AlexAitken.net

Guiding slides for the hour-long presentation on ‘What is jQuery’ that I’ve been giving to backend teams.

It’s a fun thing to be at the fore­front of a lan­guage/tech­no­logy re­volu­tion. I’m al­ways a little amazed at how the JavaS­cript I began cod­ing ten years ago has turned in to one of the corner­stones of my ca­reer. MBAs and years on con­sensus build­ing are one thing, but it’s this lan­guage that truly brings my design work to life, from its pro­to­typ­ing stages to its full pro­duc­tion de­ploy­ment. And while I’ve forged deep­er and deep­er un­der its hood, JavaS­cript has im­plic­ated it­self fur­ther and fur­ther in mod­ern de­vel­op­ment prac­tices. JSConf 2011 brought most of the thought lead­ers re­spons­ible for this im­plic­a­tion to­geth­er for two days in Port­land, OR, in­duc­ted oth­ers in to the circle, and hummed throughout with young, fresh, en­ergy and ideas de­voted to the stand­ards lan­guage mak­ing today’s web hop. Notes on the sum­mit:

Al­most all ap­plicatons we in­ter­act with on the web are form driv­en. User-sup­plied data in; sys­tem con­clu­sion out. To be sure, a dec­ade plus of ex­per­i­en­ce and in­nov­a­tion has seen UX im­prove by leaps and bounds. But we’re still build­ing forms, and to that end I al­ways en­joy re-vis­it­ing the ba­sic ques­tion of how to build them well. Here’s the es­sence of a re­cent stab.

Cross-Site Re­quest For­ger­ies (CSRF) ex­ploit the trust that a site has with­in a user’s browser. By in­du­cing clicks on links to sites where users are sus­pec­ted to be au­then­tic­ated, per­pet­rat­ors can ex­ecute trans­ac­tions un­der the um­brella of a user’s cur­rent ses­sion. Re­quir­ing newly gen­er­ated para­met­er val­ues with each new POST or GET is one way for pro­gram­mers to pro­tect against CSRF. But while im­ple­ment­ing this re­quire­ment in page-driv­en ap­plic­a­tions is fairly straight-for­ward, ajaxi­fied apps make things more com­plic­ated. The fol­low­ing ap­proach lets us ab­stract the com­plic­a­tions out of our day-to-day so we can code both cur­rently and se­curely.

The Financial Times on December 4 published a fascinating, sprawling account of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. acquisition of MySpace in 2005 and the reasons behind the social network’s subsequent decline and abdication to Facebook. Matthew Garrahan’s 4000-word piece delivers the type of in-depth, well-researched reading for which the newspaper industry is struggling to find an audience and revenue model in this era of 140-character text bytes. For the invested, it also contains a clear subtext: foot-dragging on design and user experience improvements drove people from the MySpace ship.

In October of 2008 I attended the Ajax Experience Conference (sponsored by ajaxian.com among others) in Boston. 2009 saw a conflict between Ben and Dion and Adaptive Path’s San Francisco UX Week, which I opted for to diversify. Here, however, near its first anniversary, I share what I took from the 2008 Boston session. We’ve made progress. There’s still a way to go. And I still think UI/X is king. The excitement and challenges of a year ago:

It’s a wide-ranging discipline. The focus of this site is on the front-end of the web but my design inspiration is drawn from numerous sources. I think it’s in looking outside our areas of expertise and practice that we can often take our most valuable lessons.

Design processes usually entail decisions made on the basis of subjective opinions and experience. If good design is our goal, what we hope for is that the people whose subjectivity shapes the product are people who have devoted time or careers to understanding the questions and implications of their design decisions. At a fundamental level, of course, we need to define what design is and what ‘success’ entails for any product design project.