Why are the polls so close?

This says it better than I could.

A Look Back at the Paradigm Shift

What’s been happening this year?

I’ve been watching, you’ve been watching, as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton went nose-to-nose over the right to lead the Democratic party to victory in November, from sometime back in February to just the last couple of weeks, when the bow was neatly tied on party unity and the race to defeat John McCain began in deadly earnest.

Not without some surprises.  The Repubs picked Sarah Palin as the new running mate.  Well, that doesn’t come as so much of a shock — all you had to do was to think of the most cynical, vote-grabbing thing they could have done to win, and you’d have bet that they’d have picked a woman.  And for any woman to be thrust onto the stage and pushed into the limelight just because she’s a woman and therefore likely to grab votes, is an insult to women everywhere.  If that was done to Governor Palin, she should be outraged.  That she’s not, given her extreme right-wing views and her belief in a faith that tells women they should “respectfully submit to the authority of their husbands yadda yadda yadda…” Is, well… not too shocking either.

We come to the part of the story where the Culture Wars begin, for real.  There have always been two Americas, for as long as I can remember: the ones who believe in peaceful, intelligent solutions to world problems and the ones who believe that throwing our weight around on the playground will make us the biggest, baddest kids in the park, and therefore safer.

There have always been these two groups.  They were in my high school, mixed together, going to classes together, going to the same sporting events – though, now that I think of it, I’d put more of the former group in the marching band and more of the latter on the football team.  Which makes for an interesting analogy.  I’ll have to explore that another time.

Within these groups were subgroups.  Among those of us who were on the side of peaceful solutions to world problems were philosophical realists who struggled with the ideas of whether or not might makes right and whether or not one could claim victory at something if that victory was achieved by means contrary to your stated goals.  In other words, would it be right to gain power in order to pursue your agenda to save the world, if in order to do so you played by the enemy’s rules, and therefore created much of the damage that you started out to prevent in the first place?  At the attainment of such power, wouldn’t you have, in effect, become the enemy? Would you really be able to work any positive change from such a place?

We were a philosophical group.  Some of us swayed in the direction of “whatever it takes to win” and some of us toward the idea that victory earned in that way can’t be counted as such.

There are people of all stripes today who are wrestling with this question.  These groups still exist, and are interspersed throughout our society, working together, married to each other, sometimes in enclaves and sometimes not.  There are places like Colorado Springs, where you are more likely to bump into McCain voters, and places a few miles up the road like Boulder, Colorado, where the vast majority of the vote will most likely go to Barack Obama.  To my eyes, these groups are neatly polarized into the “might makes right” camp and the camp that believes we’ve got to lead through diplomacy and moral example.  (Although, the 2008 Democratic state convention was held in Colorado Springs, where only five years ago protestors – myself among them – were teargassed after joining 15,000,000 others around the world in demonstrating against the start of the then-imminent Iraq War.  Progress has been made.)

Let’s take a look back at what’s been happening in the Democratic party, however.  We’ve been forming a national identity.  We’ve been coalescing around the ideas that we want cleaner energy, that freedom and security both lie in the direction of independence from, rather than control over, foreign sources of oil, that to respect the planet is to respect and help ourselves, and that women, like men, must be able to choose what happens with their bodies.  We’ve dedicated ourselves to stopping the Iraq war and to providing health care for all of us, and we want to bring the economy back with new, green industries and make sure that our children are properly educated.

But there’s one big issue that been dividing the party.  It’s not the “Oh, Hillary’s a woman and Barack’s a black man” line down the middle, though that’s gotten all the press.  The real issue between Barack and Hillary was the way they campaigned, as an indicator of how they would approach change in Washington.

Sometime in the last 20 years, politics took a dramatic turn toward the negative, particularly in presidential elections.  Smear tactics became the norm.  People have become cynical and now expect them.  The republicans managed to take over both houses of congress during Clinton’s second term – and they didn’t do it because an actual majority of Americans supported them, but because they managed to take advantage of voter apathy and organize enough votes out of their base to put them over the numbers necessary to win.  The Democrats, seeing the Republicans’ wins over the years, have been drifting more and more toward the same set of anything-to-win tactics as the Republicans – including Scare Your Voters, Lie and Distort the Truth, Smear your Opponent and so on.  The problem is, when you adopt these tactics, you end up becoming very much like your opponent, regardless of your ideological differences.  Which is why the Democratic party kept drifting so far to the right for so long, trying to slice and dice the same group of voters that the Repubs considered their base, using the same tactics.  They ignored the left-leaning elements, to the point where most of the progressives in America felt powerless to take part in the political scene.

In 2004, along comes Howard Dean.  He energizes a hitherto-apathetic base by refusing to use smear tactics, by telling the truth, and by employing technology that allows people to connect with each other and to collectively build a movement for change from the ground up.

He becomes the unexpected frontrunner early in the race, but is knocked out of the running by a series of last-minute, cynical attacks from the campaign of John Kerry, which, though untrue, nevertheless worked.  Dean lost New Hampshire, and Kerry got the nomination.  A large, very networked, very disappointed organization was left behind and was virtually ignored by Kerry’s campaign.  Kerry didn’t understand Dean’s way of organizing, and he certainly didn’t understand why all those people had come together to support Dean in the first place.  It was because Dean was saying the things that people were thinking, and he was listening to the people that talked back to him.  He was simply speaking the truth.  He was giving people a chance to take part in the conversation and he was refusing to use negative tactics against his opponents to win people over to his side.  He was awakening the parts of the population that had been avoiding the political process because they didn’t feel they had any real representation.  Kerry’s campaign and the older, established parts of the Democratic party didn’t understand this, but they did understand how to fight dirty and try and undermine your opponent in order to win.  They attempted to appeal to the more conservative set of voters that had voted in the previous elections, instead of appealing to those voters who hadn’t voted because there had been no one to represent them.  Because, after all, when you campaign with those kind of tactics, the people who are most likely to respond to them are the ones more likely to respond to fear – and the Repubs are always better at fear.  When you use those kinds of tactics, you inevitably push the dialogue farther to the right.

When John Kerry won the nomination, and proceeded to botch the general election, there were a whole crowd of disillusioned people who had just watched a smear tactic take down their champion.  In the intervening years, this group of people grew and became more organized and came back to try again, morphing into the campaign of and the movement behind Barack Obama.  Howard Dean may not have taken his country back in 2004, but he did begin to take back the party.

This year, the dialogue has been between two people who embody the old and new ways of doing politics. Hillary represented the politics of the old, where the ends justify the means, and doing anything to win is all right, as long as you win.  Barack represented the organized and interested base, who wanted access to and input into the way things are done in Washington, and who wanted the way that politics were done in this country to change from top to bottom, starting with the way we talk to each other about the issues.  If, on the national stage, we could put a man who spoke clearly and intelligently about the problems facing us, and refused to resort to tearing his opponent down in order to win votes, we just might have someone who thought like us and represented us.  Putting such a man in office, who has kept a running dialogue going with and between his supporters, might mean that we were putting a man in office who would indeed govern that way, as a participant with the people rather than an insulated politician listening to a closed circle of influence.  Hillary appeared as though she would have ignored that base, and we would have been denied, for at least another four to eight years, the kind of access we need in order to change the way government works.  It was the most clear in their respective campaign slogans, from Barack’s “Yes we can” to Hillary’s supporters’ chant of “Yes she will.”

It was one of the hallmarks of Barack’s campaign that he was working to create change every step of the way.  He didn’t expect to win when he started out.  But people responded to that willingness to change the dialogue as he went, with every step pushing it more toward civility and honesty.  More people gravitated toward this message than toward Hillary’s politics-as-usual, and I think the major deciding factor in getting Barack the nomination was this fact.  People weren’t just being promised change – they were seeing change.  Politics was being changed right before their very eyes.  The race for the democratic nomination became a real one, a substantive one – one in which every step toward that goal, for the Obama campaign, was in itself a victory.  Obama’s speech on race, the fact that his campaign has been funded solely by individual campaign contributions – primarily from ordinary people giving only what they can afford, the “open convention” at Invesco Field, all were powerful milestones that have changed the face of politics in this country.  The fact that he is the first black man to be nominated seems almost incidental.  But the most powerful change is that he got there by energizing the base that wants to see and contribute to positive change in the world, not the one that feels we must lash out in fear.  He spoke to all the people who have been disenfranchised and got them into the process again.

Because now – even more than in 2004 – we see each other.  Oh, yes, we have seen.  We know what we can do.  And even if Barack were to lose this election, we would still be here, having learned from yet another defeat, still organizing to win in 2012.  Or – who knows? – In some other way.  Because we must win at some point.  We have the numbers.  The question is whether or not there are sufficient numbers of us to get out and vote and overwhelm the numbers that will be driven to the polls by whatever scare tactics or drastic smears that the McCain campaign has planned for the last minute.

And make no mistake, those will come.  This election is not about issues for the Republicans- it’s become blatently about getting the numbers through whatever means necessary – lie, cheat, steal, and scare people into voting your way.  One wishes that the Democratic nomination race had been the race for the actual presidency.  Because here’s where the man that we’ve selected – and we – get put to the test.  Can we do it?  Can we organize enough votes to get out there and put him over the top?  Will he stay on message enough to sway more voters to his side?  Will he continue to create change in the way politics are done, at every step along the way, and force the race to be substantive?  Will he call the Republicans on their tactics and their blatant untruths?  Or will we get blindsided in our optimism again, having underestimated the power of the easily swayed to react in great numbers to an attack launched to generate fear?

This is, after all, a Republican opponent we’re talking about, not another Democrat.  They are only interested in winning, not in how they do it.  The Democratic message is that the “How” is part of the win.  If you win by distorting your opponent’s words and attacking them, trying to stir up fear in the voters in order to get them to vote for you, you may as well be running on the Republican side.  On the other hand, to call your opponent on a lie when they are lying is not an attack – that’s just telling the truth.  What the Obama campaign needs to do now is get back on message – tell people that we can’t have this kind of campaigning with lies and deception any more; that it’s indicative of how the country will be run if that side were to win.  Create change with every step of the way and draw more people to us with every step of change.

Fortytu: Public Opinion Aggregator

For a long time, I’ve been working on an idea that I’ve termed “Open source government.” For various reasons, it’s never gotten out of the idea phase. Last week, I attended startup weekend to start talking about it, make connections, and get some feedback. This weekend, I’m filling out the application form for techstars. I have small hope of even getting the form finished by the deadline, but it’s a good exercise in figuring out which bases I still need to cover. This post is an attempt to describe the idea clearly, in its present form.

Let me first state the problem: We don’t know what we think.

By that I mean “we,” as a sum total population, don’t know what we think as a group.

We have public opinion polls, but they fall far short of the mark. Polls are managed by asking a specific set of questions of a group of people intended to represent a cross-section of the population. They have flaws. Are the right questions being asked? Who is being polled? Do the questions lead the respondents into a specific type of response? Are there different ways to interpret the results? Why, exactly, did people respond the way they did? Could there be deeper reasons for their opinions, that we’re not getting at through these yes/no or multiple choice questions?

Polls don’t allow us a deep look at what’s going on. All too often, I feel that the right questions aren’t being asked. The data that comes out of these polls is sifted through and reported on by experts. People like you and me generally don’t have access to it. We are left with interpreted results that, unfortunately, have been further filtered through the various biases of the media.

I want to know what people really think. I want to be able to see by state, county and town how many people are in support of my favorite candidate, and why. I want to be able to drill down and find out how many people share my opinions on any given subject in any town in the U.S. I want to be able to see how many people are in support of a war and how many are against it, and follow that data to find out why.

I also want this information to be available to everyone. The most powerful thing I think I can do to help my country and to help humanity is to find a way to make sure that we all know what we think.

To use a stark example, and to reveal some of my political leanings: if most of the people in this country had had the chance to go online in early 2003 and securely, safely register their opinions on whether or not going to war in Iraq was a good idea, what would have happened? We might have still gone to war, but many more of us, in all parts of this country, would have known that we were not alone. The climate of fear that existed, in which people were afraid to express their opinions to their neighbors, could have been greatly lessened. Groups may have formed and actions may have been taken to change the outcome, much sooner, before so many lives were lost and America’s reputation so damaged in the world.

When people know the strength of their numbers, they are empowered to speak out and rally support. Today, we are witnessing a movement for change with astounding momentum. When people see so many others of like mind standing up and demanding change – creating change – they are encouraged to do the same. Knowing the strength of one’s numbers is an antidote to being manipulated through fear.

Ok. So now you know the why – let’s talk about how.

Fortytu is intended as an account based system in which users willingly register their opinions on a variety of subjects. The questions are both seeded and created by the users. The system will allow users to merge similar questions, combining their results, rate and categorize questions and topics, and comment on them twitter-style so that discussion remains succinct. The system will be self-maintaining in a way similar to wikipedia.

The net result of all this activity is that:
1) The questions that need to be asked – the ones that are most important to the users – will float to the top.
2) Demographic data on users will be kept, but privacy maintained, so that aggregate data will be available by region, state and town, and across several different demographic measurements pertaining to any specific question or combination of questions.
3) Since users are able to maintain a private list of their answers and change them at any time, the results of any given question will be dynamic and reflect changing public opinion.

So, what happens when we’ve got all this data?

Politicians start using it to aid their campaigns. Elected officials put questions into the system to find out what their constituents want them to know. Journalists mine the system for data and report their sources. Marketers use the data for more tightly focused ads. People organize themselves into groups more effectively based on common interests and causes. Politics, government, media, marketing, and grassroots organization are transformed.

Hubris aside, I think it’s a good idea.

Crimes of Compassion

I wrote a letter in support of a friend last night, who is being sentenced to federal prison in less than a month. The letter was a plea for leniency. In it, I described the better points of her character and tried to explain what could have motivated her to do what she did.

It’s an emotional time. I’ve known my friend for 10 years. I never knew that she was involved in some of the things for which she’s now being sentenced, but looking back at the time during which I met her, it makes sense. She’s a compassionate individual, and the crimes she committed are the sort of things a strong-minded person in their twenties, with a passion for protecting those who can’t protect themselves, might be motivated to do.

She was involved in some actions with an environmental group about a decade ago that resulted in some serious property damage, but not, as far as I can tell, any loss of or injury to human life. That seems to have been one of her group’s principles. Apparently, some of the facilities they took action against were owned by companies that were using them for some pretty heinous acts – rounding up wild horses from public lands and rendering them for meat, for example. But though this may have been bad, her group’s actions were considered the more illegal. She did a pretty good job of keeping these things quiet and unknown to her friends outside of that group and her family, and apparently she thought she had left that part of her life behind long ago.

It caught up with her, with a vengeance. Someone in her group eventually informed on the rest of them, and by the time they caught up with her, they had enough evidence to put her away for life. Given that choice vs. helping the investigators in exchange for a lesser sentence, she chose to help. It must have been a gut-wrenching decision for her, as some of the people she was asked to give evidence on had been her friends. I don’t like to think about what I would have done, or how I would have felt, in the same situation. Fortunately, I have nothing in my past that would ever put me in that same situation, but still.

In the past few weeks I have read more hate-spewing stuff on the internet than I have ever seen associated with anyone I knew. There are news articles describing her in harsh terms as a felon and eco-terrorist, whose authors wonder how such a nice young girl with such a promising future could have taken such a wrong turn. Some of the more negative comments I’ve read with these articles say that she should just be locked up for life, or killed, or worse.

I’m not defending her actions. But sometimes, caring, compassionate individuals, especially when young, can take their enthusiasm for justice a bit too far. While some choose to heal the evils of society in a more measured, steady way, some choose a more abrupt route. What I’m saying is that she’s not an evil person – as far as I can tell, her actions were motivated by a desire to protect wildlife and the environment, not for personal gain or personal vengeance. She discontinued doing these things long ago, and now understands that these actions were not only wrong, but may have damaged her causes more than helped them.

The sad thing is, the worst stuff I’ve read about her has been on environmental activist sites, where she is reviled as a snitch. There, people are calling her a traitor to their cause and posting photos of her so that she can be identified on sight to anyone who might wish to do her harm. I find this sort of knee-jerk reaction to be as bad as the people who automatically revile her for committing her acts in the first place.

It’s different when you know the person. It’s easy to look at a person you don’t know who has committed a crime, and assume all kinds of things about them that justify your hatred of their actions and allow you to hate them as well. It’s not so easy to give a person you don’t know the benefit of the doubt.

The person I know is a caring, compassionate individual who sometimes goes out of her way to help the people she loves. I’ve known her as a loyal friend and a bright, intelligent person who I’ve been happy to have in my life. It saddens me deeply to see her going off to jail, though I understand that, karmically and otherwise, it’s what has to happen. I don’t think of her differently, even though I wouldn’t have done what she did. I see her as a friend who went a little too far in expressing her sense of justice, by taking matters into her own hands.

If anything, this experience teaches me to think of anyone I read about in the news, who has committed some sort of crime with which I disagree, as a person with a life and a past, who may or may not have good qualities that I may never know about. The age-old wisdom that you should hate the sin, but not the sinner, seems to apply here. I wish I could teach that to the people on both sides who simply want to judge her based on what little they know, instead of understanding her as a whole person.

Farewell to Interactivate

This is about three weeks overdue.

Three weeks ago, on a Monday, I was laid off from Interactivate, Inc. I had worked there six months. Right before the holidays, San Diego Corporate decided to close the Boulder office. It wasn’t as though it was unexpected; we had seen it coming for weeks. But we did think they would wait and let us take our paid holiday time and… well, you know, have Christmas.

I was given a week’s severance, in exchange for which I had to sign an agreement not to sue them. They offered to let me work as a contractor, but with no guarantee of work. Fortunately, the good folks who assign the work in San Diego have kept me afloat with enough to do for the last couple of weeks that I’ve been able to maintain relative peace of mind.

But enough about Corporate. I’m here to tell you about the guys in Boulder.

When I interviewed for this job, after a grueling round of technical questions, an examination of my most recent project on the whiteboard and a list of questions designed to test my knowledge of English grammar and punctuation, there came the lightning round. I was posed such queries as, “Tell me a joke.” “What is the average flight speed of an unladen swallow?” “How do you get rid of a ship full of tribbles?” “What does Trogdar burninate?” and, most tellingly, “If you were stranded on a desert island, what album would you want to have with you?” Note, they asked “album.” As in vinyl. I answered with Stevie Wonder’s “InnerVisions,” which I had recently been playing, incessantly, on my brand-new-used turntable. I got the job.

I ‘m sure the joke helped. Well, actually, I got only average points on the joke, but full marks on delivery. I used a voice. The joke was one my brother told me when I was a kid, and, being put on the spot, it was all I could remember. The “Baby Big Mouth Frog” joke. No, I’m not going to tell it here. It needs The Voice.

Suddenly, I was no longer a big fish in a little pond. The pond was still small – there were only six people in our office – but every one of them was hand-picked and Extremely Good At What They Did. I was able to talk tech constantly with my co-workers instead of having to explain, in kindergarten language, what it was that I did (or could do, for the company, if my manager would simply get out of my way). We bantered across the office, shouting comments and questions over the walls. We pulled each other into technical conversations to work out some knotty problem on the whiteboard, jumped in to help on each other’s projects when needed, and shared knowledge constantly. Ok, I was the recipient of the knowledge most of the time. I was the new guy. But what a joyous and fortunate thing, to be in such a high-speed learning environment, challenged constantly, expected to improve, and driven to do well, be thorough, and excel in everything I did. Oh, and there were the odd (very odd) links that were instant-messaged around the office from time to time when someone had found something particularly bizarre to share. Followed by laughter. And talk. And distraction from work. And more laughter. Finally, we got back to it. But those breaks were good.

And, there was Pool.

My second day, we all went out to lunch, to a place called “The Attic” in Boulder, where, way in the back, there are free pool tables. I was told that whether or not I learned anything about programming at this job, I would definitely become a better pool player.

They were right. For six months I labored to beat any one of them fairly at a pool game. I won a few times, but only because someone scratched or I got lucky and hit the 8 ball in on the break. Frankly, I sucked. But I watched and learned. I asked questions, and eventually stopped trying to win. I concentrated on my bridge, on following through, on hitting the ball straight into the hole instead of watching it go off at some weird angle because I didn’t maintain control. I learned how eating a burger affected my game, and learned to hold off until I was well into it and had had some time to develop my concentration. I got pretty good at The Leave – if I couldn’t sink anything, I could at least make it so my opponent had no shot. Some of those were very satisfying.

Then, of course, there was Calvinball.

For those of you unfamiliar, the reference is to the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” in which, from time to time, Calvin and his pet tiger would play games that had constantly changing, ever-shifting bizarre rules. On certain days of the week – Wednesday, I think, or maybe it was Tuesday – pool turned into Calvinball. After every win, you were allowed to make a new rule. Cluck like a chicken before every shot or forfeit your turn. Or shoot with your eyes closed. Stand on one leg. Use the pinky bridge. Call your shot and do at least one fancy-schmancy thing that makes the crowd go “Aaaah.”

These rules accumulated through the lunch hour. That was part of the point. After a while, it got so you couldn’t remember which rules you were following. There were veto rules. And rules for vetoing vetoes. Rules that were made on the fly to sound convincing, as though they were holy writ based on precedent from over six weeks ago. And sometimes they were. Convincing. Somewhere, somebody was keeping a tally of points for that sort of thing. We just didn’t know who.

Once, before the end, before we knew for certain that they were going to axe us, I beat Mike. Mike was the acknowledged best player in the office, obsessive enough to carry around a tool to rough up the end of the cue stick on his keychain. Mike was a little put off, but it was a good day for me. I had been taking cues from Mike for weeks, asking questions and observing his game, trying to absorb all that he knew. Finally, it paid off. Maybe, maybe he was having a bad day. Not quite on his game. I didn’t care. I had won. Six months of effort and I finally had the satisfaction of sinking the 8 ball at the end.

Then the hammer fell.

We had known, for a while, that it was coming. We had hoped it wouldn’t, but none of really believed it. It had started when Derek, third or fourth employee of the company, Director of Operations and manager of our office, was fired without a moment’s notice. There were reasons given, financial and otherwise, but it came down to the fact that there were lots of changes going on at the company that we weren’t too particularly comfortable with. Suddenly, our isolated little castle was having its moat filled in and the drawbridge lowered. We fought to keep ourselves insulated from the corporate politics and differing management practices of the non-application-development wing of the company (everyone that was not us), and succeeded, for a while. But the writing was on the wall. We had assurances from San Diego that they were going to support us, and they might have followed through, had the rest of the office remained intact. But getting rid of a good manager is a bad thing to do.

Dan and John decided they had had enough, and went looking for other work. They found it pretty quickly and were both snatched up by the same company. As two of the anchor employees of the application development office, it left us looking at a pretty big hole. As soon as notice was given, one of the VPs flew out from the San Diego office to tell the rest of us that we were out of a job. Domenic and I hadn’t been quick enough to land new work before the company was able to fire us, so it came as a bit of a shock. Not a huge one, but still.

That evening, we all went out for drinks. Derek joined us. We went to the Attic. We played pool.

It was a celebration of the fact that we were all together, one last time, laughing and joking, enjoying ourselves, and frankly, getting plastered. The calvinball rules ran thick and heavy. The beer flowed. The games became raucous and loud and the cue ball flew off the table into the wall at least twice. We toasted the barman who had served us all so well for so long. By the end of the evening we were speaking in thick Scottish brogues, and no one could remember whose turn it was.

It was a bittersweet ending to a spectacularly good few months. In retrospect, all that time I spent grousing about this or that detail of my life and how I needed to be making more and doing more were couched in a net of safety, an environment where excellence was encouraged and intelligence was simply the norm, where the people I worked with were universally supportive and well-versed in having fun. I considered Interactivate to be a form of “school” the whole time I was there. I intended to learn as much as I could about programming when I started there, and that I did. But unexpectedly, I also learned about what it is like to work with a great bunch of people, and how important that is to one’s outlook on life. I learned a good deal about pool. And calvinball. And not taking oneself too seriously.

I also learned to call shotgun the second I’m out the door, and to defend my claim against any and all comers who would try and convince me that whistling a two-step while walking backwards amounts to a superior right to sit in the passenger seat.

Mostly, it’s whoever gets there first.

Like Dude Man #13

Like Dude Man #12

Site Redevelopment, part 2

More random notes as I continue to redevelop my personal web site, www.genghishack.com.

I’ve been organizing things in the background. I do a little bit more of this every day. Part of getting any large task done is just plugging away at it bit by bit, day by day, even if it shows no visible progress to the outside world.

One thing I needed to fix was the resume link – I wanted to put a new version of my resume up there, and I’m glad I did, because yesterday’s reshuffling of the files caused that link to break. Good thing I don’t have the URL for this site widely circulated yet.

I’ve had this hosting account for a few years, and it shows the signs of use. it’s an SSH account hosted on a linux server, which is good. SSH accounts are good. Don’t even get me started on how bad it is to have FTP-only access to a site that you’re trying to manage. People who think that’s good enough for a professional web developer simply don’t know what they’re doing. For one thing, it lets me run CVS. If you don’t know what CVS is, or if you’ve never used any form of revision control – if you aren’t even sure what the term means – stop now, waste no more time as a web developer, and hie thee off to the nearest bookstore to pick up a copy of Open Source Development with CVS. If you don’t want to spend the buckage, you can read it on the web. You want version control. Even if you’re working on projects all by yourself and not in conjunction with a group of other developers, you want to be able to go back to a previous version of your code when you’ve totally screwed things up, tag your code at various points, maintain separate branches of your code for separate projects, etc. Enough about CVS. Either you know it, or you don’t. CVS is one of those demarcation points in a developer’s career – Suffice to say I’m not much interested in working with anyone on a development project who hasn’t ever used some form of version control.

Back to subject. A clean workspace reflects a clean mind. The same goes for your desk as for your filesystem. If you’ve got stuff lying around everywhere in random locations, it’s going to be awfully hard to concentrate on what’s important. I don’t like to miss details. I like to know where all my information is. Organization is foundation-work for everything that comes after it. Another large part of getting any large task done is just putting everything where it goes.

My home directory is now organized into sites (I have several domains and subdomains pointing at this location), documents, logs, source files, my cvsroot, .ini files, the cgi-bin (required on this web server) and the temp directory. The sites folder contains the root directories for each of my web sites, whether presently operating, in progress, or defunct. The defunct ones I’ll need to clean up at some point, removing code that I want to re-use and deleting the rest, but for right now, they are where they belong. Easy to find and ready to be picked over when I have the time.

My personal site’s root directory needed to be cleaned up a lot, too. It contained artifacts of several old projects and lots of little one-off experiments that I stored there when I was not really paying much attention to how it looked (for a long time, this site was a one-page deal with nothing more than a title and a link to my resumé). The current directory structure of my site reflects much of my thinking about how to partition assets and tasks within the framework of a site. There’s an admin section, a world unto itself; a content directory, because presentation MUST be separated from processing; the always-present directories for css files, JavaScript, images and flash; an includes directory for stuff that must be included by all scripts; a directory to use when uploading files; a directory for libraries (classes, sets of functions and such) that may be loaded and used by some particular script; directories for each of the sections of the site, because I’d much rather have the url read http://mysite/directory/ than http://mysite/page.php; and the index and configuration files for the site. This makes sense to me. Again, I know where everything is. And since my idea of where things should go sometimes changes, I’ve written my code so that I can move a directory where I want it to go and change its location in the config file, and the entire site will know where to access that resource without a hiccup.

This foundational stuff may seem very basic, but it’s important to get the basics right. Once you’ve done that, you can take off from there and do all sorts of cool things. It’s like learning to read or write: the alphabet, the basic set of building blocks, is the hardest thing to learn and get right. It takes a while. You have to memorize all these weird shapes and sounds from nothing, and the order in which they go, and then how they relate to each other, and how to spell words from them, and then how to put the words into sentences – but once you’ve got those basics, you can take off from there into all sorts of worlds. It’s important to get that initial learning right. Get the foundations put solidly in place. If you don’t, you’ll have all kinds of problems later on trying to learn and use more advanced concepts.

So. This is what it is, trying to get all this foundational and framework stuff right. Putting all your tools in the right place. Making sure you have control. Anticipating what kinds of problems you’re going to face. Designing for them from the get-go.

Like Dude Man #11

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