Supernova 2004 midterm update

I'm at the Supernova 2004 conference at the moment.  I'm scribbling notes as I go, and plan to go back and cohere the highlights into a post-conference writeup.  First impressions:  Lots of smart and articulate people here, both on the panels and in the 'audience'.  I wish there were more time for audience participation, though there is plenty of time for informal interactions between and after sessions.  The more panel-like sessions are better than the formal presentations.

The Syndication Nation panel had some good points, but it ratholed a bit on standard issues and would have benefited from a longer term/wider vision.  How to pay for content is important, but it's a well trodden area.  We could just give it a code name, like a chess opening, and save a lot of discussion time...

I am interested in the Autonomic Computing discussion and related topics, if for no other reason than we really need to be able to focus smart people on something other than how to handle and recover from system issues.  It's addressing the technical complexity problem.

Next problem: The legal complexity problem (IP vs. IP: Intellectual Property Meets the Internet Protocol) - I think this problem is far harder because it's political.  There's no good solution in sight for how to deal with the disruptions technology are causing business models and the structure of IP law.

And, on a minor note, I learned the correct pronunciation of Esther Dyson's first name.

Atom Proposal: Simple resource posting

On the Atom front, I've just added a proposal to the Wiki: PaceSimpleResourcePosting. The abstract is:

This proposal extends the AtomAPI to allow for a new creation URI, ResourcePostURI, to be used for simple, efficient uploading of resources referenced by a separate Atom entry. It also extends the Atom format to allow a "src" attribute of the content element to point to an external URI as an alternative to providing the content inline.

This proposal is an alternative to PaceObjectModule, PaceDontSyndicate, and PaceResource. It is almost a subset of and is compatible with PaceNonEntryResources, but differs in that it presents a very focused approach to the specific problem of efficiently uploading the parts of a compound document to form a new Atom entry. This proposal does not conflict with WebDAV but does not require that a server support WeDAV.

Atom: Cat picture use case

To motivate discussion about some of the basic needs for the Atom API, I've documented a use case that I want Atom to support: Posting a Cat Picture. This use case is primarily about simple compound text/picture entries, which I think are going to be very common.  It's complicated enough to be interesting but it's still a basic usage.

The basic idea here is that we really want compound documents that contain both text and pictures without users needing to worry about the grungy details; that (X)HTML already offers a way to organize the top level part of this document; and that Atom should at least provide a way to create such entries in a simple way.

Who am I?

Technorati Profile

I'm currently a tech lead/manager at Google, working on Blogger engineering.

I'm formerly a system architect and technical manager for web based products at AOL. I last managed development for Journals and Favorites Plus.  I've helped launch Public & Private Groups, Polls, and Journals for AOL.

History:

Around 1991, before the whole Web thing, I began my career at a startup which intended to compete with Intuit's Quicken software on the then-new Windows 3.0 platform.  This was great experience, especially in terms of what not to do[*]. In 1993 I took a semi-break from the software industry to go to graduate school at UC Santa Cruz.  About this time Usenet, ftp, and email started to be augmented by the Web.  I was primarily interested in machine learning, software engineering, and user interfaces rather than hypertext, though, so I ended up writing a thesis on the use of UI usability analysis in software engineering.

Subsequently, I worked for a startup that essentially attempted to do Flash before the Web really took hold, along with a few other things. We had plugins for Netscape and IE in '97.  I played a variety of roles -- API designer, technical documentation manager, information designer, project manager, and development manager.  In '98 the company was acquired by CA and I moved shortly thereafter to the combination of AtWeb/Netscape/AOL.  (While I was talking to a startup called AtWeb, they were acquired by Netscape and Netscape was in turn acquired by AOL -- an employment trifecta.)

At AtWeb I transitioned to HTML UIs and web servers, working on web and email listserver management software before joining the AOL Community development group.  I worked as a principal software engineer and then engineering manager.  I've managed the engineering team for the AOL Journals product from its inception in 2003 until the present time; I've also managed the Groups@AOL, Polls, Rostering, and IM Bots projects.

What else have I been doing? I've followed and promoted the C++ standardization process and contributed a tiny amount to the Boost library effort.  On a side note, I've taught courses inobject oriented programming, C++, Java, and template metaprogramming for UCSC Extension, and published two articles in the C++ Users Journal.

I'm interested in software engineering, process and agile methods, Web standards, language standards, generic programming, information architectures, user interface design, machine learning, evolution, and disruptive innovation,

First Post

The immediate purpose of this blog is to publish thoughts about web technologies, particularly Atom.  Of course that suffers from the recursive blogging-about-blogging syndrome, so I'll probably expand it to talk about software in general.

What does the name stand for?  Mostly, it stands for "something not currently indexed by Google".  Hopefully in a little while it will be the only thing you get when you type "Abstractioneer" into Google.  Actually it's a contraction of the "Abstract Engineering" which is a meme I'm hoping to propagate.  More on that later.