RJMetrics just picked me up as their Lead User Experience Designer. I’m really thrilled to be a part of a team I’ve heard great things about.

Totally psyched! It’s gonna be fun.

Let me start this off by saying that nothing in particular triggered this post. That’s how much I hate WYSIWYGs. I was literally eating pizza and enjoying Ancient Aliens when my disdain for text editors shot out of my brain like a microwave-beam-emitting pyramid.

Where do I begin?

By this point in your life you’ve probably had some experience with a What You See Is What You Get editor. Do you remember your first time? Like any new love affair, you’d become so intoxicated with the sheer possibilities that laid before you that any blatant red flag was easily ignored. There were SO. MANY. BUTTONS.

But soon enough, you’re eating TV dinners and watching America’s Got Talent in silence. It’s not you it’s me…actually it is you.

“No, you cannot set the font of one paragraph (and only one paragraph) on your site to Papyrus… I will end you.”

In my experience with content management systems, you’re going to run into two kinds of users. The people who know HTML and run ruin shit, and the people who have no freaking clue what they’re doing. And I don’t mean what they’re doing with text editors, I’m talking about using the internet in general. As it turns out, the only people who can use WYSIWYGs properly are the people who don’t need them.

From the first group, you’ll probable stumble upon the damage they’ve done after an emergency phone call at 2am on a Saturday, pop into HTML mode and…my god:

<picture of="myCatSprinkles.pur" align="more-lefter"> Mr. Sprinkles is the yardie yardie yar yar hip hoppinest fat cat <b><strong>you’ve</strong></b> evar shaked a stick at. <blink><a gogogadget="website">the google</a><a> <refridgerator><microwave>&43a;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs;&fdg;&342;&dsfs; <script src="some-script-they-found-that-will-destroy-everything-you-have-ever-lived-for.js"> </script> They thought it would make the cat dance. </microwave></refridgerator></a></blink></picture>

They modified the HTML? They seem know what HTML does but have no clue about the syntax… camelCase? How could this be? The anchor tag is finished, but was never started… Good use of of both <b> and <strong> tags for extra effectiveness. And of course, a browser-compromising piece of trojan glory I’ve come to expect.

What’s funny is that upon asking the user what happened to achieve such substantially FUBARed markup they’ll feign a blackout like they’ve been shotgunning Four Lokos for days. This never ceases to amaze me.

But, I wanted to see what I’d get!

Sure you did. But riddle me this, have you ever actually saw what you would get? Or were you just ecstatic that you could add inline images without ever having to decipher an <img> tag. Think long and hard before you answer that. I’m almost convinced that the sole point of these editors from Satan is to make it easy to place a picture of a cat next to text about said cat. SAD REALIZATION: The internet was made for cats, and cat-related nonsense.

Someone said there would be cake…

We, as developers, set the expectations ridiculously high. I’ll take the fall on this one. Sorry everybody, my bad. I started telling clients that using this, they would get this, and not this.

Solution: One WYSIWYG to rule them all (There was a point to this post)

WYMeditor In my opinion, this one is the only wysiwyg that makes me not want to abandon them entirely. Namely, for the ability to set predefined classes so your users can pick the different styles from a list, but have no control over futzing them or inventing new ones. And yea, it’s got the bare minimum toolbar that resembles Word 97. Because we got that on lock.

Who is this for? No, seriously, what user is using all the TinyMCE features? Or even half of them.

Real Solution: In 2nd grade, teach everyone Markdown instead of Cursive. #WeDontNeedNoPalmerMethod

OMFG markdown is so easy it hurts. In my opinion, people should be taught markdown in 2nd grade and HTML in 2nd and a half grade. That way, they’ve got a good 20 years of experience before they start causing mayhem in the real world.

This post was written in markdown, and it was delightful. Now back to alien Egypt.

</rant>

After two years working with the Jarvus crew at Devnuts, I’ve made the extremely tough decision to part ways and move on to something new. There’s been some tough challenges and some great successes. It’s been a wild ride. More than anything, I’m proud to have shared each day with some most excellent people.

We got to work with brands, big and small, and had a blast sponsoring some awesome events.

Why?

Ultimately, my reason for leaving relates to differences in management style between myself and my partners, and a general disagreement on a short term strategy for achieving our shared long-term vision. It happens in business, and it’s ok. I wish them the best of luck.

To all of my friends, colleagues, clients, and customers, it was a pleasure working with you all, and I look forward to working with you in some capacity in the future.

Onward

Moving forward, I’ll be working part-time on CreditScout, our film tax incentive software, and will be looking for the next challenge.

So it goes.

Barcamp Philly was Saturday and was aaaawesome. It was my first time, and I gotta say, I was really impressed with the people, the talks, and the amount of genuine participation from all of the attendees.

A New Age of Apprenticeship

I had the pleasure of helping out Brian Kirk from TechnicallyPhilly with a talk called “Re-imagining the public computer center.”

We got a lively discussion going about the purpose and use of government and privately sponsored computer centers, but quickly moved on to teaching styles and the shifting role of education. @jcyvii demonstrated how he uses Khan Academy to handle the wide range of math skill levels in his 7th grade class.

I think one of the main takeaways was that the availability of computers and technology to students is half the battle, and to make a difference, community leaders need to draw short term paths to long term goals for students to use the resources effectively. Furthermore, it’s up to us to define the role of education for future generations. I believe an apprenticeship renaissance is upon us. I’ll elaborate more in a future post.

#PhillyBurbWorking

Around 12:30pm I stumbled into a session titled “Rockin the Suburbs” hosted by Todd Hiestand. We started talking and quickly realized that we all shared a common need for a shared working experience in the suburbs. (I live in the city now, but I grew up in Lafayette Hill and have been shocked at the amount of resources that are idle in my hometown and surrounding areas.)

Since most people in the room are spread out around the greater Philly area, we acknowledged that opening a space isn’t the best short term approach, but rather, pick venues that can serve as greatest common denominators across the region. We ended up choosing the Plymouth Meeting area as a starting point.

Of course, the venue itself is not the only core component of a coworking experience, but instead, the community. I’m excited to be a part of it, and to see where we can take it.

We put together a few resources to pull us all together and keep everyone informed:

• @phillyburbwrkng
• #burbworking #phillyburbworking
• PhillyBurbWorking Google Group
• PhillyBurbWorking Calendar
• Philly Burbs Member Map

If you’re interested, get involved!

All in all, I had a great time, met a bunch of great people, and am I excited to do it again next year. Hopefully some photos to come(sober and not so sober). Technically Philly just posted a great wrap-up here as well.

Links:

• BarCampPhilly.org
• #bcphilly
• @barcamphilly

You’d think at that age I would have aspired to be something more sensational: astronaut, president, movie star… Nope, I wanted to drive a forklift. I wanted to load semis with pallets of board games. But, it wasn’t just forklifts that got me going, it was the bigger picture. It was commerce. It was business. It was the movement of products and money, in and out, day after day.

Now, it wasn’t the money or the greed or the power that excited me, it was the growth. I was so obsessed with watching things grow. Still am. Things like the Topsy Turvy excite me.

Why don’t you work in a warehouse now?

To be honest, a lot has changed since I was 5. My parents got our first computer in 1992, and my fixation with computers since then has had the most significant influence on the course of my life.

Over the years, I was obsessed with video games that involved economics. Here’s a few:

• Sim City 2000
• Castles II
• A-Train
• Theme Park
• Harvest Moon
• Cross Country USA (I liked this one so much that I made a one-player board game using a map, a toy truck, and some dice so I could play it offline)

These games taught me about the impact of economic decisions and the joy in the seemingly mundane. And that you have to make friends with gnomes, it’s the only way to get the golden axe.

I got into web development around 12. I picked up web dev not necessarily because I was particularly passionate about computers, but because it was a business opportunity with $0 cost of entry. That’s to say that if a warehouse was on the market with $0 down and $0/month, I would have been on that hard.

Stop glorifying idleness

Mike Rowe has it right. We’ve declared war on work. More specifically, we’ve declared war on unsexy jobs.

There’s a massive opportunity for software companies to create a new era of business applications. Not just another social media monitoring app. When I see apps like Chain.io, I smile. We need more of this.

Let’s make useful things again

There’s been some talk about stepping back from our obsession with creating consumer one-hit wonders, in lieu of making products that create long-lasting value. We don’t care that Facebook leaked an iPad version of their mobile app.

We need to get back to making software that improves life by optimizing supply chains, saving doctors from having to manually enter data from one system to another, or making it easier to manage a school. The current software offerings in each of the previous industries are embarrassingly bad. Like, “is only supported by Internet Explorer 6 and below” bad.

When you really think about it, it’s somewhat ridiculous that our best engineers work at places like Facebook and Goldman Sachs. I’m pretty damn capitalist, but we’ve got real-world problems to solve. I guess this post isn’t really just about software, but more about creating a rallying cry to go back to working on things that actually improve life rather than chase money just for money’s sake.

I’m not saying social networking and innovative financial services aren’t great things, but I’d put some other issues before them. Like technology that lowers distribution costs. Watch Modern Marvels - Containers, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s like we stopped caring about actually changing the world, and instead focussed on making things that let us talk about changing the world. Let’s start caring about real problems again.

If you’re not sure what I mean: these things are awesome

Takeaways

1. Kids need more games that focus on business and economics. They gave me a tremendous grasp of real-world problem solving at a really young age.
2. If what you’re working on involves a check-in, a daily deal, or an angry bird… is there something better you could be doing?

P.S. I just realized that I’m writing this at Devnuts, which actually is a warehouse, so, I guess, WIN.