Being able to correctly estimate time is a very important skill for speakers and people who record themselves on screencasts and the like. The media loves you when you can deliver a sound-bite of a certain length. So I thought it would be a fun thing to build a very simple game to test your sense of time.

So go and play Time yourself (source on GitHub). All you need to do is to accept the challenge and you get a message telling you how many seconds you should press your mouse or a key and it will tell you how many milliseconds you were off. Of course it then also gives you a chance to boast about your skills on Twitter using the #timeyourself hash tag.

Under the hood this is a demo for an upcoming event article for Smashing magazine and it uses the timeStamp of click and key events to measure how long you pressed the key or the mouse.

Enjoy!

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Getting upgraded to business class on my flight back from Hong Kong as BA didn’t have a vegetarian meal for me! Flatbed win with 8 hours straight sleep.
• Celebrating my birthday with my friends and getting a giant duck:
• PPK’s slides on JavaScript Events from his presentation at Yahoo
• Splendid Cappucino Latte Art
• Meeting colleagues from long long ago randomly in Australia and them blogging about your talk
• A great presentation by filament group on Access oriented web design
• Vimeo doing a very nice custom Flash effect for the Let it Shine ad.
• Sand/Stone is an interesting idea, “a 6,000km-long wall of artificially solidified sandstone architecture that would span the Sahara Desert, east to west, offering a combination of refugee housing and a “green wall” against the future spread of the desert”
• The Full Frontal conference is now live, come to Brighton in November to get your JavaScript fix.
• A good comparison of Game Developers and Porn Stars

I am right now in Santa Clara, California for the end of the year wrap-up and planning sessions of the Yahoo Developer Network. One thing I am realizing is that it is very tough to measure the success or really the impact of what an evangelist does. As my company does not have any commercial programs that tie with the offerings I talk about (all the APIs are free but some are limited to a certain amount of hits per day and there is no way to “buy” more – BOSS is working on that though) I don’t make the company any money.

What I do though is go out there and tell people about the things we have. On the flipside I get feedback from the outside world and see implementations of our work to feed back into the company. This is worth a lot – you cannot determine the quality of a product if you are the one who did it.

This is the same for every evangelist/advocacy role in any of the companies out there. The problem is that when reporting what you’ve done up the hierarchy in a company a lot of things get lost. Measuring the success of a company is a very tough job and it increases with the size of the company. This leads to terrible decisions being made (there will be another post about this here).

As an evangelist/advocate the hardest job is to tell people exactly what your impact was. A lot of what you do is planting mental seeds and inspiring people to work differently – that can’t be measured in hard figures. Other companies measure the success of an event for example by how many business cards were collected and have a department that follows these up by contacting people. I don’t like this much, first of all because a lot of the people I meet don’t have business cards but follow me on twitter instead and secondly because they gave me the card and not the company.

So in order to measure the success of any developer network we need your feedback and success stories of how what we’ve explained and shown has impacted your work. A blog post like this one on Yahoo Pipes makes me happy, as do tweets like this one.

While I am happily scrounging the web for these gems it is annoying that I need to do that. The biggest problem is that people are not commenting any longer. I don’t know why – personally I love to give a comment on where I found out some information. It keeps my concerns and the original message in context. When I twitter my personal view on something the 140 character limit and lack of original text will lead to information loss.

So my wishes from all of you on behalf of all the people in big companies organizing and supporting developer events (yahoo, microsoft, adobe, sun, paypal, ebay…) are following.

If you enjoy free information, swag, being able to directly reach internal experts and being able to network with a select group of like-minded people:

• please leave comments on the blogs/announcement pages of the events (in our case the YDN blog and upcoming – a lot of people only look there and don’t have time to scrounge the web for all the info.
• Use tags we provide at events to tag your photos, blog posts, tweets, videos…
• Tell us about cool implementations and changes in your company based on what we talked about – we are happy to feature those and send you link love and there is nothing cooler than telling the world how someone else but us have done something cool with our stuff
• If you sign up for an event – show up (or send a colleague). I am getting terribly sick of spending a lot of money to hire locations and have 150 sign up to the event in the first 10 minutes – effectively blocking out people that should be there – and then 20 show up! This is wasted time and money – and in the current climate that is not a clever thing to do.

I love my job and I am doing quite extensive work to make the IT industry understand that tech evangelism is not a waste of money but that there is a massive need for it. Marketing and PR departments just cannot reach geeks and internal geeks have neither the drive or the opportunities to talk to the world about the great things they do. I am very sure that innovation and change in IT is not coming from top down but from people who dare to talk to the right people to initiate change. As I put it in my talk at accessibility 2.0 geeks that care are the drivers of innovation and I don’t want to lose the opportunities we have right now.

When I started in IT events were massively expensive and I had to negotiate for months with my managers to get tickets. We are past this – thanks to developer networks and evangelists. I’d hate to see this go and developers falling back to being deliverers and not allowed to go out and play.

This was a question I got in the office today and there is no shame in asking it:

I am using Event Delegation on one of my products and I need to stop the main handler on the body from firing when I click a certain button. How do I do that?

The answer is of course to use stopPropagation() or cancelBubble(), both nicely wrapped in YAHOO.util.Event.stopPropagation():

HTML:

JavaScript:

YAHOO.util.Event.onContentReady(‘buttons’,function(){

YAHOO.util.Event.on(document.body,’click’,function(e){

var t = YAHOO.util.Event.getTarget(e);

snitch(‘
It was the ’ + t + ’ that was clicked
‘);

});

YAHOO.util.Event.on(‘tease’,’click’,function(e){

snitch(‘
that was the first button
‘);

YAHOO.util.Event.stopPropagation(e);

});

YAHOO.util.Event.on(‘tease2’,’click’,function(e){

snitch(‘
that was the second button
‘);

});

function snitch(msg){

document.getElementById(‘littlesnitch’).innerHTML += msg;

}

	
});

Try it out here: Overriding Event Delegation with stopPropagation

• March 18th, Roosevelt Hotel NYC, US, AjaxWorld – talking about Building large web applications with the YUI
• March 21st – March22nd, Montreal, Quebec – Nurun workshop on Accessibility
• April 3rd, Scotland, Highland Fling, Scotland – Sharing the joy – building badges for distribution
• April 25th (one day shy of my birthday), London, AbilityNet’s “Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom” – right and wrong implementation of accessibility

Planned talks (need confirmation)

• Ajax Experience 2008 – sent in “the human factor in web applications” and “YUI for control freaks” as proposals
• Tech conference about the future of web development in Beijing

Past talks

• February 12th, London Trocadero Beers and innovation #13 – A panel that chats about the changes of relationships between developers and designers (costs £25 though, didn’t know that)
• February 20th, somewhere in Leeds GeekUp – talking about the YUI

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