could shoot them on film to impress the professors. And then carry that debt for you know 5, 10 years.

Dan

Yeah.

Jen

Ridiculous. When they could have been shooting it on video. Anyway, like I said, I could rant forever, but I think it does — I think it's starting to really hurt our profession that — it used to be that there were no classes because the web was new, and no-one in the academy knew anything about it. A lot of universities didn't even really have websites. And then now it's finally become something major. You can major in web design, web development. But the coursework is just, usually, not always, there are some really good programs out there, but, if you just pick a random program, a lot of them are just wrong, they're so bad, they're terrible. And so people are graduating and they're 25, and they got this debt and they want to go into the industry, and it's a great industry to go into because you can make some money to pay off that debt, and yet everything that they know is completely wrong.

Dan

Mmm. How depressing.

Jen

Yeah.

Dan

And it's not their fault.

Jen

It's not their fault. In fact some of them are really sharp and smart. And there were some people in the chatroom further up — I don't know if I can see them, they were saying that err — iamel.. — how do you say these people's names?

Dan

I just go with — you're doing great

Jen

Said the worst thing is if you do things the right way in classes like that, it's bad because then you don't pass, because to pass you have to code it in whatever antiquated way the professor wants.

Dan

Oh that's iamelliott.

Jen

iamelliott

Dan

Yeah

Jen

Yeah. Bad. When you know more than the teacher does.

Dan

I remember in one of my technical writing classes. Now see I've always been a writer. I grew up in a family where both my parents worked in college, my Mom is a college English professor. So I was reading and writing at a very early age, and always have done it. And of course my degree is in English, technical writing. I was doing a double major. Computer science and tech writing and the money was running out so I had to pick whichever one I was closer to and could afford to be done with and was further along with the writing so I graduated with that. But, the interesting thing, I had a professor who in one of these technical writing classes, they wanted things submitted along, I guess a path that most people would take. Now for me, writing's always been a bit of a different experience for me in that I typically just sit down and I write, and I don't do a lot of editing, I don't really do rough drafts. So if you're were to — I'm not recommending you do this — but if you were to go and read hivelogic or read some of my posts on alistapart, those are pretty good. That's my first draft typically. That's my one draft. I don't really do a rough draft and then go and edit it. I'm not saying it wouldn't be better if I did, but usually my first draft wasn't that bad. So a lot of the time I would just run with that. Well of course the way they want you to do this in college is the proper way, which is you start with notes, and then you do an outline from the notes, and then you refine the outline, and then you have your final outline, and then you begin with the rough draft, and then you — I never did any of that, I'd just sit down and start typing, and I would see it — I always felt like I was transcribing. I saw it all in my head. And then I could sit down and my hands had to go through this motion called typing and everything would just come out. And that's how I still write today. And typically it's already there, it's already formed, it's already written, I just have to go through this motion of communicating it on to the screen, and doing that — now I realise that's not typical, but that's just the way it works in my head. The teacher didn't grade you based on the final product.

Jen

Mmmmhmmm.

Dan

He graded you based on all of these things. So the notes I would have — well I don't do notes, so my notes that I would turn in would be crap. Well I don't typically do much of an outline. So the outline I would turn in would be crap. And the rough draft would be barely better than the notes. It wouldn't match the outline. It'd be crap. Then this final thing I would turn in would be beautiful. Then it didn't matter because that's not what the grade was about. I mean obviously they were looking at that but each of these things were part of this bigger piece. It's like I didn't get that for the first half of the term. That he just wanted me to — and finally I said to my wife, well she wasn't my wife back then, she was my girlfriend back then. I said "You know I'm just going to do it the way he wants me to do it", and she's like, "Well yeah you probably should". And so I did it that way. And that's the only thing that saved my grade in the class is I said "Fine, you know what, I don't want to or need to do an outline but I'm going to do one". And people would say "Well didn't it help the process? Didn't it help you? Wasn't it better?" No. For me it was still a hindrance. It was extra work. And man, back then I was the most impatient person in the world. I couldn't stand that I had to — why did I have to do this extra work? I realised — back to your earlier point — that education in college, at its worst, all your doing is doing what the teacher wants you to do. It doesn't matter whether it's part of learning. It doesn't matter whether it's the right thing to do. (coughs) Excuse me. It doesn't matter whether it's something that you actually want to do. It's just — this is what the teacher has asked you to do so do that. And if you do that thing you will get the grade and then later when you get out of school you can do it the way you want to do it. And that was the hardest pill for me to swallow in college.

Jen

Well and I get it as a person who worked as a professor and needed to grade — you know I got 30 videos. They're all 4 minutes long and I'm supposed to give them grades and they're videos.

Dan

(laughs)

Jen

(laughs) They're all you know dramatic whatever. They wrote a script and they got some friends to be actors and they shot it and they edited it together and they're all really bad (laughs)

Dan

Yeah.

Jen

They're all bad, all of it's bad because it's really hard to make a film and so the first several films you make are going to be bad. And sometimes you're like I don't know how to say this one's a C and this one's a B and this one's an A, you know I just make up some stuff, like you got 7 checkboxes, if you do each of those things then you get the A, if you do 5 you get a B, if you did 3 you get a — you know. I think some of this stuff is hard to teach. The creative things — like how do you — how are you a good — what's it take to be a good writer? Like sometimes it's a mystery. The thing that I think is really damaging is when you leave school with the impression that "well the proper way to do good writing is to make notes then an outline, then 5 paragraphs, and in each paragraph you have 5 sentences, and the first sentence (laughs)" — you know that sort of formula — like when you leave and you think that that's real and you think that that's the correct way to do things or even worse, you hate it, hate it, hate it, and so you leave saying "Well I'm a bad writer. I can't write. I'm not good at writing, because I didn't like that process". That's when it's really — so at least you left with a sense of this is jacked up, this is —

Dan

Well if you get that concept though, that you're just doing what the teacher wants you to do because the teacher wants you to do it and you need to grade. That actually is pretty good preparation for the real world.

Jen

Mmhmm.

Dan

Because when your boss asks for something and you know — I think a lot of people, especially smart people, when they get out of school, the first thing they think is like "Oh wow I'm gonna have this cool new job" and they get to the job and they're doing stuff, they want to impress the boss and everything else. And pretty quickly they start to think, "you know (laughs), you know what I'm smarter than my boss. I know so much more than my boss. This boss — that boss doesn't know anything, that boss is stupid. I know so much more. I should be the boss because I know more." And eventually in like 10 years when you are the boss, you look back on that first boss and you're like "How did they know so much? What? They were so smart, I remember how they handled this thing. They knew everything." And you know — umm — someone in the chatroom said — I want to make sure I quote the right person. Transition says "Dan Benjamin says college sucks". I actually — I really don't think college sucks at all, and in fact I think — you know — there are people who always say "what am I doing in school? Should I even be in school?". I actually think that college is critical. I mean, so many of my friends didn't go to college or dropped out and they're huge successes, so obviously you don't need college to be successful. But I'll tell you what college does, I'll tell you what it does — or university as they say in the UK, "I'm at university". I think it's great and I think everybody if you can go to college you should try to go and you should try to finish if you can go. Because I think what it does, it teaches you some of these lessons that we're talking about, even though you learn the wrong thing. But what it also does is sort of sets that bar so that — I've never run a marathon — you've run a marathon right?

Jen

No (laughs).

Dan

I thought you ran a Boston marathon or something.

Jen

Oh Ironman I think. Once I accidentally ended up in an Ironman. (laughs). No.

Dan

Alright. Let's say you've run a Boston marathon. Let's say you've done that. When you meet somebody and it somehow comes up in conversation. They're like "Oh yeah. What year did you run the Boston marathon? Oh I ran it in 2004. Cool.". All of a sudden you guys both have this shared experience and the person now knows that when they think of you they think that yes, we had this shared common experience and you did it. You did this thing that I also did and that tells me something about you. Even though they may have completely incorrect notions about what it is that it tells them. And I think in many ways having a college degree — even if it's a degree that's not in the thing that you want to do — it says to a potential employer — and let's face it most people have employers for a lot of their career. It tells a potential employer "I did this thing and you know what this thing called going to college and graduating is and what it means. I did that." So that is at least I did that. So if I did that I can probably do this other thing that you want from me, that you want me to do. So I don't mean to downplay college, because if you go to a good school and you're like into it and the teachers are good and the curriculum is good and it can be an amazing and life-changing experience. But no matter what happens in there, at the very least you show up with that diploma and you're like "I got this thing and this proves to everybody who might want to give me some money which I need that I can at least do that."

Jen

Yeah and I agree with you, I mean I went to college and it was completely awesome and I majored in sociology and I feel like those classes and that training and that way of thinking about society. Thinking about the big picture, thinking about how this government policy or that cultural event can affect a whole society is something that I use everyday. I use that constantly as I design, because that's what you're doing as a designer. You're thinking about how the choices that you make are going to have an impact across a group of people. And statistical analysis, understanding you know how a good survey is written or not written, and while I've never written a sociological study I, you know, I can look at a survey, and be like "Yeah all those questions are really not good. You're going to get bad results out of that. You need to rewrite those questions." And that's not directly, you know, that's not directly — it's not trade school, I don't think you get a good web education in a sort of trade schooly way from many programs, but you can still get a really, really great education in general. Some of those liberal arts classes that everybody like "I don't want to take that class that's dumb, why would I ever need that information?". That's some of the best stuff. That general overall thinking is some of the most important I think long term.

Dan

Yeah.

Jen

But back to —

Dan

Critical thinking

Jen

Yeah critical thinking. But going back to keeping up with the industry. You know for people who are in school or not in school. It just seems like books, you know people talk about books, they talk about conferences, they talk about err —

Dan

People love the conferences.

Jen

And there are some good ones. It feels like books and conferences have stepped it up recently.

Dan

2nd (fake coughs) sponsor.

Jen

(laughs) And the 2nd sponsor — we'll talk about that in a moment.

Dan

Right after this break yeah.

Jen

Yes (laughs). Books.

Dan

Books.

Jen

Conferences.

Dan

A lot of people like the conferences.

Jen

Yeah.

Dan

People go to those things. They get their work to pay and then they go.

Jen

It's really good when your work pays. It's a little harder when you pay. Which many of us do.

Dan

What do you think is the appeal and the allure of the conference for the most part? Do you think that its the fact that you're going and you're sitting and you're listening to what you hope is a really, really good talk. Or do you think that its just being...I said...going back to your earlier thing where you said "Oh I'm just this nobody. I'm in this dark corner and nobody understands what I do". And this is a chance at a conference for you to go and connect up and now you're with people who do understand what you do and are interested and believe as you do that xyz is very important.

Jen

I think there's a bunch of reasons but I think the main thrust for a lot of people is that, day-to-day-to-day you're focused on your tickets, your focused on the site you need to get launched in 2 months. You're focused on you know your plan for what you're to do for your next business web strategy (inaudible) thing app. And when you go to a conference you get a chance to leave that heads down world and get out of your own team's focus and go to a place where lots of other people are talking about completely different things that are completely related. So you're, you're not thinking about your specific todos, you're thinking about the industry, you're thinking about trends, you're thinking about web design in the abstract or user experience in the abstract, or you know, oh right why are we making a web site? Why is this a good thing for our business? Maybe we should backup for a second and re-evaluate our assumptions and think about it in this completely different way. Hear what other people are doing. Stories from what other people are doing. See what the trends are. See what the -- and you know meet people, talk to people at meals and between sessions and between -- sometimes get to meet your heroes. Lots of times just talk to other people that are like you and you go oh right, ok well what are you doing? What do you think about this? It's great to watch videos of conference talks online, but of course watching videos of conference talks online while you're in between when you're working, as part of your break, you're working on a ticket you take a break, look at some of a conference video, then you go back to your ticket, doesn't have that same effect. Where actually leaving town or going everyday all-day to a thing, seems to just, I don't know, it like shifts reality in this way where you're able to get some perspective on the world. Which always seems to be pretty special. And people seem to leave and go back home with a whole new way of looking at the world.

Dan

Yeah.

Jen

Even when they don't leave with a specific, like, oh I should use this controller for whatever (inaudible). Although they might have that. They might. But they might not.

Dan

(laughs)

Jen

It's almost like the perspective thing is more. It's hard to know where to get that. I mean I feel like there are things you can read or look at or participate in while you're home, but in some ways the real big picture, the whatever, the thirty thousand feet view of what's happening, um, sometimes it can be hard to find an opportunity to think about those things. For some people I think. Especially for people who are heads-down, or who've had the same job for the past 15 years.

Dan

Now that's an interesting point too. Having the same job for a long time and perhaps you and I are the same generation, similar age. Our parents -- probably -- I mean I'm making a generalization of course, our parents probably had the same job for most of their lives. I know mine certainly did. I know my grandparents had...

Jen

My grandparents did.

Dan

...like one job their whole life. And I think you know today people seem to change jobs even -- and it seems to be increasing because I remember how frequently I changed jobs early in my career. That's slowed down a bit. But I remember that. And my parents and grandparents I guess this is just what people do now. And now I will talk to 20-somethings and they're changing jobs like constantly. That's not the part that surprises me. Because you figure they get bored, or they want to make more money or there's a cool startup or whatever. They just make a change right. Is that employers don't even bat an eye at this any more. Especially not in technology. Oh you were here for 6 months cool. And then you were over here for 3 months. And you're here for 8 months. That's normal. For me, anything less than a year and I felt like I was really, really taking a chance with my resume and my career if I was at a place less than a year and I should probably be there 2 years. In my mind I was making a minimum of a year commitment even if I hated it. And now it's like a few months here and a few months there and why did you leave? Oh this other company was starting up and I thought it'd be fun to go over there. As an employer, that scares the heck out of me because you think as soon as this person finds some other cool thing, they're going to go somewhere else, and you know, it's just a shock because you're there, and you're thinking to yourself, man I'm going to hire somebody. I'm going to invest time, invest money. And it's really going to -- it takes, potentially it takes a toll on you and your own business. Not just mentally, you know, but financially. It creates a stressful situation for you. Because now you've got somebody who's come to work for you. You're entrusting them with time. You're paying them money. You want them to get up to speed with everything, so you're training them, you're teaching them and now they're going to up and go, and you kind of know that going into it. And that's what really is surprising to me, not that the person wants the different opportunities and changes things up and the companies are totally cool with it. Have you seen that?

Jen

Yeah it's interesting because the -- you know thinking about this I thought one of the things that I think is important, or maybe the secret to running a great web shop or the secret to running a great department in a company with a very successful web stuff -- we make awesome web stuff. Like part of that is to really take time for the company, the people running the company to put value into giving their workers to learn more stuff, and to explore, and to experiment, and to take like a -- "I heard about this thing but I haven't had a reason to use it yet, err let me just take a half a day and mess around with it and build something silly just to learn that it's terrible and we should never use it." Or I'm going to take some time to go to this conference and it's going to cost you guys 5 grand to send me or whatever. That the company itself should say thats really important, we need to invest that time, we need to invest that money. And you're right, people might leave their job. You might spend 10 grand a year giving employees a chance to go to conferences, a chance to buy books, a chance to buy videos, a chance you know, just mess around half a day a week, or, you know, blow off a whole week, take a whole company and take a week off of client work and just experiment with stuff.

Dan

Yeah I mean, just to follow that up, I mean I think it's ok that -- no you can't expect an employee to stay with you forever, you shouldn't go into it with that expectation. But it's simply looking at this track record of 3 months here, 6 months here, 6 months here, 6 months here, like you have to go into it saying "Ok this is a 6 month deal". I think that --

Jen

Sometimes not. Sometimes people do. They are in a really great shop. The shop has a culture that supports them, that they love and they stay there for 5 years. I see that a lot as well.

Dan

Yeah.

Jen

Usually when I see people jumping in that 6 months, 6 months, 2 months, 4 months --

Dan

Just a bad fit and they're saving -- they're doing everybody a favor right. They're actually doing the company a favor by not staying there too long.

Jen

Well they're jumping from bad environment to bad environment.

Dan

Yeah.

Jen

That's what I usually see. I don't see people jumping at 4 months because the place they worked at was awesome (laughs). You know maybe the place they worked at, they thought it was going to be great. They loved the company's product. They loved the ideas of the company, but the way the team was functioning was just not workable, or you know had a lot of promise but they went in with all these ideas and they just couldn't get them anywhere because everybody was saying no all the time, and you're running round putting out fires instead of having a chance to plan for something that's going to be solid.

Dan

So what about screencasts. Is that another good way to learn? Cos I know I mean, I made a few screencasts for PeepCode, but I did that after watching tonnes and tonnes of them and learning. For me, I mean, I love books, I love being able to sit down with a book because then it becomes — you know the benefit of a book is that its fast and easy reference material and that you can read it, but then its very easy to go and jump back in. But screencasts, as a way to learn new stuff, as a way to find about something cool and new that’s come out. Ah man I’ve used the heck out of screencasts.

Jen

Yeah. I have too. Especially when I was learning Drupal. There was nothing like going to a video that was 6 minutes long that showed me this one module. Like oh you need to do X, here’s how you do it. Actually it wouldn’t be one module, usually it was like 6 modules. Here’s the recipe, use this, this, that, this and that other thing and this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to plug them together, turn this on over here, configure that there. Click, click, click. Oh this is weird, so watch out for this weird thing. Boom boom now you’re done and here’s where you can adjust it. Like, that was absolutely invaluable. I don’t know how I would’ve learned a lot of what I learned in the Drupal world, without those. And those were especially useful before I knew that there was a Drupal world and that the way to learn Drupal is to get to know people and then learn from people, stuff about the stuff. But when I was on my own and I felt like I didn’t deserve the right to bother any of the superstars. All false, but you know I felt that way. The screencasts were — But I don’t know, I’m curious, I’d love to hear from listeners what people think about screencasts and what ones they like and what do they — where do they — I mean do people use Lydia or whatever that site is?

Dan

Lynda.

Jen

Lynda.

Dan

Yeah I think they use Lynda. But I mean there are so many sites out there that a lot of them I find are niche sites too. And I mentioned PeepCode. You know that’s really focused on Rails and the community that surrounds it. And, there’s such different quality, I mean there’s people who’ll make a screencast, and they’ll put it out there and it’s something that they make you know in an afternoon. We would work for weeks on the stuff we did for PeepCode. I think you know, you can tell that. But even the ones that are hastily done and you know where people just have a neat idea and show you something really quick and easy. Those are really valuable too, because for a lot of people I think it depends on the way you learn. There’s a lot of people who learn very effectively by being shown something. And if you are the one designer, or the one developer in your company, or you’re trying to learn something new, you can sit down and spend 15 minutes or an hour, whatever, watching a screencast, and it’s like somebody sits down next to you, you know, imaginary person, but — they’re right there and they’re showing you on your screen. This is how you do this thing that seems really hard. An hour later you’ll be like oh yeah now I can do that.

Jen

It’s great because it’s on your screen and you just hit the pause button. You back a couple, whatever, oh, let me look at that last 30 seconds again. And you open up a code window and you type what they’re typing and you hit pause, and you type what they’re typing and you hit play. It’s even better than a book in some ways.

Dan

Yeah. Can be.

Jen

Especially for code. Especially for very specific, you know, this is how to do this one thing in CSS. Or this is how to write this thing in Rails, or this is how — Very, very practical. Very, very hands-on. Very — yeah. Yeah, I’m actually surprised I don’t see more of those. Perhaps because they are hard to make. Yeah I mean even if you don’t take 3 weeks to edit something together, they still take, you got to be, you know, you gotta have some decent equipment and be good at explaining. One of my pet peeves is finding a screencast, that’s really like, oh my gosh, that’s exactly what I need to learn. And the person who made the screencast is too scared to talk.

Dan

(Laughs)

Jen

(Laughs) So they’re just clicking.

Dan

Yeah.

Jen

And they’re recording sound. So you can hear — it’s usually on a PC — you can hear their fan, and you can hear their mouse. But they won’t say anything. And I’m just like please, just tell me! (Laughs) Just say it! Just tell me what you’re doing! Just use your mouse.

Dan

Yeah. You know what. This is going to be just a little — can I rant for a second?

Jen

Yeah.

Dan

Uh, if you decide, if you’re listening to this show, and you have a new service, or new iOS app, or something like that. I can’t impress upon you enough, how — if you are going to do a screencast, and you should, because they’re invaluable marketing tools too.

Jen

Yeah.

Dan

If you’re going to do one, and you should. Hire somebody to help you with it.

Jen

(Agrees)

Dan

If you want to hire somebody to actually record the demo. Or if you feel confident to record that yourself, record it. But at the very least hire somebody like me, to do the script for you. You write the script, have the person read it, have them record it professionally and do that. Don’t just, like you’re saying, have the — ‘cos you nailed it Jen — have the fan in the background, and you can hear them typing, and it’s just quiet while you see them just typing crap on the screen. And it just goes on and on like that for a while. And you’re like what are they doing? And then they’re making mistakes, and there’s no editing that’s been done. And, you know, all of — and then — or worse, the worst thing that likes a sin, at least to people like me, is seeing this cool iOS app, or this cool new app that’s coming out, and here’s a quick screencast of it, and then they have the computer voice that they just typed in and then it’s the computer voice reading it. Because I’ve asked — I’ve gone to people and asked them. And they said, well you know I have an accent, I’m not confident in my own voice. I said that’s a perfectly valid reason not to do it. But don’t use the computer. Hire somebody you know. It’s not that expensive to get somebody like me to read a 5 minute script.

Jen

And you’ve got a great microphone.

Dan

Yeah, you gotta have the mic, you have the whole thing. Just like go to somebody and say would you do this? And worst case they say — and I’m not saying it has to be me, I’m saying there’s plenty of people who do this kind of work out there. Voice talent. And you can go to them — and yeah it might cost a few hundred bucks, but that can make all the difference in the world.

Jen

Yeah.

Dan

Anyway I had to rant. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did that.

Jen

Was that a rant?

Dan

That was a rant. I apologise for it.

Jen

I feel like my rants are so much darker than that. Yeah I do think demo videos are really — I mean they’re a little bit different than videos that sort of regular people make for each other to teach things about technology. But they’re genius to say, well you know we’re going to do this thing, we hope it goes out on Twitter. Somebody clicks on the link on Twitter and they — all they know is that such and such friend said this is awesome.

Dan

(Agrees).

Jen

And they just want to spend 60 seconds tops, or maybe 3 minutes if it turns out to be good, like figuring out exactly what is this thing. What is it? Just tell me right up. What is it? I don’t have 10 minutes to watch a really long podcast, that’s — a video, that’s all wandering around. Or I don’t have you know, I can’t read and read and read, page after page, trying to decode what this thing is.

Dan

Right.

Jen

You know. Tell me. And video’s a great way to do it. And good — you know, good writing in general. And that you should take 3 weeks. I mean 3 weeks wouldn’t be very long to make a video like that. You spend, you know — spend a month making a really awesome video. Getting people who know how to do that to help you. I just — you know — I think about doing screencasts and —

Dan

You’d be very good at it.

Jen

I love teaching so much. I miss it.

Dan

You’re very good. Why don’t you do it? Shame on you.

Jen

And I wouldn’t take 3 weeks on each one, because it’s not sustainable. You’d never put anything out. You got to like you know do it quick and be OK with mistakes in there and stuff.

Dan

Why aren’t you doing it then?

Jen

You know, just decisions about life. Time, time time time. But if I could figure out how to make it work financially, I would totally do it. If people want it they should you know harass me for it.

Dan

I’m going to start harassing today.

Jen

Tell me how much money you could cough up for it and yeah. Especially I think there’s all these new things. You know like you just want to use the CSS background-image property. It’s new and it’s really confusing. And you can read tutorials, which is what I did when I wanted to use that one thing. Like I knew it was out there. That’s the first thing. You gotta know that this new thing exists. So I knew that it was there. I read about it in a couple books and — but I wanted to use it. So I start looking around. Its harder than ever to find good blog posts. Half of the links you’ll find are just crap right. So you finally dig through to find the ones that are good. But they’re not that good. They’re short, they’re too short. And then you run into all this complexity and there’s nothing really out there about it. So it just takes a long time to figure it out yourself. And I’d love to have turned around and just made you know a 5 minute video and shown people what it is that I’ve finally figured out the trick to make it work. There’s a bug in webkit that you gotta write one little thing attribute to fix and there’s a — You have to set your border to match your border-image, and one’s in pixels and one’s not in.

Dan

Right.

Jen

It’s just like little tiny details that you know.

Dan

I think that people would love your stuff. I think you should do it.

Jen

Yeah.

Dan

Put one out there.

Jen

I’ve gotta build jensimmons.com first (laughs).

Dan

Ah you’re still working on that?

Jen

I’m still not working on it. But yeah, its got a —

Dan

You started that back in when we were just starting the — yeah look at this.

Jen

Oh yeah no I —

Dan

It’s the same.

Jen

It’s been 2 years of not yeah. It has to go up by south by south west. It has to. It has to.

Dan

And you’re going to be here for that too.

Jen

I am. I’m actually speaking at south by south west.

Dan

Oh cool. What’s your topic?

Jen

HTML5 APIs and how they change the way we should design.

Dan

Oh wow, good for you.

Jen

It’s for designers.

Dan

Is this your first time speaking there or uh?

Jen

At South By it is yeah.

Dan

Good for you.

Jen

Yeah I got past the vote for me hurdle.

Dan

Oh yeah.

Jen

Yeah. Insane. Yeah. So what other tips? Do we have tips?

Dan

I don’t have any.

Jen

I feel like all we have is like a big question. We don’t really have a lot of answers.

Dan

In very much the same way that life is a big question. That’s what we have here.

Jen

Our answer is use Twitter.

Dan

Yeah Twitter.

Jen

Use Twitter. And if you don’t think, if you don’t agree, then you’re following the wrong people.

Dan

(Laughs.)

Jen

It’s not that you should stop using Twitter, it’s that you should change who you’re following.

Dan

Right.

Jen

Yeah. Yeah like the future-friendly group. The futurefriend.ly website. Like it’s a manifesto about the future of web design and how things are going to change because of mobile.

Dan

Mmm.

Jen

And one of the most important things I think about that, it’s like 2 or 3 pages on this web site. It’s just — there’s like a list of people who signed the manifesto. Go follow every single one of them on Twitter. (Laughs.) That’s what’s — that’s the takeaway from that.

Dan

Right.

Jen

Go follow all those people. There’s like 7 of them.

Dan

(Laughs).

Jen

And then read everything that they ever say (laughs). And then if you see them talking to a lot of the same people over and over. Go follow those people too. Yeah because they’re all geniuses and they will tell you what is the future of the web. The web ahead. Yeah.

Dan

Is that how you end the show usually?

Jen

I should pitch the other shows ‘cos maybe because you’re on the show, and because we’re live and because it’s a little more on the — you know the normal 5by5 — how shows happen.

Dan

(Agrees.)

Jen

Like John Siracusa’s listening to this show. Probably as a first time. Maybe even Merlin Mann will listen to this show. And some of the other superstars on your network. Awesome. People should go listen to the other shows. There’s 12 of them. And they’re each about a subject. Like we did a whole show on video. On HTML5 video.

Dan

(Agrees.)

Jen

We did a whole show on designing for touch screens. Like how do you do that? You want to design for these things. What does that really mean to design for touch? On grid systems and what’s up with the grid.

Dan

Yeah, that’s a good one to listen to.

Jen

Yeah. Jeremy Keith’s — I think that was episode — I can’t type because I’m not supposed to be typing.

Dan

Yeah, well — you should type just so people can hear how loud it is. You should.

Jen

Yeah should I? Yeah let me go over here and look up the list of —

Dan

Yeah.

Jen

Oh no it’s not loud now.

Dan

All of a sudden its not loud. Ah it’s a little loud.

Jen

A little but nothing like before.

Dan

Yeah before it was like thunder.

Jen

Number 3. Jeremy Keith on everything web. That one was so good. He just talked about all kinds of brilliant stuff. Really - I mean — maybe the point of this show is that you should just listen to all the other shows (laughs). If you want to learn about this stuff. People feel free to @reply me on Twitter and tell me subjects that you would like covered. Things. And I’m not going to get into details of — we’re not going to do code demos on this podcast. We’re not going to do that. So, if you write me and tell me you really want me to explain to people how to do internationalization in Drupal 7.

Dan

Right. But you will be reading CSS on the show. Body. Space. Curly bracket. Space. Font. Dash. Size. Colon. You will be doing that.

Jen

Yeah. Mmhmm. Teach SASS over the audio.

Dan

(Laughs) Right.

Jen

Yeah. People can follow @thewebahead on Twitter. @thewebahead is the name. And check out more shows 5by5.tv/webahead. And see the show notes for this particular episode at 5by5.tv/webahead/13

Dan

There going to be a lot of notes in there do you think?

Jen

I don’t think on this show. Because there wasn’t a lot of typing. But there’s some, because the people in the chat room, because we have a chat room today.

Dan

Mmmhmm

Jen

Have been collecting links for us. Very good. They might even have titles actually. But I think that’s it. Unless you have any other brilliant things to say about how to keep up.

Dan

I wish I did. I wish I had anything smart to say, to help people — other than use Twitter. Which is really — if you say that, you sound really smart.

Jen

Oh I sound way smarter than I am. Or more — I shouldn’t say smarter. I should say — I sound much more knowledgeable than I would actually be in my natural state because I use Twitter.

Dan

Oh yeah.

Jen

Because you just — you see these things and you’re like, you just remember them and then later when someone says what do you about the ber-der-ber-bmer-bmmer, you say oh yeah I know that, and you just regurgitate what you read off of Twitter (laughs).

Dan

Yeah.

Jen

And you only know — you know, you only know 3 sentences about it, but you sound really smart.

Dan

Yeah you can sound smart — everybody has the potential to sound smart in 140 characters.

Jen

Yeah. Yeah. Well thank you Dan! Thanks for being on this episode.

Dan

My pleasure. Can we expect more live shows from you Jen?

Jen

I don’t know. I would love to do every show live. I think there’s a technical something that’s gotta get hooked up to something.

Dan

Mmhmm.

Jen

I was talking to this guy the other day about it. So if he hooks those things up, then I really would love to do this show live every time. Yeah. It’s pretty fun. But even if it’s not live, it will be around, and people can subscribe in iTunes.

Dan

That’s right. Alright.

Jen

And you should do that.

Dan

Well I was very thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me Jen.

Jen

Yeah.

Dan

And that’s how you close out, you just say yeah.

Jen

Yeah. I do.

Dan

Ok.

Jen

Bye. Thanks everybody. Goodbye!