#distill13

[distill13-blog]

KEYNOTE SESSION - Michael Lopp

Michael Lopp is a director at Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley software company dedicated to radicalizing the way the world interacts with data. Before joining Palantir, Lopp was part of the senior leadership team at Apple for nine years where he led essential parts of the Mac OS X engineering team, and subsequently managed the engineering team responsible for Apple’s Online Store. Prior to Apple, he worked in engineering leadership at notable Silicon Valley companies such as Netscape, Symantecand Borland. Lopp is a noted author in Silicon Valley; his blog, “Rands In Repose,” and his books, Managing Humans and Being Geek, are part of a new management and engineering canon.

  NOTES:

Shows picture of 20 different types of power plugs around the world and a map talking about how this is a mess

Then shows the 30 pin apple plug asks for a show of hands and talks about the change to the new cable

Stables and Volatiles

Wrote Managing Humans and Being Geek

"You're in a hurry"

   - we get bored.

   - we are three years away from a new job/position

   - once you learn everything and optimize

"Your gig has an expiration date"

   - if you can't see to the next new part of your role, then it's time to move

"1.0 is going to kill you"

   - endless trivial bullshit and decisions that have to be made

"Disruption"

   - now a marketing term

   - has been happening in the valley for a long time - went from farms and vineyards to 3 million super high nerd density in 50 years

william shockley

   - invented the transistor (nobel prize winner)

   - brought people together in a garage in palo alto

   - was a terrible human being and a racist

   - traiterous 8 (founded fairchild semiconductor and intel)

These guys defined the egalitarian workplace

   - no dress code

   - flat no titles

   - stock options for employees

   - "they're the reason you're here wearing flip flops"

"push decision making decisions out to the edges"

engineers as a demographic are risk takers

   - we know failure is an excellent way to learn

Archetypes and Spectrum

     Stephen story - comes in says there's no way to accomplish something

       - brought people together and jumpstarted the org and accomplished something in 3 weeks, but there was lots of duct tape and then it eventually came crumbling down

       - Stephen is a volatile

   Stables

       - like schedules.   like stability

       - play nice with others

       - value no drama teams and effeciency

       - calmly assess risk

       - generate a lot of process because it generates predictability

       - salience in decision making.  tendency to pick the middle of the road given the input data

Volatiles

     - prefer to define strategy than follow it

     - want to believe that they control their destiny

     - cannot conceive of failing and find a thrill in risk

     - don't build predictable or stable things but build a lot

     - only reliable if it's in their best interest

         - management of volatiles requires putting things into their context

     -  prefer to work in small autonomous teams

     - don't care how you feel

          - is that person's feelings more important than these other 26 things?

          - have to clean up the wake of unhappy people they leave behind

     - will choose the flying toaster when given the options of toasters

Guys who made the flying toaster screen saver eventually created moveon.org

Allergic Reactions

    - These guys and gals hate each other ( Larry disagrees)

   - volatiles believes stables are slow, lazy, and political bureaucrats.

   - stables believe volatiles will do whatever they want.

   - "Everyone's right. Sigh"

   - You need to build a place where they BOTH THRIVE.

The reward for shipping 1.0 can be a curse.

   - Borland (phillipe kahn - volatile  - eventually invented the camera phone)

   - Netscape ( Marc andressen - volatile)

   - Apple ( Steve Jobs)

   - Volatiles can become stables

        - volatiles want to protect the thing that was so hard to build (1.0)

        - this can be dangerous

        - company stops being innovative

Oracle/IBM/HP = yard sale of mediocrity

   - they're coasting and making money, but they're not willing to take big risks

Borland fell apart

Netscape bought by AOL ("fate worse than death")

Apple

   - barely survived in 97 but still kicking

DO YOU WANT FLYING TOASTERS?

Back to the 30pin vs. the new cable

Why did we go "WHAT?" when we saw the cable.

Is apple a bunch of greedy bastards?

Steve Jobs was willing to kill the ipod mini when demand still outweighed supply and was the #1 consumer electronics product

MBP removed replaceable battery

   - gave away the battery business so they could learn about lion polymer battery and move forward

apple does not want to become stable

you need both.

stables bring credibility and predictability to your execution.

volatiles

   - someone who knows nothing lasts and considers it their mission in life to replace that which is inefficient, boring, and uninspired.

build a world where they can both thrive

   - build appreciation of the other side of the fence

   - throw away things tyou cherish

  - distribute blank slates (at palantir gives small teams 3 months to do whatever they want)

   - equal representation of - and investment in sboth groups

  - stagnation == death

back to the power plugs

   - it's the result of uncoordinated decision making (not enough volatile)

Q&A:

how does a volatile "kick a stable in the ass" in an academic setting?

   - Lopp says university is broken, and it's BS

   - doesn't see it as a place that cultivates creativity

reiterates that volatiles and stables are equally important and should be rewarded comparably.

[distill13-blog]

ANTI-SPAM & ANTI-GAMING TACTICS

Drawing on experiences of running large websites (such as digg.com) and blogs, this session will discuss numerous tactics that you can use to keep spammers and website gamers at bay. Some specific technologies and how to interface with them will be mentioned, but also generic discussions of base theory, that you can use to apply to your own website where you see fit.

BIO

Eli has been building Web Applications for over 18 years and has worked on numerous high profile projects, such as Digg, TripAdvisor, and the Hubble Space Telescope Program. He is currently a Founding Partner & CTO of Musketeers.me, and the Managing Editor of php|architect magazine. He is also an avid writer (blogs, articles and books), and has spoken at numerous conferences.

NOTES:

Anti-spam

Create hurdles

  - moderate(requires lots of employee time but works very well)

  - require login (stops most basic issues and has benefits later on)

Prove that the poster is human

   - CSRF Protection

         extra steps for scripts

   - CAPTCHA - very effective but intrusive

   - Require user agent

        - i don't think this works anymore

   - CSS hidden field

        - Larry likes 

        - form that should be empty that only a bot would populate

    Require Javascript

        - use javascript to generate the form so only a browser that executes js will be able to see the form.

        - or only have divs and make the divs handle onclick events

        - or have javascript generate a math problem and its answer (or any element in the form) and only accept the submission if that field is present

IP - Based Methods

Public blacklists

Your own blacklist

   - bans should be temporary

Perishable press blacklist

   - apache htaccess file that scans headers, parts of ips, and known bad user agents and known scripts.  

   - very few false positives

Scan for Junk

Akismet, spamassassin, antispambee, mollom,

Make SPAM less advantageous to spammers

rel="nofollow" on all UGC links.  This means google page rank not improved for both good and bad UGC.

Disallow links completely

    ANTI- GAMING

Prove they are Human

Captcha/csrf/user agent

   - same tricks as anti-spam for the same reason

Rate limiting 

   - kept the data in the php session (times of last 5 clicks. measure distance between the first click and the last click in time)

Check the source

User

    lots of activity on a single account.  lots of users with little history

IP

   - lots of activity from a single IP

Refer

   - lots of activity from non-destination pages from a single refer or not containing referrer

Pattern Matching

Friendships?

  -use both internal and external user graph data to determine realism of actions

Order of actions

   are actions always happening in the same exact order? BOT.

Timing of actions

   Happening too fast.  Happening in very regular intervals.

Leave Traps

Leave cookies to catch people generating multiple accounts

    - don't clear this other cookie on log out

How do you handle offenders?

You can make it look like it worked.

You can blatantly deny actions

Is it silently deleted?

Karma concept

Beware of malleable content!

   - people will change it afterwards

  Very useful lecture says Larry

[orangephotosf]

The Orange team at #distill13 (at Winery SF)

[distill13-blog]

Open Sourcing Mental Illness by Ed Finkler

OPEN SOURCING MENTAL ILLNESS

In the spirit of open source, I’d like to shine a spotlight on depression. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s important. Mental illness affects many of us, but the stigma attached to it dissuades most people from talking about it openly. That’s not how we make progress. With this talk, I want to do my part.

I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety when I was thirteen, and I’ve been struggling with it my whole life. In this talk, I’ll discuss how it has impacted my work as a developer, husband, and father.

By speaking openly about my own challenges and successes, I hope those struggling with mental illness will learn how to be happier and more productive, and others can better understand how to be helpful and supportive.

BIO

With over 15 years of passionate web development experience and open source advocacy, Ed Finkler loves empowering people through technology. He’s excited about creating things and sharing them with the world.

He served as web lead and security researcher at The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University for 9 years. More recently, he has been helping startup teams build exciting e-commerce, social sharing, and mapping systems. He’s a proud member of the Fictive Kin team, working on Done Not Done, Gimme Bar, and lots of other cool stuff. Along with Chris Hartjes, Ed is co-host of the Development Hell podcast.

Ed spends much of his free time creating and working on open source projects such as Spaz, a long-running, award winning microblogging client. Ed also created the PHP libraries like FUnit, Resty.php, PHPSecInfo, and Inspekt.

NOTES:

Ed has generalized anxiety disorder

   - gets stressed out about things in a way that is crippling and affects his ability to interact with things

   - depression is a part of this

   - Adult ADD

Intensity of emotion

   loss of temper, screaming at people, feeling intensity, takes a lot of strength to not act on it

Anxiety

   it's not like your anxiety about a job interview or mondays.

   it's your brain feeding stress response stuff to your body and there's not much you can do about it but it's disabling

   feels like a rope pulling out the bottom of the sternum

   can have physiological impacts (IBS) - body isn't used to those chemicals

Problems focusing

Spiraling chains of thoughts

    can jump to the worst conclusions of one thought after the other 

    can construct outcomes very rapidly

    Internalizing that feeds into it, talking about it helps

Obsessing on negative events

   still thinks back about negative events that occurred 30 years ago that had no material impact on his life and obsesses on the guilt or negative emotion

Unwanted thoughts

   Maria Banford comedy set http://www.comedycentral.com/comedians/maria-bamford

Negative Major Impacts:

   Feeling alone/unlike anyone else

   Feeling broken and don't know how to fix it

   Suicidal thoughts and self-mutilation

Anxiety + Depression raise your mortality rate

   Emotional isolation is comparable to smoking in affect on life expectancy

Ideas to help:

Working with teams who are understanding and sympathetic to the situation

Helping friends & coworkers:

   help them feel safe

   Listen to them, try to understand

   Acknowledge their frustration

   help them anticipate changes. Help them plan.  Ask them what they need to facilitate the change for them. 

   Encourage & enable them to seek help. 

If you want to help:

   - talk and share

funakatron.com/osmi

END THE STIGMA. 

Q&A

adderall vs. strattera

   - like speed vs. not speed

   - cut appetite and gave energy

   - after a few weeks left with anxiety but would never advocate for one drug over another

Things that you would change if you could do childhood again?

   - Somebody to talk to: tell a child with similar mental illness that "there's nothing wrong with you"

   - bullied a lot in jr. high and feels that it's a severe trauma

   - typically you have to go through 3 or 4 seriously stressful events to convert from someone with a propensity for depression to actually be affected

Birds of a Feather meet ups 

   - a place for people to talk about what they are going through

devpressed.com

funkatron.com

[distill13-blog]

Realigning & Refactoring UI Best Practices

REALIGNING & REFACTORING UI

Often designers and developers see Markup and CSS Refactoring as a dreaded, monolithic task. Organization, architecture, clean up, optimization, documentation all seem tedious and overwhelming. However, if you're armed with the right tools and a solid foundation, you may find refactoring to be actually quite fun. Learn some Sass, markup, and documentation tips & tricks from a product designer's perspective. Start making refactoring a regular part of your design process and development workflows.

BIO

Jina Bolton enjoys creating beautiful user experiences. She currently works as a product designer at Do, an awesome company that helps you get work done. Previously, Jina has worked at rad companies including Apple, Engine Yard, and Crush + Lovely. She also coauthored 2 books, Fancy Form Design and The Art & Science of CSS.

She is currently helping lead Team Sass Design (a task force redesigning the Sass website) and Susy Next, the upcoming version of the Susy Responsive Grid system for Compass. She also has a side project, Art in My Coffee, a curated gallery of coffee art.

NOTES

Think about the entire lifecycle, as a set of systems, not a set of pages.

Build a styleguide in the same codebase and use it as a test for your CSS changes

   - There are styleguide generators (try styledocco)

fractured process -> fractured UX

Use SASS

Book recommendation Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS

Don't nest more than 3 levels in your SASS

SUSY is good for grid layouts

Compass for SASS and mixins

Try bordoer-box sizing at a top level

Use normalize (not old-school reset)

Keep different kinds of components organized in different sass modules (like buttons/forms/etc)

Make your SASS file a template and inject debug styles in debug mode

Make a UI library

   -Start with styles, eventually include DOM and more

Color files with color variables for color pallet

SASSME is a good tool for sass + colors

Check out Starbucks styleguide

Use iframes to test responsive design

@jina 

[larryatdistill]

I will be attempting to liveblog

from my laptop.

using this tumblr.