Here’s a thoughtful and insightful post by Jen Mylo on negativity and meanness in online communities.
Category Archives: Ethics and Values
Sidestepping the Debate About Quotas
Lately we’ve been having a discussion within the Seattle WordPress Meetup about how to be more inclusive, and welcome people who are traditionally under-represented or discouraged from participating in tech communities. During the discussion, Mark Root-Wiley linked to an article by Courtney Stanton where she describes how she was able to get women to represent […]
Maintaining Personal Integrity in Your Career
Barry Eisler asks some tough questions in this essay on journalistic integrity, and I think they can also be applied to working on the Web, or in any industry. I like to think of myself as having strong standards for what types of clients and projects I take on, but after reading the article, I’m left […]
Discouraging Trolls
Jeff Atwood wrote a fascinating article on different methods to use to discourage trolling on social websites, including some discussion of their ethical merits. I wasn’t aware of slowbanning and hellbanning before, but I think they’re very clever ideas.
Success in Business
Here’s a great quote from Jeff Atwood’s post on why he decided to step back from Stack Exchange:
I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.
Pushing Back Against Unreasonable Employer Demands
I just read a good article on work/life balance from Kendall Guillemette. It’s encouraging to hear others in the industry pushing back against the sense of entitlement many employers have regarding our time (which is to say, our lives). I think the 40-hour work week was one of the most important advances of the labor movement, […]
Another Obtuse Attempt to Control the Internet
Check out Mark Jaquith’s post on the PROTECT IP Act for a basic rundown on why it’s bad and what you can do to help stop it.
What Really Motivates Us
Dan Pink’s talk at RSA presents some really interesting ideas about what really motivates people to work. Contrary to popular opinion among management, mainstream studies reveal that people don’t really care about making more money, as long as they have enough to meet their basic needs. What really drives us is mastering our craft, having autonomy […]
Re-Abolish Slavery Ribbon
I just released a new WordPress plugin into the repository that raises awareness about modern-day slavery by adding a “Re-Abolish Slavery” ribbon to WordPress sites. It’s running on this site, so you can see a live example by looking in the upper-right hand corner. The ribbon links to the Not For Sale campaign, which is […]
The Internet Was Built on Open Principles
“The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles… If we want to track what government is doing, see what companies are doing, understand the true state of the planet, find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, not to mention easily share our photos with our friends, we the public, the […]
Patent Trolling
NPR has a really good article on the absurd state of patents in the U.S. ” ‘We’re at a point in the state of intellectual property where existing patents probably cover every behavior that’s happening on the Internet or our mobile phones today,’ says Chris Sacca, the venture capitalist. ‘[T]he average Silicon Valley start-up or […]
Open Source Values Reflected in Version Numbering
“In the closed-source world, Version 1.0 means ‘Don’t touch this if you’re prudent.’; in the open-source world it reads something more like ‘The developers are willing to bet their reputations on this.’ ”
– Eric Raymond, How Fine a Gift?
Excessive SEO is Ruining Google Search
Sadly, I have to completly agree with Jeff Atwood’s assessment of the recent decline in the quality of Google search results:
People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment — Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO’ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.
W3Schools Isn’t Official or Accurate
Divya Manian gave a presentation yesterday at WordCamp Seattle about generating proper markup when creating output from plugins, and she mentioned a site called W3Fools.com, which is basically a protest against W3Schools.com. I didn’t realize until I saw W3Fools, but W3Schools isn’t actually ran by the W3C, and it contains a lot of inaccurate information. […]
Why Cube Farms are a Bad Idea
Campaign Monitor’s blog has a post about their new office space, and in it they write about several reasons why private offices are necessary for programmers, including this quote from Paul Graham: “After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to […]
The Good, Bad and Ugly of SEO Methods
I agree with a lot of what Derek Powazek wrote about the SEO industry in Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists. His main gist is that the good SEO techniques — like using tags that match the semantics of the content and setting up 301 redirects when pages move — should just be considered good development practices, and […]