I’m at the NYC Indie Web Camp this weekend at the beautiful New York Times office in Manhattan. Tantek Çelik joined my team at Mozilla about six months ago to work on various Web Standards initiatives that we push forward on the Firefox Platform team. Although our bread and butter is Web Platform Rendering, Tantek is also passionate about advancing user-sovereignty to enable authorship outside of proprietary corporate silos (see POSSE.) I tagged along with him this weekend to learn more.

The Indie Web movement is in the midst of an exciting creative stage. There are people hacking on the building blocks and other folks dogfooding the code. At this point, I’m in the latter camp, looking to solve 2 problems that I have with my 3 web sites:

• junglecode.net – this blog for stuff about various things that I do with the geeks I hang out with (dare I say, my network.)
• junglecode.com – a site to catalog the products I make that happen to also pay my bills.
• junglecode.org – a site to describe non-profit activities (music and other hobbies) that I engage in. I haven’t found much time to write about this stuff lately.

Problem 1: When I first decided to split my online life into 3 top-level domains, I thought it would help organize my efforts into those 3 top-level buckets. It turns out that, in practice, I’ve just split my online persona into 3 sites in various states of intermittent activity. I’d like to try and organize the 3 buckets so that I can post content in any category (org,com,net) and have the posts go to the right site, while still aggregating on this blog. Fortunately, I met Jeremy Zilar this weekend and he works on the 200+ Blogs for The New York Times. My 3 site problem dwarfs in comparison to what the Times has to scale. I’m loving all the brainstorming going on this weekend.

Problem 2: I’d like to make a few bucks on these sites without the usual ad-generated methods. It’s not that I’m above receiving advertising revenue, I just think my audience is a very narrow slice of the geek population that is also very good at not clicking on ads. I would instead like to sell them my stuff. I might sell a single sweatshirt or an extra torque wrench that I happen to have lying around. I’d like to do this in an Indie Web way as I am, in effect, inviting you to a virtual private garage sale (VPGS?) I’m looking into various Web Payments solutions to do this.

I’ve added the IndieWeb plug-in to my WordPress sites so I can send and receive various notifications over IndieWeb protocols like WebMention. I expect to hack on various bits of the solution to these 2 problems as I learn more. I’ll share the code here, in case others may find it helpful.

I’m also interested in extending the Web Platform to enable more Indie Web capabilities at the core of the Open Web stack. It’s really exciting and fun to work on this stuff. What else can we do to make it easier for user-authors to raise their independent voice?

My last two posts didn’t make it on to planet.mozilla.org due to a recent junglecode server move. I asked Robert Accettura to update the entries in the planet database so that server-side redirects aren’t necessary. This post is just testing those changes. It’s also a plug for Planet Mozilla, a most excellent public resource for the Mozilla community.

If you missed these two posts on planet, here you go:
Software Project Estimates: Go Fly a Kite!
Mozilla Platform Rendering in Asia

Building Open Source software presents challenges to engineers and managers that differ greatly from proprietary systems. Open Source doesn’t eliminate the need for proper estimates and the predictability of costs that accurate estimates bring. Open Specifications like the W3C web standards add additional complexity to the estimation process. How are you supposed to know how long a project will take, when the specifications are frequently modified by authors and editors who aren’t under your control?

An estimation method that I often use at Mozilla is based on the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge project. The Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge was the world’s first working railway suspension bridge. It was over 800 feet long, which was a length that was difficult to accurately measure back in 1847, before bridge construction started. The rapid waters and 225-foot high shear cliffs made a direct crossing impossible. The bridge construction must begin by stretching the first wire across the violent stream.

The Niagara Falls Bridge project shares many similarities with a complex software project: multiple stakeholders, unknown scope, dangerous obstacles and difficult terrain. How do you start when you can’t see how far you need to go? In January 1848, fifteen-year-old Homan Walsh flew a kite from the Canadian side of the river and was able to crash the kite into a tree on the New York side. The kite string was used to pull a thicker line back to Canada, then a rope, then metal wire, and construction progressed until a temporary suspension bridge could be built.

The truth is that Homan had a very difficult time getting the kite to fly to the other side! Weather and other unexpected problems left him stranded on the Canadian side for eight days and several failed attempts. Despite the difficulties, his initial kite was essential to the larger goal. When I first talk to engineers about a new software project, I often get estimates that sound like “two or three months, if we’re lucky.” When I hear that, I ask them to go fly a kite.

A “Kite” is just enough code to learn just enough new information about the project so that intelligent estimates can be made. I should note that this code can be very flimsy (like a kite) but functional enough to illuminate the unknown. It’s important that the engineer understands that we will not be shipping the kite! The goal with the kite exercise is to come with estimates that are in multiple pieces of work that each span days or weeks. Estimates that are still measured in weeks may require more kites to break down into days.

Getting that first kite across the gorge can be a very exhilarating experience, and may be just enough motivation to continue the difficult path forward. As an example, a big bridge project for us is Vertical Text and the first kite looked like this. A second kite looked like that.