Journal tags: anniversary

I went to codebar Brighton yesterday evening. I hadn’t been in quite a while, but this was a special occasion: a celebration of codebar Brighton’s tenth anniversary!

The Brighton chapter of codebar was the second one ever, founded six months after the initial London chapter. There are now 33 chapters all around the world.

Clearleft played host to that first ever codebar in Brighton. We had already been hosting local meetups like Async in our downstairs event space, so we were up for it when Rosa, Dot, and Ryan asked about having codebar happen there.

In fact, the first three Brighton codebars were all at 68 Middle Street. Then other places agreed to play host and it moved to a rota system, with the Clearleft HQ as just one of the many Brighton venues.

With ten years of perspective, it’s quite amazing to see how many people went from learning to code in the evenings, to getting jobs in web development, and becoming codebar coaches themselves. It’s a really wonderful community.

Over the years the baton of organising codebar has been passed on to a succession of fantastic people. These people are my heroes.

It worked out well for Clearleft too. Thanks to codebar, we hired Charlotte. Later we hired Cassie. And it was thanks to codebar that I first met Amber.

Codebar Brighton has been very, very good to me. Here’s to the next ten years!

On this day twenty years ago I wrote the first entry in my online journal. In the intervening two decades I’ve written a further 2,817 entries.

I am now fifty years old, which means I’ve been blogging for two fifths of my lifetime.

My website has actually been around for longer than twenty years, but its early incarnations had no blog. That all changed when I relaunched the site on September 30th, 2001.

I wrote at the time:

I’m not quite sure what I will be saying here over the coming days, weeks, months and years.

Honestly I still feel like that.

I think it’s safe to assume an “anything goes” attitude for what I post here. Being a web developer, there’s bound to be lots of geeky, techy stuff but I also want a place where I can rant and rave about life in general.

That’s been pretty true, although I feel that maybe there’s been too much geeky stuff and not enough about everything else in my life.

I’ll try and post fairly regularly but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep. Hopefully, I’ll be updating the journal on a daily basis.

I made no promises but I think I’ve done a pretty good job. Many’s the blogger who has let the weeds grow over their websites as they were lured by the siren song of centralised social networks. I’m glad that I’ve managed to avoid that fate. It feels good to look back on twenty years of updates posted on my own domain.

Anyway, let’s see what happens. I hope you’ll like it.

I hope you still like it.

Here are some of my handpicked highlights from the past twenty years of blogging:

• Hyperdrive, April 20th, 2007

  Last night in San Francisco.

• Design doing, November 11, 2007

  The opposite of design thinking.

• Iron Man and me, December 1st, 2008

  The story of how one of my Flickr pictures came to be used in a Hollywood movie.

• Seams, May 12th, 2014

  There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

• Web! What is it good for?, May 28th, 2015

  Not absolutely nothing, but not absolutely everything either.

• Split, April 10th, 2019

  Materials and tools; client and server; declarative and imperative; inclusion and privilege.

On June 3rd, 2001, I launched thesession.org. Happy twentieth birthday to The Session!

Although actually The Session predates its domain name by a few years. It originally launched as a subdirectory here on adactio.com with the unwieldly URL /session/session.shtml

That incarnation was more like a blog. I’d post the sheetmusic for a tune every week with a little bit of commentary. That worked fine until I started to run out of tunes. That’s when I made the site dynamic. People could sign up to become members of The Session. Then they could also post tunes and add comments.

That’s the version that is two decades old today.

The last really big change to the site happened in 2012. As well as a complete redesign, I introduced lots of new functionality.

In all of those incarnations, the layout was fluid …long before responsive design swept the web. That was quite unusual twenty years ago, but I knew it was the webby thing to do.

What’s also unusual is just keeping a website going for twenty years. Keeping a community website going for twenty years is practically unheard of. I’m very proud of The Session. Although, really, I’m just the caretaker. The site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made.

I’ve more or less adopted a Wikipedia model for contributions. Some things, like tune settings, can only be edited by the person who submitted it But other things, like the track listing of a recording, or the details of a session, can be edited by any member of the site. And of course anyone can add a comment to any listing. There’s a certain amount of risk to that, but after testing it for two decades, it’s working out very nicely.

What’s really nice is when I get to meet my fellow members of The Session in meatspace. If I’m travelling somewhere and there’s a local session happening, I always get a warm welcome. I mean, presumably everyone would get a warm welcome at those sessions, but I’ve also had my fair share of free pints thanks to The Session.

I feel a great sense of responsibility with The Session. But it’s not a weight of responsibility—the way that many open source maintainers describe how their unpaid labour feels. The sense of responsibility I feel drives me. It gives me a sense of purpose.

The Session is older than any client work I’ve ever done. It’s older than any books I’ve written. It’s even older than Clearleft by a few years. Heck, it’s even older than this blog (just).

I’m 50 years old now. The Session is 20 years old. That’s quite a chunk of my life. I think it’s fair to say that it’s part of me now. Of all the things I’ve made so far in my life, The Session is the one I’m proudest of.

I’m looking forward to stewarding the site through the next twenty years.

March 2020 was the month when the coronavirus really hit the fan for much of Europe and North America.

It’s now March 2021. People are understandably thinking about this time last year. Tantek wrote about this anniversary:

We reached our disembarkation stop and stepped off. I put my mask away. We hugged and said our goodbyes. Didn’t think it would be the last time I’d ride MUNI light rail. Or hug a friend without a second thought.

I recently added an “on this day” page to my site. Now that page is starting to surface events from this time last year.

Today, for example, is the one year anniversary of the last talk I gave in a physical space. Myself and Remy travelled to Nottingham to give our talk, How We Built The World Wide Web In Five Days.

The next morning, before travelling back to Brighton (where we’ve been ever since), we had breakfast together in a nice café.

I wrote:

Eating toast with @Rem.

Usually when I post toast updates, it’s a deliberate attempt to be banal. It harks back to the early criticism of blogging as just being people sharing what they’re having for lunch.

But now I look back at that little update and it seems like a momentous event worth shouting from the rooftops. Breaking bread with a good friend? What I wouldn’t give to do that again!

I can’t wait until I can be together with my friends again, doing utterly ordinary things together. To “wallow in the habitual, the banal” as the poet Patrick Kavanagh put it.

I miss hanging out with Tantek. I miss hanging out with Remy. I miss hanging out.

But I’m looking forward to being in a very different situation in March 2022, when I can look back at this time as belonging to a different era.

Between now and then, there’ll be a gradual, bumpy, asynchronous reintroduction of the everyday social pleasures. I won’t take them for granted. I’ll be posting about toast and other everyday occurrences “wherever life pours ordinary plenty.”

Clearleft turned fifteen this year. We didn’t make a big deal of it. What with The Situation and all, it didn’t seem fitting to be self-congratulatory. Still, any agency that can survive for a decade and a half deserves some recognition.

Cassie marked the anniversary by designing and building a beautiful timeline of Clearleft’s history.

Here’s a post I wrote 15 years ago:

Most of you probably know this already, but I’ve joined forces with Andy and Richard. Collectively, we are known as Clearleft.

I didn’t make too much of a big deal of it back then. I think I was afraid I’d jinx it. I still kind of feel that way. Fifteen years of success? Beginner’s luck.

Despite being one of the three founders, I was never an owner of Clearleft. I let Andy and Rich take the risks and rewards on their shoulders while I take a salary, the same as any other employee.

But now, after fifteen years, I am also an owner of Clearleft.

So is Trys. And Cassie. And Benjamin. And everyone else at Clearleft.

Clearleft is now owned by an employee ownership trust. This isn’t like owning shares in a company—a common Silicon Valley honeypot. This is literally owning the company. Shares are transferable—this isn’t. As long as I’m an employee at Clearleft, I’m a part owner.

On a day-to-day basis, none of this makes much difference. Everyone continues to do great work, the same as before. The difference is in what happens to any profit produced as a result of that work. The owners decide what to do with that profit. The owners are us.

In most companies you’ve got a tension between a board representing the stakeholders and a union representing the workers. In the case of an employee ownership trust, the interests are one and the same. The stakeholders are the workers.

It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out. Check back again in fifteen years.

Today marks ten years since the publication of HTML5 For Web Designers, the very first book from A Book Apart.

I’m so proud of that book, and so honoured that I was the first author published by the web’s finest purveyors of brief books. I mean, just look at the calibre of their output since my stumbling start!

Here’s what I wrote ten years ago.

Here’s what Jason wrote ten years ago.

Here’s what Mandy wrote ten years ago.

Here’s what Jeffrey wrote ten years ago.

They started something magnificent. Ten years on, with Katel at the helm, it’s going from strength to strength.

Happy birthday, little book! And happy birthday, A Book Apart! Here’s to another decade!

I woke up in Geneva. The celebrations to mark the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web were set to begin early in the morning.

It must be said, March 12th 1989 is kind of an arbitrary date. Maybe the date that the first web page went online should mark the birth of the web (though the exact date might be hard to pin down). Or maybe it should be August 6th, 1991—the date that Tim Berners-Lee announced the web to the world (well, to the alt.hypertext mailing list at least). Or you could argue that it should be April 30th, 1993, the date when the technology of the web was officially put into the public domain.

In the end, March 12, 1989 is as good a date as any to mark the birth of the web. The date that Tim Berners-Lee shared his proposal. That’s when the work began.

Exactly thirty years later, myself, Martin, and Remy are registered and ready to attend the anniversay event in the very same room where the existence of the Higgs boson was announced. There’s coffee, and there are croissants, but despite the presence of Lou Montulli, there are no cookies.

The doors to the auditorium open and we find some seats together. The morning’s celebrations includes great panel discussions, and an interview with Tim Berners-Lee himself. In the middle of it all, they show a short film about our hack week recreating the very first web browser.

It was surreal. There we were, at CERN, in the same room as the people who made the web happen, and everyone’s watching a video of us talking about our fun project. It was very weird and very cool.

Afterwards, there was cake. And a NeXT machine—the same one we had in the room during our hack week. I feel a real attachment to that computer.

We chatted with lots of lovely people. I had the great pleasure of meeting Peggie Rimmer. It was her late husband, Mike Sendall, who gave Tim Berners-Lee the time (and budget) to pursue his networked hypertext project. Peggie found Mike’s copy of Tim’s proposal in a cupboard years later. This was the copy that Mike had annotated with his now-famous verdict, “vague but exciting”. Angela has those words tattooed on her arm—Peggie got a kick out of that.

Eventually, Remy and I had to say our goodbyes. We had to get to the airport to catch our flight back to London. Taxi, airport, plane, tube; we arrived at the Science Museum in time for the evening celebrations. We couldn’t have been far behind Tim Berners-Lee. He was making a 30 hour journey from Geneva to London to Lagos. We figured seeing him at two out of those three locations was plenty.

By the end of the day we were knackered but happy. The day wasn’t all sunshine and roses. There was a lot of discussion about the negative sides of the web, and what could be improved. A lot of that was from Sir Tim itself. But mostly it was a time to think about just how transformative the web has been in our lives. And a time to think about the next thirty years …and the web we want.

The first ten minutes of my talk at An Event Apart Seattle consisted of me geeking about science fiction. There was a point to it …I think. But I must admit it felt quite self-indulgent to ramble to a captive audience about some of my favourite works of speculative fiction.

The meta-narrative I was driving at was around the perils of prediction (and how that’s not really what science fiction is about). This is something that Arthur C. Clarke pointed out repeatedly, most famously in Hazards of Prophecy. Ironically, I used Clarke’s meisterwork of a collaboration with Stanley Kubrick as a rare example of a predictive piece of sci-fi with a good hit rate.

When I introduced 2001: A Space Odyssey in my talk, I mentioned that it was fifty years old (making it even more of a staggering achievement, considering that humans hadn’t even reached the moon at that point). What I didn’t realise at the time was that it was fifty years old to the day. The film was released in American cinemas on April 2nd, 1968; I was giving my talk on April 2nd, 2018.

Over on Wired.com, Stephen Wolfram has written about his own personal relationship with the film. It’s a wide-ranging piece, covering everything from the typography of 2001 (see also: Typeset In The Future) right through to the nature of intelligence and our place in the universe.

When it comes to the technology depicted on-screen, he makes the same point that I was driving at in my talk—that, despite some successful extrapolations, certain real-world advances were not only unpredicted, but perhaps unpredictable. The mobile phone; the collapse of the soviet union …these are real-world events that are conspicuous by their absence in other great works of sci-fi like William Gibson’s brilliant Neuromancer.

But in his Wired piece, Wolfram also points out some acts of prediction that were so accurate that we don’t even notice them.

Also interesting in 2001 is that the Picturephone is a push-button phone, with exactly the same numeric button layout as today (though without the * and # [“octothorp”]). Push-button phones actually already existed in 1968, although they were not yet widely deployed.

To use the Picturephone in 2001, one inserts a credit card. Credit cards had existed for a while even in 1968, though they were not terribly widely used. The idea of automatically reading credit cards (say, using a magnetic stripe) had actually been developed in 1960, but it didn’t become common until the 1980s.

I’ve watched 2001 many, many, many times and I’m always looking out for details of the world-building …but it never occurred to me that push-button numeric keypads or credit cards were examples of predictive extrapolation. As time goes on, more and more of these little touches will become unnoticeable and unremarkable.

On the space shuttle (or, perhaps better, space plane) the cabin looks very much like a modern airplane—which probably isn’t surprising, because things like Boeing 737s already existed in 1968. But in a correct (at least for now) modern touch, the seat backs have TVs—controlled, of course, by a row of buttons.

Now I want to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey again. If I’m really lucky, I might get to see a 70mm print in a cinema near me this year.

I wrote my first tweet ten years ago.

I’m off to grab some lunch.

— Jeremy Keith (@adactio) November 1, 2006

That’s the tweetiest of tweets, isn’t it? (and just look at the status ID—only five digits!)

Of course, back then we didn’t call them tweets. We didn’t know what to call them. We didn’t know what to make of this thing at all.

I say “we”, but when I signed up, there weren’t that many people on Twitter that I knew. Because of that, I didn’t treat it as a chat or communication tool. It was more like speaking into the void, like blogging is now. The word “microblogging” was one of the terms floating around, grasped by those of trying to get to grips with what this odd little service was all about.

Twenty days after I started posting to Twitter, I wrote about how more and more people that I knew were joining :

The usage of Twitter is, um, let’s call it… emergent. Whenever I tell anyone about it, their first question is “what’s it for?”

Fair question. But their isn’t really an answer. You send messages either from the website, your mobile phone, or chat. What you post and why you’d want to do it is entirely up to you.

I was quite the cheerleader for Twitter:

Overall, Twitter is full of trivial little messages that sometimes merge into a coherent conversation before disintegrating again. I like it. Instant messaging is too intrusive. Email takes too much effort. Twittering feels just right for the little things: where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking.

“Twittering.” Don’t laugh. “Tweeting” sounded really silly at first too.

Now at this point, I could start reminiscing about how much better things were back then. I won’t, but it’s interesting to note just how different it was.

• The user base was small enough that there was a public timeline of all activity.
• The characters in your username counted towards your 140 characters. That’s why Tantek changed his handle to be simply “t”. I tried it for a day. I think I changed my handle to “jk”. But it was too confusing so I changed it back.
• We weren’t always sure how to write our updates either—your username would appear at the start of the message, so lots of us wrote our updates in the third person present (Brian still does). I’m partial to using the present continuous. That was how I wrote my reaction to Chris’s weird idea for tagging updates.

Thinking that hashtags disrupt the reading flow of natural language. Sorry @factoryjoe.

— Jeremy Keith (@adactio) November 6, 2007

I think about that whenever I see a hashtag on a billboard or a poster or a TV screen …which is pretty much every day.

At some point, Twitter updated their onboarding process to include suggestions of people to follow, subdivided into different categories. I ended up in the list of designers to follow. Anil Dash wrote about the results of being listed and it reflects my experience too. I got a lot of followers—it’s up to around 160,000 now—but I’m pretty sure most of them are bots.

There have been a lot of changes to Twitter over the years. In the early days, those changes were driven by how people used the service. That’s where the @-reply convention (and hashtags) came from.

Then something changed. The most obvious sign of change was the way that Twitter started treating third-party developers. Where they previously used to encourage and even promote third-party apps, the company began to crack down on anything that didn’t originate from Twitter itself. That change reflected the results of an internal struggle between the people at Twitter who wanted it to become an open protocol (like email), and those who wanted it to become a media company (like Yahoo). The media camp won.

Of course Twitter couldn’t possibly stay the same given its incredible growth (and I really mean incredible—when it started to appear in the mainstream, in films and on TV, it felt so weird: this funny little service that nerds were using was getting popular with everyone). Change isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just different. Your favourite band changed when they got bigger. South by Southwest changed when it got bigger—it’s not worse now, it’s just very different.

Frank described the changing the nature of Twitter perfectly in his post From the Porch to the Street:

Christopher Alexander made a great diagram, a spectrum of privacy: street to sidewalk to porch to living room to bedroom. I think for many of us Twitter started as the porch—our space, our friends, with the occasional neighborhood passer-by. As the service grew and we gained followers, we slid across the spectrum of privacy into the street.

I stopped posting directly to Twitter in May, 2014. Instead I now write posts on my site and then send a copy to Twitter. And thanks to the brilliant Brid.gy, I get replies, favourites and retweets sent back to my own site—all thanks to Webmention, which just become a W3C proposed recommendation.

It’s hard to put into words how good this feels. There’s a psychological comfort blanket that comes with owning your own data. I see my friends getting frustrated and angry as they put up with an increasingly alienating experience on Twitter, and I wish I could explain how much better it feels to treat Twitter as nothing more than a syndication service.

When Twitter rolls out changes these days, they certainly don’t feel like they’re driven by user behaviour. Quite the opposite. I’m currently in the bucket of users being treated to new @-reply behaviour. Tressie McMillan Cottom has written about just how terrible the new changes are. You don’t get to see any usernames when you’re writing a reply, so you don’t know exactly how many people are going to be included. And if you mention a URL, the username associated with that website may get added to the tweet. The end result is that you write something, you publish it, and then you think “that’s not what I wrote.” It feels wrong. It robs you of agency. Twitter have made lots of changes over the years, but this feels like the first time that they’re going to actively edit what you write, without your permission.

Maybe this is the final straw. Maybe this is the change that will result in long-time Twitter users abandoning the service. Maybe.

Me? Well, Twitter could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn’t mind that much. I’d miss seeing updates from friends who don’t have their own websites, but I’d carry on posting my short notes here on adactio.com. When I started posting to Twitter ten years ago, I was speaking (or microblogging) into the void. I’m still doing that ten years on, but under my terms. It feels good.

I’m not sure if my Twitter account will still exist ten years from now. But I’m pretty certain that my website will still be around.

And now, if you don’t mind…

I’m off to grab some lunch.

My site has been behaving strangely recently. It was nothing that I could put my finger on—it just seemed to be acting oddly. When I checked to see if everything was okay, I was told that everything was fine, but still, I sensed something that was amiss.

I’ve just realised what it was. Last week on the 30th of September, I didn’t do or say anything special. That was the problem. I had forgotten my blog’s anniversary.

I’m so sorry, adactio.com! Honestly, I had been thinking about it for all of September but then on the day, one thing led to another, I was busy, and it just completely slipped my mind.

So this is a bit late, but anyway …happy fifteenth anniversary to this journal!

We’ve been through a lot together in those fifteen years, haven’t we, /journal? Oh, the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen!

I remember where we were on our tenth anniversary: Bologna. Remember we were there for the first edition of the From The Front conference? Now, five years on, we’ve just been to the final edition of that same event—a bittersweet occasion.

Like I said five years ago:

It has been a very rewarding, often cathartic experience so far. I know that blogging has become somewhat passé in this age of Twitter and Facebook but I plan to keep on keeping on right here in my own little corner of the web.

I should plan something special for September 30th, 2021 …just to make sure I don’t forget.

This year marks quite a few decadal anniversaries. In 2005 I published my first book. I went to South by Southwest for the first time and, together with Andy, gave my first talk.

A few months later, the first ever UK web conference took place in London: @media. Most of the talks were about CSS, but I gave the token JavaScript talk, trying to convince people that they should try this much-maligned JavaScript stuff.

Here we are, ten years later and I’m still giving talks. Except now I’m trying to convince people to take it easy with the JavaScript.

My friend Jeffrey has been writing on his website for twenty years. There are very few things on the web that last that long. I’m very, very glad that his website is one of them.

I remember finding Zeldman.com—and Ask Dr. Web, and the Ad Graveyard—back when I was first “going online.” I remember being so grateful for his generosity, but I also remember that what really struck me was the warmth and humility in the writing.

My own website will turn twenty in another few years. I never would have started it if it weren’t for Jeffrey.

On this day ten years ago I started this journal. There had been a site at adactio.com before that but it was a silly DHTML brochureware thing. That changed when I wrote my first blog post:

I’m not quite sure what I will be saying here over the coming days, weeks, months and years.

Ten years later this journal contains a decade’s worth of notes-to-self. When somebody else finds what I’ve written to be interesting, that’s a bonus …but I’m writing for myself (or, if I do ever imagine somebody else reading this, I imagine someone just like me—a frightening thought).

It has been a very rewarding, often cathartic experience so far. I know that blogging has become somewhat passé in this age of Twitter and Facebook but I plan to keep on keeping on right here in my own little corner of the web. I’ve been blogging now for 25% of my life.

This journal is one quarter as old as I am.

This journal is half as old the web itself.

Here’s to the next ten years.

It was fifteen years ago today Sir Tim taught the planet to play.

What a short, strange trip it’s been. Here’s to the next fifteen years. Who knows what wonders they will bring?