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Learning from Twitter

ejohn.org

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Re: Learning from Twitter

#21

Post by jeresig »

revorad wrote: post #11
johns wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know you were part of a YC company. Which one was it?

I think it was JumpChat, an app for mass messaging by combining text, email and IM.

That's correct! We started work on it in early 2006 and moved to Boston/Cambridge in June 2006 to participate in the Y Combinator program (which was a lot of fun, as many have said). We had a monumentally hard time trying to get people to fund our idea. I remember having a meeting with a potential angel investor (in Boston) that said, after our full deck was done, "Well, that sounds cool, but I'll have to ask my kids to see what they think." That was pretty typical of the Boston investing scene, with regards to mobile in 2006.

It was around that time that Twitter came out (which we poo-pooed due to its lack of features). It wasn't until a few months later (and after we had run out of money and had to get real jobs) that we realized that Twitter was a much better solution for what we had wanted to achieve.

It's not a loss, though. We had a great experience and all ended up getting great jobs doing things that we love. I went on to work at Mozilla. Julia went on to work at a few startups and is now starting a pretty cool video dating site: Inlu.st, and Josh is working at Blue State Digital (he did work for the Obama campaign).

Re: Learning from Twitter

#22

Post by jeresig »

revorad wrote: post #13
jeresig wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, while I assume that this was mostly rhetorical and largely tongue-in-cheek it is a question that I've been pondering lately. (Or, more accurately, thinking about what work excites me.) I've been working on jQuery full-time now for about 1.5 years (sponsored by my employer, Mozilla). Prior to that I worked on jQuery in my spare time for about 4 years while doing other things (I was in college, then in Y Combinato…

I'd love to hear more about what art you are involved in (besides jQuery of course!).

Unfortunately I've never had any formal training in art (either through technique or through study) - and it wasn't until after college that I realized that this was a passion of mine - so it's been pretty slow going. I've been taking a number of classes and practicing on my own, starting to become more familiar with oil painting and generally trying to improve my technique and composition.

However where my real passion lies is in art history. Specifically I've been spending a considerable amount of time studying, researching, and collecting Ukiyo-e (Edo-era Japanese woodblock prints). It's an incredible art form and to study it is to study the complete culture of Japan in the 17th to 19th century. I'm lucky as I live less than a mile away from the Harvard art library and have a friend that works as a librarian there - so I end up spending a lot of time checking out research material, studying, and learning. (For example, right now I'm reading a book on Kabuki theater and its relevance within the context of Ukiyo-e.)

I've started to write a little bit about the art form (as my time allows, which is kind of challenging) here: http://ukiyoe.tumblr.com/

I also run the Ukiyo-e sub-Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/ukiyoe/

I hope to do more research and writing in this area during the upcoming months, time permitting of course!

Re: Learning from Twitter

#24

Post by jeresig »

cosgroveb wrote: post #23
revorad wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was JumpChat, an app for mass messaging by combining text, email and IM.

So like wuph?

Pretty much, yeah! When that episode of The Office aired we all emailed each other - it was pretty hilarious. Of course ours was a bit more pragmatic, it would only send to the medium that would best get in contact with you - and you could use it to bulk send messages to your friends. A tool like that doesn't really need to exist in this day-and-age as everyone always has their cell phone and modern cell phones are super-capable.

For reference, the clip from The Office: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytc9-wGCHW0

Re: Learning from Twitter

#25

Post by Charuru »

What in the world. I expected something interesting, but this is some major fail by twitter. Not caching selectors just boggles my mind. How can a million dollar web company do this?

Re: Learning from Twitter

#26

Post by cosgroveb »

jeresig wrote: post #24
cosgroveb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like wuph?

Pretty much, yeah! When that episode of The Office aired we all emailed each other - it was pretty hilarious. Of course ours was a bit more pragmatic, it would only send to the medium that would best get in contact with you - and you could use it to bulk send messages to your friends. A tool like that doesn't really need to exist in this day-and-age as everyone always has their cell phone and modern cell phones are s…

That's awesome. Facebook seems to be trying to do what you did with their new messaging features. I'm sure it's totally different in some fundamental way but interesting that they went there.

Re: Learning from Twitter

#27

Post by cabalamat »

This sort of thing is one reason I hate websites which use a lot of Javascript when they don't need to. Another reason is that it breaks expectations of how websites should work.

Re: Learning from Twitter

#28

Post by didip »

dmethvin wrote: post #17
bretthopper wrote: post #5

It's good to know that this situation will lead to improvements in jQuery. However, I'm disappointed in how twitter, or more accurately, Dustin Diaz handled this situation. They identified some performance issues. Narrowed it down to a jQuery version but just left it there. jQuery is open source so they could have done some investigating on their own and tried to narrow down what changed in that selector. Especially…

I'm on the jQuery core team. As you might guess, when a high-profile site seems to be having troubles with jQuery, we want to fix it whether it involves a bug fix or tutorial help. It would really help us out if people could slip our pre-release versions into their test environments. There's a 1.5 beta available now ( http://blog.jquery.com/2011/01/14/jquery-1-5-beta-1-released... ). Don't wait several months to try…

Deployed on production already (http://cdn.mybucket.co/static/js/jquery-1.5b1.mini.js). I minify it using Crockford's jsmin script.

We happened to use http://www.infinite-scroll.com, which also bind to window scroll event as well. Let's see how it goes.

Thank you so much for all the hard work that goes into jQuery.

Re: Learning from Twitter

#29

Post by long »

dionidium wrote: post #4

I use a generic version of the waiting-for-pause trick: // execute callback only after a pause in user input; the function returned // can be used to handle an event type that tightly repeats (such as typing // or scrolling events); it will execute the callback only if the given timout // period has passed since the last time the same event fired function createOnPause(callback, timeout, _this) { return function(e) {…

For anyone that's interested, two related techniques are called "throttling" and "debouncing".

Re: Learning from Twitter

#30

Post by ryankirkman »

long wrote: post #29
dionidium wrote: post #4

I use a generic version of the waiting-for-pause trick: // execute callback only after a pause in user input; the function returned // can be used to handle an event type that tightly repeats (such as typing // or scrolling events); it will execute the callback only if the given timout // period has passed since the last time the same event fired function createOnPause(callback, timeout, _this) { return function(e) {…

For anyone that's interested, two related techniques are called "throttling" and "debouncing".

Both of which are available in the awesome Underscore.js library: http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/
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