One of the best things about Twitter is that relationships there can be asymmetrical. Even if I don’t know you or follow your updates, you can still follow mine if you’re interested. Over time, we might talk in @mentions from time to time and I might realize that you’re someone whose updates I’m interested in all the time. In fact, that’s exactly how I end up following most of the people on Twitter that I’ve never met before.

It’s not that I don’t want to hear what everyone has to say, but automatically following thousands of people back would make my timeline impossible to keep up with (and even more productivity-cripplingly distracting than it already is).

One thing about these loose, asymmetric relationships constantly frustrates me though. The requirement that I must follow you in order for you to direct message me, even after I’ve direct messaged you, is too restrictive. Pointlessly restrictive.

It often makes sense to take a Twitter discussion private, but we can only use Twitter to do that if we have a symmetric relationship with each other. Sure, I can follow you temporarily or message you my email address for follow up, but why? It should be easy for Twitter to allow anyone to reply to any direct message for some period of time, or even forever.

Wouldn’t that make the direct message feature a lot more useful?

Each year, I get a little closer to not making this post before the year is over, much less on the actual anniversary of when I started posting (12/21). That’s mainly because it seems more like a “me” post instead of something that you might actually find interesting or useful and that’s not really what this site is supposed to be about. However, every time I mention skipping it, the feedback is in favor of making the post. So, here it is (and I’ll try to do better next year).

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Rob had me on This Developer’s Life recently, along with several other fine folks, talking about drama on the Internet, semicolons, and generally “why so mean?”

I thought it was an interesting episode. Though I’ve occasionally been sucked into “someone’s wrong on the Internet” myself, I try to avoid drama. So many debates-turned-arguments on the Internet are all downside and have almost no potential upside even if you “win”.

So, I was really interested to hear what others had to say about the topic, and they did not disappoint. If the subject sounds interesting to you (and fair warning, there’s almost no technical content in this one), you might enjoy it too.

You can stream or download the episode here: The Developer’s Life – 2.0.9 Drama

If you’re (like me) still working on projects that must work in browsers without great support for HTML5, you might be interested in this article I recently wrote for MSDN’s Script Junkie. It doesn’t go deep into particular implementations, but focuses more on what a polyfill is, why a polyfill is more useful than an arbitrary JavaScript utility library, and then does into a few concrete examples.

Taking advantage of HTML5 in real-world sites and applications can be a daunting proposition. Though modern browsers are implementing HTML5′s new features at a rapid pace, few of us are lucky enough to write applications supporting only the latest crop of browsers. As a professional web developer, that browser fragmentation forces you to spend significant effort navigating the uncomfortable space between the promise of the future and the realities of the present. The good news is that Internet Explorer 10 and 9 support HTML5. Users are also leaving older versions of Internet Explorer. But the share of older versions is likely to remain just enough for developers to support in the foreseeable future.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to give up on supporting HTML5 in the near term. Just as there are techniques for a site to gracefully support variances like multiple screen sizes and different levels of CSS capability, it’s also possible to achieve surprisingly robust cross-browser HTML5 support. Even though older browsers lack many of HTML5’s new APIs, JavaScript is an incredibly flexible language and exposes opportunities to retroactively add new features when they aren’t natively present.

Continue reading HTML5 Now: Getting More Through Polyfills on MSDN »

Scott Hanselman recently invited me onto Hanselminutes to talk about Web APIs, “hashbang” URLs, CDNs, and web performance in general. In the turmoil around having a mid-week holiday here in the US, I hadn’t even noticed that the episode went live last week.

It’s more of an open-ended conversation than us talking about the details of a particular technology. So, we’d both welcome you joining the conversation in the comments there on Scott’s post.

Click here to head over to the Hanselminutes website, give it a listen, and let us know what you think.

It’s been a few months since I began reviewing ASUS’ Zenbook UX31 based on day-to-day use, and it’s time to wrap the process up with a third and final post. The original plan for this series of reviews was that I’d write three posts about the Zenbook, finishing with one that summarized my experience using it regularly for a few months.

Unfortunately, the trouble I had with its keyboard sabotaged that plan. If you haven’t been following along, a month with the Zenbook’s keyboard was all I could endure. However, almost every other aspect of the UX31 put it solidly in the running as a successor to my MacBook Air.

Rather than ending on that sour note about the keyboard, this last post in the series will cover a few things that the Zenbook did well. So well, I’ll be looking for these features in whichever Ultrabook™ ultimately does replace my MacBook Air.

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The IE team published an in-depth post over the weekend, raising a few concerns about StatCounter’s methodology (or lack thereof) for reporting browser market share. Their points were interesting to consider, but one of them stood out to me:

You’ll notice some pretty big differences in the weighting of StatCounter versus Net Applications. First and foremost, the most populous country in the world, China, doesn’t make the top 20 for StatCounter, when in fact it represents the world’s largest internet population.

[...]

To further explore this problem, we re-ran the StatCounter numbers and weighted their publicly reported individual country browser share numbers by the CIA internet population data. This calculation would then represent a true country or geo-weighted view of worldwide browser data based on the actual world’s internet population.

It’s true that we should be wary of methodology issues that can creep into data extracted from analytics services that weren’t designed with aggregate statistics in mind. StatCounter’s data is often accepted at face value, without any detailed scrutiny. However, I believe this geo-weighting approach they’ve explored may be as flawed as the raw, unadjusted data itself.

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Note: If you haven’t read my initial impressions of the Zenbook, you might want to head over and read that first: The ASUS Zenbook UX31: Initial impressions

I’ve been using my ASUS Zenbook for just over a month at this point, and it’s time for a second review now that I’ve used it for a while on a day-to-day basis. I’ve heard from many of you about being eager to read the next installment in this process, so I’m glad to know that you’re finding this experiment useful too.

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I took part in The Code Project’s A Coder Interview series recently, and the result was published there yesterday. Terrence happened to send the questions at a rare moment when I wasn’t running in five directions at once, which led to me accidentally writing quite a bit.

Part of it touches on something important to me that I plan to write more about eventually:

What advice would you offer to an up-and-coming programmer?

Write about programming. Start a blog, answer questions on The Code Project or Stack Overflow, or whatever else suits you, but find some way to write about programming.

I can’t count how many times I began writing about something I thought I knew thoroughly, only to find that I had to fill in several important gaps in my knowledge to write about it competently. Just as important, you have to learn topics more comprehensively to distill and teach them in simple terms. The combination of writing about programming and making that writing as clear and simple as you can is a powerful exercise.

[…]

The interview also exposes my shameful stance on tabs vs. spaces, but you’ll have to go there to read that part…

Click here to read the full interview at The Code Project

For over a year now, I’ve been using a 13” MacBook Air as my only laptop. Though it’s a bit underpowered and I prefer Windows to OS X, I was ultimately unable to resist Apple’s build quality compared to the Dell I had used previously.

However, I never fully resigned myself to accepting a dichotomy between quality construction and operating system. Thankfully, the recent proliferation of Windows-based Ultrabook™ machines seems to be rapidly bridging that divide.

Given my already-growing desire to find an alternative, when I was contacted about reviewing the ASUS’ Zenbook UX31 Ultrabook™, I decided to give it a go. I know I’m not alone in having been frustrated with a choice between machines that run Windows well and quality hardware, so I hope that you’ll find my experience of trying to move back from the MacBook hardware useful.

Disclaimer: Up front, I want you to know that I’m receiving a complementary UX31 in return for evaluating it and writing a few posts about that experience. I’ll give you my honest assessment of it and only recommend it if it meets my own standards, but I also think it’s important to be transparent and not potentially abuse your trust.

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