techZING! 1 – Hello World

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Twitter Bayesian Filter, HTML 5, Canvas, Bespin, jQuery, Swfupload

This is the first episode of techZING! where Justin and Jason discuss the following:

• Is Twitter useful? There’s a high noise to signal ratio. Justin suggests that maybe a Bayesian filter like Paul Graham outlined in “A Plan for Spam” would work. Jason wants to like Twitter, but so far has only sent one twit (or is it tweet). At this point he just seems to find it a little confusing with the disjointed half-sentences.
• Justin wonders whether being able to filter for the users who post most frequently on a particular topic would make Twitter more useful. Jason poses the idea of applying Digg-like ratings to individual tweets as a way to solve the signal to noise problem.
• Justin tries out Stack OverFlow and gets his feelings hurt when a 21-year old kid with a lot of points down votes his answer to a jQuery question. As a result he wonders if it’s really the kind of community he wants to participate in. Jason suggests that maybe he’s being a little too sensitive.
• Jason mentions the Google Wave Demo given at the Google IO conference and expresses particular interest in the growing support for HTML 5 by Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera in spite of what Microsoft is doing with IE. Justin is impressed by what Mozilla Labs has done with Bespin in their use of the canvas element in creating an in-browser code editor. Justin thinks it’s amazingly responsive and that it has a much better feel than Flash-based editing.
• Jason describes how he and another developer wrote a custom in-browser text editor for Preezo without using the built-in browser editing provided by designMode and contentEditable (for IE). Instead they trapped every keystroke and mouse event and managed the entire editing process manually. He claims that it was their only choice if they wanted the editing process to work as well as it does in PowerPoint. Jason notes that it was the most difficult code he ever had to write. Justin is duly impressed.
• Jason mentions that for drawing Shapes in Preezo they wrote their own cross-browser graphics library that mapped to VML on IE and to SVG on Firefox and Safari. Justin asks whether they could map it to canvas as well. Jason says that in view of the growing support for canvas going forward he would just write to the canvas API and use the ExplorerCanvas Javascript library to convert canvas API calls to VML. He also thinks that the raster graphics of canvas is more generally useful that the vector graphics supported by SVG and VML.
• Justin wonders whether doing a startup indeed requires an entrepreneur to work 14 hours per day as Jason Calacanis claims, but Jason disagrees. He allows that what Calacanis says might be true for doing certain types of work, but that he find it’s difficult to be productive writing code for longer than about 8 hours per day without burning out.
• Justin finds the idea of extreme programming to be an intriguing approach to avoiding burn out. Jason agrees and says that it’s more fun and that you write better code with fewer bugs. Jason says that while he’s never done pair programming in a professional setting, he describes how he’s been pair programming for years with another developer located in Europe using Skype and Ultra VNC and finds it to be extremely productive. Jason wonders why you don’t hear more about people trying this.
• Justin asks whether you really need a physical office for a startup with all of the collaboration tools now available like Skype, VNC and web-based project management software. Jason doesn’t think it’s necessary and in fact would prefer to with the smartest people he can find that he enjoys working with regardless of where they might live, even if it’s in another country.
• How important is to have high quality office space for attracting talent? Justin recounts a story of how a company he once worked for was able to entice a top notch coder simply because they had table tennis. Jason thinks that if you want to attract the best people then you need to provide an environment where people want to spend their time. He tells a story of how his first startup had a great office at the center of a cool area of town (Old Pasadena, CA) and how much fun it was. He says that they were always at work because they enjoyed the space and location so much.
• Jason mentions that he once visited a 3D gaming engine company based out of a house in Sherman Oaks, CA, where developers were working in bedrooms, the living room and the dining room. Justin liked the idea a lot, but Jason thought it was kind of weird even if it was just because it was in Sherman Oaks (not that he has anything against Sherman Oaks).
• Is it important to be in the Valley in order to be able to find and work with smart people in the web startup space? Justin is concerned that it might be, but Jason isn’t convinced that it’s necessary and considers that it might actually work against you because you have to compete against other startups for talent.
• SWFUpload seems to be a great solution for uploading files and receiving dynamic client side updates (like progress complete). It’s powered by a hidden Flash control wrapped by a simple Javascript library. Jason mentions that he had previously looked at various PHP/Javascript only solutions, but found that they either didn’t work, wouldn’t scale or required installing some type of Apache extension. Justin mentions that jQuery provides support for Javascript file uploading, but doesn’t do quite what SWFUpload provides.