Archive for December, 2005

Phew, it’s been a hectic but great week. I’m off to London in a few minutes to participate in the Yahoo! Europe Web Development Conference (where I’ll be presenting and co-presenting four sessions), but I wanted to report on some of the things from this past week while they’re still fresh.

On Monday I gave a presentation to our User Experience and Design group. I work in the Presentation Platform Engineering group, and part of my job is to help bridge between Design and Engineering. (Before joining the Platform Engineering team, I worked on the Platform Design team, so I can speak both languages to some extent.)

With so much changing in interface development this year, it’s important to coordinate the creation of a new vocabulary for rich internet interfaces. I’ll write more on this in the coming weeks, but you can check out Bill Scott’s blog post for his take on my talk, where he focuses on Storyboarding Interesting Moments, a part of what I talked about.

Though all the words didn’t flow as well as they do sometimes for me, the presentation was well received and generated some excellent discussion. Larry Tesler, our SVP of UED, was one of several that had some kind words for me afterward. I would be remiss if I didn’t pass most of the credit to Eric Miraglia, a colleague and great mind who’s been instrumental in developing our vision. (More on that from Eric, here.)

On Monday night, I joined Victor Tsaran (our Accessibility Product Manager) at a casual dinner of about a dozen Bay Area accessibility folks from Adobe, Macromedia, Apple, IBM and Sun. Over Italian in San Mateo, it was a great chance to meet others addressing the needs of accessibility community. This theme continued for the rest of the week.

On Wednesday, I went to the Mozilla Foundation, for a co-presentation between IBM’s Accessibility Architect Aaron Leventhal and Yahoo!’s Victor Tsaran. They discussed the IBM/Mozilla Accessible DHTML project, first supported in the new Firefox 1.5. It’s great stuff, and will be critical as the web moves to richer interfaces.

On Friday, Aaron presented a technical overview of the capabilities to a team of our engineers, answering questions and giving guidance to engineers investigating the “Accessible DHTML” approach.

Friday night I had dinner in Pac Heights at the beautiful home of a friend of a friend, a promenient SF lawyer. The prime rib was perfectly cooked, and we laughed quite a bit. The five-course meal and case of wine took the wind from my sails so I didn’t get around to packing at all last night. As soon as I finish typing this post I need to quickly pack — clothes are almost out of the dryer, and I need to leave for the airport in about 66 minutes.

Phew…

Can’t wait to be laying on the white sands of Culebra in two weeks, away from web and world. (We went last year too, and couldn’t resist going again. I don’t have a Ph.D., but it’s still suits me fine.)

My brother turns 25 today. Happy Birthday Peter.

My brother’s middle name is Lennon. He was born in 1980 on the day John Lennon was murdered.

At one point, my grandmother pulled my parents aside and verified that it was “L E N N O N”, not “L E N I N”. I always got a kick out of that.

It’s strange to me that a great person, Lennon, was taken from this world early, and at the same time my brother, another great person, was brought into this world.

Happy Birthday Peter. You’re the best brother I can Imagine.

As I’ve probably said before, one of the great things about working at Yahoo! is the external speakers routinely on campus. On Fridays, our Technology Development Group — some of the same folks behind Yahoo! Developer Network — hosts a weekly TechDev Speaker Series. Today’s speaker was John Battelle, the former Wired editor, Industry Standard founder, highly influential search industry blogger, and author of the new book, The Search.

He read some interesting passages, answered an very generous number of questions, and hung around to sign books. He definitely gave me a few things to think about, including a suggesting that we’re leaving the “poke” interface days (mouse clicks to ‘poke’ around an interface) and entering days of natural language interfaces, where words and concepts drive knowledge exploration.

I’m at work, sure, but it’s not a bad way to spend a Friday. (And I’m looking forward to Saturday too.)

Freelance, contract, full time… Startups, consultancies, big players… Remote and onsite… A day doesn’t go by lately that somebody doesn’t ask me, “do you know any web developers looking for work?”.

Are you a CSS stud with JS chops and a passion for semantic markup? If so, and if you’re interested in hearing about some of these gigs, feel free to shoot me an email at nate at koechley dot com or leave a comment on this post.

(I’m most familiar with web development / frontend engineering jobs, but if you’re looking for design, user experience or engineering work, I can keep you in mind for those too.)