Bootstrap, a UI framework for the modern Web

It was almost exactly one year ago and I remember it quite vividly. I was attending an event organized by Google which was about the Chrome Web Store, as well as HTML5 and web applications in general. After the speaker finished pitching about awesomeness of this stuff (and how Chrome was the only browser that supported them all, of course), it was time for a round of questions and some discussion. I seized this opportunity and brought up an issue of user interface inconsistencies that plague the contemporary web apps. Because the Web as a platform doesn’t really enforce any constraints on UI paradigms, we can experience all sorts of “creative” approaches to user interface. In their pursuit of novelty and eye candies, web designers often sacrifice usability by not adhering to well known interface metaphors, and shying away from uniform UI elements.

At that time I didn’t really get a good answer that would address this issue. And it’s an important one, given the rate at which web applications are springing to life and replacing their equivalent desktop programs. Does it mean we’ll be stuck with this UI bonanza for the time being?…

Fortunately, there are some early first signs that it might not necessarily be so.

Enter Bootstrap

Few months later, in August 2011, Twitter released the first version of Bootstrap framework. Originally intended for internal use, this set of common HTML, CSS and JS patterns was made open source and released into the wild. The praise it subsequently gained is definitely well deserved, for it is a great set of tools for kickstarting development of any web-related project. Its features include:

• a flexible grid system for establishing a skeleton of the web page or app
• a set of great-looking styles for HTML form elements
• many complex UI components, like collapsible alerts, dropdowns, navigation bars, modal windows, and so on
• customizable set of CSS styles for typical markup elements, such as headers or tables

Along with universal acclaim came also the popularity: it is currently the most watched project on GitHub.

The value of consistency

However, some want to argue that being so popular has also an unanticipated, negative side. It makes the developers lazy, convinced they can get away without a “proper” design for their site or app. Even more: it allegedly shows disrespect for their users, as if the creator simply didn’t care how does their product look like.

Does it compute? I don’t think so. Do you complain if you find that any particular desktop application uses the very same looks for UI components, like buttons or list boxes?… Of course not. We learned to value the consistency and predictability that this entails, because it frees us from the burden of mentally adjusting to every single GUI app that we happen to use. Similarly, developers appreciate how this makes their work easier: they don’t have to code dropdown menus or modal dialogs, which in turns allows them to spend more time on actual, useful functionality.

Sure, it didn’t happen overnight when desktop OS’ were emerging as software platforms. Also, there are still plenty of apps whose creators – willfully or unintentionally – chose not to adhere to the standards. Sometimes it’s even for the good, as it allows for new, useful UI patterns to emerge and be adopted by the mainstream. The resulting process is still that of convergence, producing interfaces which are more consistent and easier to use.

Bootstrap shapes the Web

The analogous process may just be happening to the Internet, considered as a “platform” for web applications. By steadily raising in popularity, Bootstrap has a chance of becoming the UI framework for Web in general – an obvious first choice for any new project.

Of course, even if this happens, it would be terribly unlikely that it starts reigning supreme and making every website look almost exactly the same – i.e. transforming the Web into equivalent of desktop. What’s much more likely is following the footsteps of mobile platforms. In there, every app strives to be original and appealing but only those that correctly balance usability with artsy design provide really compelling user experience.

It will not be without differences, though. Mobile platforms are generally ruled with iron (or clay) fist and have relevant UI guidelines spelled out explicitly. For Web it’s very much not the case, so any potential “standardization” is necessarily a bottom-up process whose benefits have to be indisputable and clearly visible. Despite some opposition, Bootstrap seems to have enough momentum to really (ahem) bootstrap this process. It already wins hearts and minds of many web developers, so it may be just a matter of time.

If it happens, I believe the Web will be in better place.

Self-Reinforcement and Exponential Functions

Special relativity is really kind of mean. Not only it prohibits anything from going faster than the speed of light (therefore destroying our Star Trek-inspired dreams of interstellar travel) but also threatens with extreme adverse effects should anyone dare to even come close to the impenetrable barrier of c. Assuming we can deal with the steady increase of mass as the speed goes up, there is always this issue of time dilation. While you are taking your short (i.e. few years-long) trip to nearby star, time passed on Earth could very well be measured in centuries. Having a millennium to catch up might prove cumbersome, and rather frustrating. Just think of all the iPhone models you would have missed!

As a solace, though, you could get quite a pile of cash waiting for you to pick up. Let’s say you’ve put 10,000 dollars (or euro, or your favorite currency) into investment with a yearly interest rate of 10 percent. Every year, this deposit will therefore increase by one tenth, and this will happen continuously over the next 1000 years. Could you quickly tell how big the final amount will be, compared to the initial one? How many times will it increase?…

You shouldn’t be very hard on yourself if you answered instinctively with e.g. 100 times or something similar. I mean, such figures are totally, utterly wrong by many orders of magnitude because the actual value is bigger than 10⁴⁰. But it’s absolutely common to have problems with grasping exponential functions intuitively. In many ways this is quite pitiful, for they accurately describe many phenomenons that occur in nature, civilization, technology and culture. Yet they often escape understanding, leading to unfulfilled predictions, incorrect extrapolations, and plain old cognitive biases.

What is so bizarre about these functions that they tend to confuse a significant fraction, if not the majority of people?…

Ideas Worth Spreading: Issue Tracking

Real-world metaphors are quite abundant when discussing topics related to IT and programming. They seem to be particularly useful when introducing newcomers, although it’s equally easy to point out mature and established techniques that originate from non-digital world (OOP anyone?…). Regardless, the flow of ideas seems to be extremely one-directional, and I think that’s very unfortunate. There’s wealth of concepts specific to IT or software industry that the general public would benefit from knowing about.

One of those, in my not-so-humble opinion, is the idea of issue tracking. I suppose vast majority of readers is intimately familiar with it but let’s put it into words anyway, for the sake of clarity and explicitness. The concept revolves around a system which allows its users to create tickets describing various issues pertaining to some particular project, or part of it, or process, or any similar endeavor. Those tickets necessarily consist of title and content, very much like emails. Usually though, they also have few additional fields that are more meta, and describe the ticket itself. Typical examples include:

• A type or category for ticket. In software project, the distinction between bug and feature request is of utmost importance, although several more kinds of tickets (e.g. documentation-related tasks) are pretty well known too.
• Status of a ticket, indicating what’s currently happening with the issue in question. Did it arise only recently, or some work on it has been already done? Maybe it was successfully resolved, or maybe there are more information needed to push the case further… Either way, that’s what ticket status should tell us.
• Person currently responsible for issue – the one it has been assigned to. For new issues, this field usually points at project manager, who is subsequently dividing work among members of their team.

Lastly, every ticket allows for discussion in a forum-like manner, and for adding comments to any metadata changes we make.

That’s it, in a nutshell. It doesn’t seem very complicated and frankly, it may not sound very innovative either. Why do I think such a concept is worthy of attention in broader context, then?…

Against Unit Tests

When discussing the topic of unit testing and methodologies they might entail (mostly TDD, i.e. Test-Driven Development), I noticed a curious imbalance in the number and strength of arguments pro and contra. The latter are few and far between, up to the point of ridiculous scarcity when googling “arguments against TDD” is equally likely to yield stories from both sides of the fence. That’s pretty telling. Is it so that TDD in general and unit tests in particular are just the best thing ever, because there is an industry-wide consensus about them?…

I wouldn’t be so sure. All this unequivocal acknowledgement looks suspiciously similar to many other trends and fashions that were (or still are) sweeping through the IT domain, receding only when the alternative approach gains enough traction.

O RLY?

Take OOP, for example. Back in the 90s and around 2000, you would hear all kinds of praise for the object-oriented methodology: how natural it is, how it helps to model problems in intuitive way, how flexible and useful its abstractions are. Critics’ camp existed, of course, but they were small, scattered and not taken very seriously. Objects and classes were reigning supreme.

Compare this to present day, when OOP is taking blows from almost every direction. On one hand, it is rejected on performance basis, as the unknown factors of virtual method’s call are seen as a liability. On the other hand, its abstraction patterns are considered baroque, overblown and outdated, unfit for modern computing challenges – most notably concurrency and asynchronism.

Could it be that approaches emphasizing the utmost importance of unit tests are following the same route? Given the pretty much universal praise they are receiving, it’s not unimaginable. In this context, providing some reasonable counterarguments seems like a good thing: if we let some air out of this balloon, we may prevent it from popping later on.

Incidentally, this is a service for TDD/unit testing that I’m glad to provide ;-) So in the rest of this post, I’m going to discuss some of their potential drawbacks, hopefully helping to even-out the playing field. Ultimately, this should always lead to better software engineering practices, and better software.

Adventures in Haskelland

In a post from top of the year I mentioned that I was looking into Haskell programming language, and promised to give some insight on how it fares compared to others. Well, I think it’s time to deliver on that promise, for the topic of this particular language – and functional programming in general – is indeed very insightful.

I do not claim to have achieved any kind of proficiency in Haskell, of course; I might very well be just scratching the surface. However, this is exactly the sort of perspective I wanted to employ when evaluating language usefulness: a practical standpoint, held by programmer who is looking to use it for actual tasks, without having mastered it in great detail – at least initially. This is, by the way, a pretty common setting when tackling all new things related to coding, be it frameworks, software platforms or languages.

Still, I knew it was almost supposed to be a rough ride. A language whose tutorials purposefully shy away from classic Hello World example (typically inserting a factorial function instead) looks like something designed specifically to melt brains of poor programmers who dare to venture forth to investigate it. Those few who make their way back are told about in folk tales, portrayed as mildly crazy types who profess this weird idea of “purity”, and utter the word ‘monad’ with great contempt.

Okay, I may be exaggerating… slightly. But there is no denying that Haskell attained a certain kind of reputation, something like a quirky cousin in the big and diverse family of languages. Unlike Lisp, he isn’t picked on due to any (particular (and (rather) obvious)) property. There is just this general aura of weirdness and impracticality that he supposedly radiates, repelling all but the most adventurous of coders.

If it really exists, then pity: it certainly failed to repel me. As a result, I may have a story (or two) to share with those who want to learn what’s this functional business is really about, and why should they care.

Grab a chair and something to drink – it’s going to take a while. But in the end, you shouldn’t regret staying.

How IT Failed to Make People Care

Unless you were living under an enormous, media-impervious rock for at least few weeks, you must have heard of the recent ruckus about laws concerned with the so-called intellectual property. It was mostly due to infamous SOPA and PIPA bills that were to pass in the US, and the temporary “blackout” of various big websites whose owners voiced their protest against those bills. But we also have something of a local spin-off, relevant to the EU and specifically Poland: an outcry against ACTA, a similar albeit slightly less ridiculous piece of law, which (as of this writing) is due to be signed in a few days.

Even though we do not really know yet how those issues are going to be resolved, there are already few important lessons to be learned here. And I think that the biggest one is not actually concerned with the merit of laws in question. Instead, it draws attention to the problem of communication between IT industry and general public.

It’s no longer OK to be ignorant of the Internet

It never was, really. If anything, recent events served as a good wake-up call, reminding that the Internet and all related technological infrastructure is something that we take for granted way too often. While I might exaggerate a bit, I don’t think it’s very far-fetched to say that for average person, the Internet is pretty much magic. You pop up “the Internet app”, type whatever you are looking for, and few moments later, voilà: you just got it, by the sheer magic of intertubes. Assuming, of course, that there is actually something specific you have in mind; otherwise, you can always look at what your friends have “shared”, and from there start your clicky journey through the nether. It’s awesome, virtually boundless, and it just works… right?

So far, consequences of such technical ignorance were also mostly technical, surfacing as security issues, loss of data, malware spread and so on. But that’s alright! We’re dabbling into arcane and invoking supernatural powers, so it’s no wonder we sometimes accidentally summon few annoying daemons. Should that happen, we can always call an exorcist in a form of friendly geek-next-door, or (at worst) tech support.

Now, however, failure to grasp the fundamental nature of the Internet can result in much more dramatic backlash. See, this technical stuff underneath is not just a plumbing that can be safely ignored. The foundational, idealistic principles of the ‘net – decentralization, freedom, knowledge, progress, innovation, flexibility, and so on – are woven into its very fabric. It is by exposure to those “boring details” that those ideas may influence and reshape minds, helping to do away with flawed and outdated notions – including, for example, the 19th century’s concept of intellectual property. I cannot even fathom how someone with reasonable understanding of how software, Internet and IT work could conceive something as outrageous as those infamous IP laws. It just doesn’t compute.

It is no longer OK to be ignorant of the society

Yet it was conceived, put into words, formed into a legal document and officially proposed – more than once, in fact. Obviously, such things don’t happen by itself, especially when powerful interest groups are at play. And that’s precisely the reason why we have various public institutions, from parliaments to international organizations: to weed out blatantly bad solutions, and sometimes even let the good ones pass through.

At least, that’s the theory. It’s naive to postulate virtues among politicians (i.e. those willingly aspiring for power), so we make them cling to one value they’ll always embrace, for it is needed to maintain a ruling position: popularity. This should roughly translate to caring for the same things the voters care for. Roughly, because there will be always some disconnection due to effects of scale, perception, biases and multitudes of other factors.

Still, this is pretty much how it works. In order to push an agenda we are vitally interested in (or obstruct one we are strongly against), we need to gain enough publicity. We need to make people share our values and consider as utility those things that we consider as such. That’s how we set the appropriate casual chain in motion, eventually leading to fulfillment of our goals.

And this is where the IT industry has failed miserably. It’s the reason why we’re frantically looking for support, rolling out our biggest cannons, hitting the news with blackouts of absolutely crucial Internet services and DDoS attacks on government sites. We have failed in making the society share our values in elegant, gradual and systematic manner, so now we need to condone a shock therapy to compensate for this negligence. Actually, in some cases we have been actively making things worse, professing the exact opposites of those values mentioned before: centralization, limitation, monocultures, stagnation and rehashing of old concepts.

Now we are just reaping what we have sown.

Looking Back, and Maybe Even Forward

Also known as Obligatory New Year’s Post.

It was quite a year, this 2011. No single ground-breaking change, but a lot of somewhat significant events and small steps – mostly in the right direction. A short summary is of course in order, because taking time to stop and reflect is a good thing from time to time.

Technically, the biggest change would be the fact that I’m no longer a student. Attaining MSc. some time in the first quarter, I finished a five year-long period of computer science studies at Warsaw University of Technology. While there are mixed views on the importance of formal education, I consider this a major and important achievement – and a one with practical impact as well.

Being a polyglot is fun

My master thesis was about implementing a reflection system for C++. Ironically, since then I haven’t really got to code anything in this language. That’s not actually something I’m at odds with. For me, sticking to just one language for extended period of time seems somewhat detrimental to development of one’s programming skills. On the other hand, there goes the saying that a language which doesn’t change your view on programming as a whole is not worth learning. As usual, it looks like a question of proper balance.

This year, I’ve got to use a handful of distinct languages in different contexts and applications. There was Java but mostly (if not exclusively) on the Android platform. There was JavaScript in its original incarnation – i.e. on client side, in the browser.
Finally, there was Python: for scripts, for cloud computing on Google App Engine, for general web programming, and for many everyday tasks and experiments. It seems to be my first choice language as of now – a one that I’m most productive in. Still, it probably has many tricks and crispy details waiting to be uncovered, which makes it likely to grab my attention for quite a bit longer.

Its status always has contenders, though. Clojure, Ruby and Haskell are among languages which I gave at least a brief glance in 2011. The last one is especially intriguing and may therefore be a subject of few posts later on.

Speaking and listening

2011 was also a busy year for me when it comes to attending various software-related events. Many of these were organized or influenced by local Google Technology User Group. Some of those I even got to speak at, lecturing on the Google App Engine platform or advanced topics in Android UI programming. In either case it was an exciting and refreshing experience.

There were also several other events and meet-ups I got to attend in the passing year. Some of them even required traveling abroad, some resulted in grabbing juicy awards (such as autographed books), while some were slightly less formal albeit still very interesting.
And kinda unexpected, too. I learned that there is bunch of thriving communities gathered around specific technologies, and they are all just around the corner – literally. Because contrary to the stereotype of lone hacker, their members are regularly meeting in real life. Wow! ;-)