To everyone #SpeakingUp: Thank you. Keep it up. To everyone else at tech confs: #WTF. We must speak up & act against anything resembling what's been described. We must confront it directly, *when* it happens, "even if [y]our voice shakes". Make it clear it is NOT ok. We must stand up for each other. We must fix this.
This post covers the second half of my speech, again with more details.
I mentioned earlier (in part 1) that I had the opportunity to watch Aaron become a brilliant hacker, and I wanted to say a few things about what that means.
A hacker is someone who passionately explores something, gains a deep understanding of it, pushes the limits of that knowledge, and then builds upon it.
Hacking is the essence of being a scientist, of being an engineer. Being a hacker is at the essence of advancing humanity.
The law that Aaron was bullied with was the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), sadly and ironically enacted the same year that Aaron Swartz was born (1986). The CFAA is ridiculously broad and has been used to harass individuals for a diverse set of actions such as:
Deleting files from your work computer before quitting (2006)
Disobeying a website TOS (terms of service) agreement (2008)
Increasing the capabilities of a computer you own beyond what it came with (2011)
Re-using contacts you happened to make while at a previous employer (2011)
And of course mass-downloading scientific journal articles on an open network (2011)
As the above list of recent cases demonstrates, the CFAA is an often abused and horribly obsolete law. Worst of all in my opinion, the CFAA criminalizes exploration and curiosity.
Curiosity is not a crime. Curiosity is at the heart of learning, education, and science (US math & science education lags behind several East Asian countries and some European nations).
I attended Aaron Swartz's memorial service at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and had the opportunity to speak a few anecdotes and encouragements. Still upset, angry, and sad about losing Aaron, I wanted to focus on the positive and the inspiring, because to me, that's who and what Aaron was, positive and inspiring. Half-written before, and half-completed this morning, here's part 1 of what I shared with more details as writing affords.
I met Aaron Swartz in early at the very first W3C Technical Plenary meeting in Boston. A young teen, he nonetheless deftly operated his brand new Titanium PowerBook G4 which seemingly dwarfed him. At the time I remember thinking, ok, this kid has to be smart, he apparently understands RDF.
I recall him making fun of me for then working at Microsoft, to which I think I jokingly challenged him to show me a more standards compliant browser than the Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh that ran on his laptop. We immediately connected in that way that geeks challenging each other do.
Also, I couldn't help but empathize, remembering when I was his age, surrounded by those twice as old or more, looking for fellow nerds to relate to. I got to watch Aaron become a brilliant hacker. I'll get back to that term in a moment [in part 2].
In late I encouraged him to participate in Technorati's first developers contest. By building PersonalDemocracy.com's "Hot Pols" and "Top 25 blogs" features using Technorati's API, Aaron handily won a runner up award. Yes, in 2004 he was already writing code that accessed aggregations of the people's voice (millions of blogs) to show which congresspersons were most discussed, most linked to.
We kept in touch often, and spent a bunch of time together at Foo Camp . This image from a spontaneous photo I then took is still what comes to mind when I think of Aaron. We carpooled back to San Francisco, and all I remember is how quickly it went by, our seemingly non-stop conversation intensely interesting the entire ride, often punctuated by his inspiring laughter.
The last personal anecdote I shared happened in . Thanks to danah boyd, we happened to gather in Dolores Park on a warm sunny February weekend afternoon, as San Franciscans often do, and argued and ranted about many things, as geeks often do. I'd been thinking a lot about user interfaces, cognitive load, efficiency, how much typical web interfaces, even email, were incredibly frustrating to use, and shared a few hypotheses for why that might be.
Hearing out my rants and proposed hypotheses, Aaron's response was a firm and vocal encouragement:
You should blog that!
If you knew Aaron, you know that in discussions he wouldn't hesitate to criticize any mistakes made, any logical flaws, no matter how small. So I knew when Aaron quickly confirmed my hypotheses that I should blog them. I did and it turned out to be one of my most popular posts (evhead, web2summit).
But the larger point here is that he turned a rant into a positive action. He challenged me to do something about it, to blog what I'd figured out, to provide a clear constructive encouragement instead of just a criticism.
No matter how much we argued, debated, or ranted, each of us challenged the other to do something constructive and productive about it, and that above all is what I remember about Aaron.
If you believe something passionately, you should blog that.
I will always remember you Aaron, with your positivity, and your encouragements.
I made a concerted effort to write more and better blog posts last year. Here are a dozen things I learned and/or put into practice that helped me do so. If one of your 2013 resolutions is to blog more, perhaps you'll find a few of these tips useful.
Single topic post. Think of each post as a building block that you might use as a reference in some other post. The more your post focuses on a single point (or a closely related set of points) the more reusable/citable it will be, both by others and your future writings.
Tweetable post title. Social media this, social media that. POSSE and distribute. Enough said.
Summary opening paragraph. This is a classic, but absolutely essential as attention spans shorten every year. Provide context but don't bore with background. Expand on your post title and let it be. If your topic is interesting, your readers will read on.
Put tangents aside. Use the HTML5 <aside> element to isolate tangent fragments or seeds of related topics and keep you (and your readers) focused on your post's single topic.
Quotable Tweetable sentences, sprinkled throughout. Use strong, self-supporting sentences as the start, end, or even as the entirety of a paragraph. Even better: quotable multi-sentence paragraphs.
Local text editor. There should be zero latency between your thoughts and your text. Online editors are still janky and/or have distracting excessive navigation & user interface. They're notorious for losing your data "in the cloud", touchy AJAX code (I'm looking at you, comment box in the Google+ Notification drop-down - why not keep drafts of all textareas?), or fragile page refreshing javascript, vulnerable to network glitches. Such uncertainty in an authoring user interface is like background noise: it distracts you from focusing and writing better. Using a local text editor greatly reduces (or eliminates) those distractions, delays, and doubts.
Lists are nice. Make and share lists. People like lists.
Subheadings help cluster related paragraphs and provide a skimmable (and linkable - use fragment ids) outline. Even in lists, keep the first phrase/sentence of a list item short, self-standing, and stylized.
"The Skirt Rule". Stop adding content when you've covered the topic and yet your post is still short enough to be interesting.
Edit furiously. Content is like interface: anything that's not helping your main point is distracting from it.
Use a footer for updates, terminology, previous writings, additional reading, and citations. Link-heavy hypertext is hard to read text. And distracting. Move definitions, citations, etc. to the footer unless including them inline either provides little risk of distraction or significantly helps reading flow. Use "Previously" text (or a section) to link to your previous posts on the topic (Jamie Zawinsky is particularly good at/about this). Use a "References" section for citations (including Wikipedia/Wiktionary expansions of any jargon) and an "Additional Reading" section for links to related articles.
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