Posts about stuff that is related to me, and not to Web design & development.
It has been almost a decade since this blog last saw a redesign.
In these 9 years, my life changed dramatically. I joined and left W3C, joined the CSS WG, went to MIT for a PhD, published a book, got married, had a baby, among other things. I designed dozens of websites for dozens of projects, but this theme remained constant, with probably a hasty tweak here and there but nothing more than that. Even its mobile version was a few quick media queries to make it palatable on mobile.
I just dealt with one of the weirdest bugs and thought you may find it amusing too.
In one of my slides for my upcoming talk “Even More CSS Secrets”, I had a Mavo app on a <form>, and the app included a collection to quickly create a UI to manage pairs of values for something I wanted to calculate in one of my live demos. A Mavo collection is a repeatable HTML element with affordances to add items, delete items, move items etc. Many of these affordances are implemented via <button> elements generated by Mavo.
Normally, hitting Enter inside a text field within a collection adds a new item, as one would expect. However, I noticed that when I hit Enter inside any item, not only no item was added, but an item was being deleted, with the usual “Item deleted [Undo]” UI and everything!
At first I thought it was a bug with the part of Mavo code that adds items on Enter and deletes empty items on backspace, so I commented that out. Nope, still happening. I was already very puzzled, since I couldn’t remember any other part of the codebase that deletes items in response to keyboard events.
So, I added breakpoints on the delete(item) method of Mavo.Collection to inspect the call stack and see how execution got there. Turned out, it got there via a normal …click event on the actual delete button! What fresh hell was this? I never clicked any delete button!
And then it dawned on me: <button> elements with no type attribute set are submit buttons by default! Quote from spec: The missing value default and invalid value default are the Submit Button state.. This makes no difference in most cases, UNLESS you’re inside a form. The delete button of the first item had been turned into the de facto default submit button just because it was the first button in that form and it had no type!
I also remembered that regardless of how you submit a form (e.g. by hitting Enter on a single-line text field) it also fires a click event on the default submit button, because people often listen to that instead of the form’s submit event. Ironically, I was cancelling the form’s submit event in my code, but it still generated that fake click event, making it even harder to track down as no form submission was actually happening.
The solution was of course to go through every part of the Mavo code that generates buttons and add type=”button” to them. I would recommend this to everyone who is writing libraries that will operate in unfamiliar HTML code. Most of the time a type-less <button> will work just fine, but when it doesn’t, things get really weird.
Women speaking up about the sexism they have experienced in tech is great for raising awareness about the issues. However, when no positive stories get out, the overall picture painted is bleak, which could scare even more women away.
Lucky for me, I fell in love with programming a decade before I even heard there is a sexism problem in tech. Had I read about it before, I might have decided to go for some other profession. Who wants to be fighting an uphill battle all her life?
Thankfully, my experience has been quite different. Being in this industry has brought me nothing but happiness. Yes, there are several women who have had terrible experiences, and I’m in no way discounting them. They may even be the majority, though I am not aware of any statistics. However, there is also the other side. Those of us who have had incredibly positive experiences, and have always been treated with nothing but respect. That side’s stories need to be heard too, not silenced out of fear that we will become complacent and stop trying for more equality. Stories like mine should become the norm, not the exception.
I’ve had a number of different roles in tech over the course of my life. I’ve been a student, a speaker & author, I’ve worked at W3C, I’ve started & maintain several successful open source projects and I’m currently dabbling in Computer Science research. In none of these roles did I ever feel I was unfairly treated due to my gender. That is not because I’m oblivious to sexism. I tend to be very sensitive to seeing it, and I often notice even the smallest acts of sexism (“death by a thousand paper cuts”). I see a lot of sexism in society overall. However, inside this industry, my gender never seemed to matter much, except perhaps in positive ways.
On my open source repos, I have several contributors, the overwhelming majority of which, is male. I’ve never felt less respected due to my gender. I’ve never felt that my work was taken less seriously than male OSS developers. I’ve never felt my contributors would not listen to me. I’ve never felt my work was unfairly scrutinized. Even when I didn’t know something, or introduced a horrible bug, I’ve never been insulted or berated. The community has been nothing but friendly, helpful and respectful. If anything, I’ve sometimes wondered if my gender is the reason I hardly ever get any shit!
On stage, I’ve never gotten any negative reactions. My talks always get excellent reviews, which have nothing to do with me being female. There is sometimes the odd complimentary tweet about my looks, but that’s not only exceedingly rare, but also always combined with a compliment about the actual talk content. My gender only affected my internal motivation: I often felt I had to be good, otherwise I would be painting all female tech speakers in a negative light. But other people are not at fault for my own stereotype threat.
My book, CSS Secrets, has been as successful as an advanced CSS book could possibly aspire to be and got to an average of 5 stars on Amazon only a few months after its release. It’s steadily the 5th bestseller on CSS and was No 1 for a while shortly after publication. My gender did not seem to negatively affect any of that, even though there’s a picture of me in the french flap so there are no doubts about me being female (as if the name Lea wasn’t enough of a hint).
As a student, I’ve never felt unfairly treated due to my gender by any of my professors, even the ones in Greece, a country that is not particularly famous for its gender equal society, to put it mildly.
As a new researcher, I have no experience with publishing papers yet, so I cannot share any experiences on that. However, I’ve been treated with nothing but respect by both my advisor and colleagues. My opinion is always heard and valued and even when people don’t agree, I can debate it as long and as intensely as I want, without being seen as aggressive or “bossy”.
I’ve worked at W3C and still participate as an Invited Expert in the CSS Working Group. In neither of these roles did my gender seem to matter in any way. I’ve always felt that my expertise and skillset were valued and my opinions heard. In fact, the most well-respected member of the CSS WG, is the only other woman in it: fantasai.
Lastly, In all my years as a working professional, I’ve always negotiated any kind of remuneration, often hard. I’ve never lost an opportunity because of it, or been treated with negativity afterwards.
On the flip side, sexism today is rarely overt. Given that hardly anybody over ten will flat out admit they think women are inferior (even to themselves), it’s often hard to tell when a certain behavior stems from sexist beliefs. If someone is a douchebag to you, are they doing it because you’re a woman, or because they’re douchebags? If someone is criticizing your work, are they doing it because they genuinely found something to criticize or because they’re negatively predisposed due to your gender? It’s impossible to know, especially since they don’t know either! If you confront them on their sexism, they will deny all of it, and truly believe it. It takes a lot of introspection to see one’s internalized stereotypes. Therefore, a lot of the time, you cannot be sure if you have experienced sexist behavior, and there is no way to find out for sure, since the perpetrator doesn’t know either. There are many false positives and false negatives there.
Perhaps I don’t feel I have experienced much sexism because I prefer to err on the side of false negatives. Paraphrasing Blackstone, I would rather not call out sexist behavior ten times, than wrongly accuse someone of it once. It might also have to do with my personality: I’m generally confident and can be very assertive. When somebody is being a jerk to me, I will not curl in a ball and question my life choices, I will reply to them in the same tone. However, those two alone cannot make the difference between a pit rampant with sexism and an egalitarian paradise. I think a lot of it is that we have genuinely made progress, and we should celebrate it with more women coming out with their positive experiences (it cannot just be me, right?).
Ironically, one of the very few times I have experienced any sexism in the industry was when a dude was trying to be nice to me. I was in a speaker room at a conference in Las Vegas, frantically working on my slides, not participating in any of the conversations around me. At some point, one of the guys said “fuck” in a conversation, then turned and apologized to me. Irritated about the sudden interruption, I lifted my head and looked around. I noticed for the first time that day that I was the only woman in the room. His effort to be courteous made me feel that I was different, the odd one out, the one we must be careful around and treat like a fragile flower. To this day, I regret being too startled to reply “Eh, I don’t give a fuck”.
Anyone who follows this blog, my twitter, or my work probably is aware that I’m not a huge fan of big libraries. I think wrapper objects are messy, and big libraries are overkill for smaller projects. On large projects, one uses frameworks like React or Angular anyway, not libraries.
Anyone who writes Vanilla JS on a daily basis probably is aware that it can sometimes be, ahem, somewhat unpleasant to work with. Sure, the situation is orders of magnitude better than it was when I started. Back then, IE6 was the dominant browser and you needed a helper function to even add event listeners to an element (remember element.attachEvent?) or to get elements by a class!
Fun fact: I learned JavaScript back then by writing my own library, called jAsset. I had not heard of jQuery when I started it in 2007, so I had even coded my own selector engine! (Anyone remember slickspeed?) jAssset had plenty of nice helper functions, its own UI library and a cool logo. I had even started to make a website for its UI components, seen on the right.
Sadly, jAsset died the sad inevitable death of all unreleased projects: Without external feedback, I had nobody to hold me back from adding to its API every time I personally needed a helper function. And adding, and adding, and adding… Until it became 5000+ loc long and its benefit of being lightweight or comprehensible had completely vanished. It collapsed under its own weight before it even saw the light of day. I abandoned it and went through a few years of using jQuery as my preferred helper library. Eventually, my distaste for wrapper objects, the constantly improving browser support for new APIs that made Vanilla JS more palatable, and the decline of overly conspicuous browser bugs led me to give it up.
It was refreshing, and educational, but soon I came to realize that while Vanilla JS is orders of magnitude better than it was when I started, certain APIs are still quite unwieldy, which can be annoying if you use them often. For example, the Vanilla JS for creating an element, with other elements inside it, events and inline styles is so commonly needed, but also so verbose and WET, it can make one suicidal.
However, Vanilla JS does not mean “use no abstractions”. Programming is all about abstractions! The Vanilla JS movement, is about favoring speed, smaller abstractions and understanding of the Web Platform, over big libraries that we treat as a black box. It’s about using libraries to save time, not to skip learning.
So, I used my own tiny helpers, on every project. They were small and easy to understand, instead of several KB of code aiming to fix browser bugs I will likely never encounter and let me create complex nested DOM structures with a single JSON-like object. Over time, their API solidified and improved. On larger projects it was a separate file which I had tentatively codenamed Utopia (due to the lack of browser bug fixes and optimistic use of modern APIs). On smaller ones just a few helper methods (I could not live without at least my tiny 2 sloc $() and $$() helpers!). Here is a sample from my open source repos:
Notice any recurring themes there? 🙂
I never mentioned Utopia.js anywhere, besides silently including it in my projects, so it went largely unnoticed. Sometimes people would look at it, ask me to release it, I’d promise them I would and then nothing. A few years ago, someone noticed it, liked it and documented it a bit (site is down now it seems). However, it was largely my little secret, hidden in public view.
For the past half year, I’ve been working hard on my research project at MIT. It’s pretty awesome and is aimed at helping people who know HTML/ CSS but not JS, achieve more with Web technologies (and that’s all I can say for now). It’s also written in JS, so I used Utopia as a helper library, naturally. Utopia evolved even more with this project, got renamed to Bliss and got chainability via my idea about extending DOM prototypes without collisions (can be disabled and the property name is customizable).
All this worked fine while I was the only person working on the project. Thankfully, I might get some help soon, and it might be rather inexperienced (the academia equivalent of interns). Help is very welcome, but it did raise the question: How will these people, who likely only know jQuery, work on the project? [1]
The answer was that the time has come to polish, document and release Bliss to the world. My plan was to spend a weekend documenting it, but it ended up being a little over a week on and off, when procrastinating from other tasks I had to do. However, I’m very proud of the resulting docs, so much that I gifted myself a domain for it. They are fairly extensive (though some functions still need work) and has two things I always missed in other API docs:
So, enjoy Bliss. The helper library for people who don’t like helper libraries. 🙂 In a way, it feels that a journey of 8 years, finally ends today. I hope the result makes you blissful too.
Oh, and don’t forget to follow @blissfuljs on twitter!
[1]: Academia is often a little behind tech-wise, so everyone uses jQuery here — hardly any exceptions. Even though browser support doesn’t usually even matter to research projects!
After getting fed up with too many “promotional” emails and newsletters with incredibly obscure unsubscribe links, I decided to make this tumblr to point out such examples of digital douchebaggery. This annoying dark pattern is so widespread that Google even added a feature to Gmail for making those unsubscribe links obvious!
Unsubscribe links are crucial to promotional emails. They are not just another menu item. They are not something that should be hidden in a blurb of tiny low contrast text. Unsubscribe links should be immediately obvious to anyone looking for them. You want people to be reading your email because they’re interested, not because they can‘t find the way out. Otherwise you are the digital equivalent of those annoying door-to-door salesmen who just won’t go away.
— From my introductory post on Spot the unsubscribe!
On the spur of the moment, after yet another email newsletter with a hard to find Unsubscribe link, I decided to quickly put together a tumblog about this UX pet peeve of mine, called Spot the Unsubscribe!. In less than an hour, it was ready and had a few posts as well 🙂
Hopefully if this bothers others as well, there will be submissions. Otherwise, new posts will be rather infrequent.
Last year, I did something crazy, that I’ve been wanting to do since I was little: I applied to MIT’s PhD program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
It was not only crazy because I have been working for several years already, but also because I only applied to MIT, as I decided I did not want to go to any other university, both for pragmatic and emotional reasons. As any prospective grad student will tell you, applying to only one top university is recipe for failure. I didn’t tell many people, but everyone who knew thought I’d get in — except me. You see, I wasn’t a typical candidate. Sure, I have done lots of things I’m proud of, but I didn’t have an amazing GPA or publications in prestigious academic conferences.
It felt like a very long shot, so you can imagine my excitement when I received the letters of acceptance, about a week ago. I will remember that moment forever. I was watching Breaking Bad, feeling miserable over a breakup that happened only a few hours earlier. About a minute into the episode (s05e09), I saw an email notification titled “Your application to MIT EECS”. My first thought was that there was some problem with my application. And then I read the first few lines:
Dear Michailia Verou:
If you have not already heard from them, you will shortly receive a letter from the EECS department at MIT, informing you that you have been admitted to the graduate program in Computer Science at MIT next fall. Congratulations!!
WHAAAA? Was it a scam? But then, how did they have all my details? Holy mother of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I got in!!! Soon thereafter, a letter from CSAIL followed (where I said I wanted to work, specifically in the UID), and then even more letters. I started calling everyone who knew I applied to share the news, though it proved quite hard to form sentences instead of uncontrollably screaming in joy. I was (and am!) so excited about the future, that it completely overshadows any other life problems (at least for the time being).
Of course, my happiness is mixed with sheer terror. I keep worrying that I will be the dumbest person in the room, or that I don’t remember as much from my undergrad studies as the others will. I’m even terrified of meeting my future advisor(s) in case getting to know me better makes them wonder why I was accepted. But I try to remind myself about impostor syndrome, and from what I’ve read in forums & blogs, it seems that I’m not alone in having such fears.
I held off blogging about it until I felt I was able to write something coherent, but I can’t wait to share my excitement any longer.
To the future!
To real life plot twists!
To MIT!
Boy, I’m thrilled. 😀
I was excited and surprised to find out I’ve been in the 10 finalists for two (2!) categories in the net awards this year:
You can vote for me by clicking the above links and have my eternal gratitude 🙂
Furthermore, the CERN line mode browser project, of which I was a part of, has been nominated in “Best Collaborative Project”!
I’ve given “The humble border-radius” more than once, so you can pick one to watch below (in the net awards page they’ve linked to the FOWD London one):
I would recommend the CSSDay one, as it changes every time and that one is newer.
Thanks again to anyone who nominated me and everyone who votes for me. You’re all wonderful. <3
I guess this will not be useful to many, but thought I’d open source it anyway, in case someone else finds it useful. I mostly wrote it because after 50+ conferences, I got seriously fed up updating the list by editing the HTML manually. Now I will only have to edit a JSON file manually! 😛
Admittedly, it’s not my best code (more like a quick hack), but it should be pretty easy to adapt to your needs, even to adapt it to lists of different things instead of talks. Using it for talks is very straight forward: Include the CSS and JS, add a list with a class of “talks” where you want it, done.
Hope you enjoy it 🙂
Links: Live demo | Github repo | Script page
I wish I could speak at CSSConf.eu, but unfortunately I had to decline the invitation, as it collided with a prior speaking engagement I had agreed on. I recently got another email from the organizers with an interesting question:
We want to make this event as stress-free for our speakers as possible. Since you spoke at a bunch of events, can you share a tip or two about what will make a speakers’ life easier, and their stay more pleasant? Any typical mistakes we can avoid?
I thought it was lovely that they care about their speakers enough to ask this, this already places them above average. I started writing a reply, but I soon realized this is information that could be useful for other conference organizers as well, so I decided to post it here instead. So, what makes speakers happy?
These are things every good conference is doing for their speakers, although they often miss one or two. They keep speakers happy, but they ‘re not out of the ordinary.
These are all things one or more conferences have done for me, but they are not generally common so they are a positive surprise when they happen, not something expected.
Also, make sure you read PPK’s excellent Conference Organizer’s Handbook.
About a year ago, I announced I was joining W3C as a full-time staff member, to work on Developer Relations and education. Working at W3C was a dream come true and I can’t say I was disappointed. Over the past year I’ve worked with some amazingly brilliant people, hopefully increased awareness for web standards in the developer community and helped materialize the vision behind WebPlatform.org. It’s been a fun ride and working for a non-profit was very fulfilling. If somebody told me a year ago that I would decide to leave W3C on my own free will, I would’ve asked them what they were smoking. However, our future selves often surprise us and although it was the most difficult decision of my life, I recently decided to leave. July 31st will be my last day at W3C. I will attempt to describe the reasons below for anyone interested, but in no way does me leaving mean that I don’t deeply appreciate W3C or that I regretted joining. If I could go a year back, I would make the same choice.
I didn’t have much time to work on my pet projects, as my job was consuming pretty much the entire me. This is absolutely not W3C’s fault, it’s mine and a pretty common side effect of working from home. Pull requests kept piling up on Github, I didn’t have many ideas for new side projects or time for research & to come up with new techniques. I was able to work a bit on Dabblet and a WPD Prism plugin, as they were useful for WebPlatform.org, but for the most part, I wanted to work more on open source projects, do more research, blog more etc. I also recently signed a book deal with O’Reilly for a book on advanced CSS techniques (“CSS Secrets”, ETA Spring 2014) and I wanted to take some time off and write a great inaugural book, not just a decent one (and design it too!). I also kinda missed doing workshops or even client work, who knew!
Having more time will also mean I will be able to focus more on standards work, which is a huge passion of mine. I know it sounds odd to leave W3C to work more on …standards, but standards work was never a part of my job at W3C. If I wanted to devote time to actively participate in the CSS WG beyond the weekly telcon, or to the specification I edit, I would have to do it outside work hours. Obviously, I will still have to do it in my free time, but I recall having more of that when I was self-employed.
I want to be in a job that’s a challenge, that helps me grow and become a better professional. While I appreciate WebPlatform.org, I didn’t feel that doing front-end development & design on it made me particularly better at what I do, at least compared to other things I could have been doing in the past year. It could be a perfect opportunity to grow for someone else, but it wasn’t for me.
I did become a better public speaker over the past year, but I would likely be doing as many talks anyway. I got some valuable conference organizing experience from W3Conf, which I thoroughly enjoyed working on, but that was only a small part of my work.
Had I stayed, my job description for the upcoming year would have a slightly different focus. Since W3C Developer Relations was a new activity, neither Doug (my manager) nor I were quite sure how we could make the biggest impact, so we were experimenting to some degree. A few months after I joined, WebPlatform.org launched and we slowly concentrated our efforts on that. If I had stayed for another year, my job would have an even stronger WebPlatform.org focus. Half of it would be front-end design & development and even writing documentation for a day per week. That meant I would have to cut down many parts of my job that I enjoyed and wanted to concentrate more on, such as public speaking and event planning, and though it includes some public-facing activities like gathering feedback from developers, I’d like to do even more of that. This was not a bad decision on W3C’s part — WebPlatform.org needs somebody concentrating on those aspects of it. However, although I strongly believe in the vision behind the project, this was not what I would personally enjoy doing.
Even though I’m leaving W3C, it will always have a very special place in my heart. I met & worked with the most brilliant people I have ever met. Special mention to Amy, who did not just prove to be an intelligent, interesting and kind person, but also a great friend in the past couple of weeks that I got to know her better. I got to visit MIT and work from there for a while, which was an incredible experience. I got to contribute to WebPlatform.org which is a very ambitious and honorable project that I strongly believe in. I got to co-organize W3Conf, which turned out to a successful and fun conference.
Me leaving is a personal decision that has less to do with W3C and more to do with what I want out of life. But I’m going to sorely miss the W3C Team, the culture, the technical discussions. It’s been a fun ride and I’m grateful for the chance and the trust W3C placed in me. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself working for W3C again at some point in the future, in some way or in a different role.
But for now, here’s to the future! I’m thrilled.
As you can imagine, there is one more opening now. 🙂 Are you a great designer with front-end development skills? Are you passionate about creating the best open web platform documentation on the Web? Apply now! You will be able to work from wherever in the world you want, whatever hours in the day you want, you will have great autonomy and a pretty cool boss. Sweet, huh?
