Chris Zacharias

I've wanted to play around with some similar ideas for a while too, actually. I have a few loose high-level ideas - I know I want it to feel like an app, but I want to use plain JS; I want to leverage everything modern browsers can support, while remaining backward-compatible (!); I want to try odd things like using Lua inside nginx for everything (or even writing my own web server), or programmatically reorganizing my CSS and JS so runs of similar characters are grouped together and gzipping has the best effect. I also have a hazy idea of what I want the site to be about (not a content site, some sort of interactive thing) but I haven't resolved all the "but if you make it about X, it doesn't really nail all those bits about Y you wanted" stuff yet. Anyway.

Thanks for the note that AppCache is now out of the picture. I actually think I remember reading something vaguely about it being not the greatest, but I didn't know it was actively harmful. Do you mean in a security sense or it just being bad for performance?

I wasn't sure what to say about the content structure thing at first, but then I thought: take the pragmatic approach. Gather piles and piles and piles of actual content and dump it either on the site itself or your dev version. Notions about structure, presentation and content will likely occur in the process of accumulating (or writing) what's on the site.

As for what kind of content to put up, I would suggest focusing heavily on links to (and/or articles…

Corporate priorities can be absolutely 100% nefarious as the wage-fixing antitrust investigation and subsequent settlement shows:

https://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-steve-jobs-brutally-callous-response-after-getting-a-google-employee-fired/

https://pando.com/tag/techtopus

In May of this year (2019), https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 was on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 .

I take this last event as an example of "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing": these sorts of events that further corporate priorities without corporate knowledge or corporate sanction clearly can and do happen.

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Widely speculative thought experiment follows

1. Let's hypothetically assume there was a rogue team at Google trying to kill of Mozilla Firefox.

2. Let's further suppose like the YouTube IE6 story they flipped some switch to start the process yesterday.

3. Let's further suppose they were discovered by any one or more of their managers / their directors / Google's legal and compliance / C-level executives today.

4. In my opinion, what we should be asking ourselves is: what actions the last group of people (3.) can take at and with what would be corresponding probability of that action being carried out.

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tl;dr Do we trust Google to not "be evil"?

The founder of the startup I'm at now, imgix, had this to say about it:

http://blog.chriszacharias.com/cruise-ships

Google is a cruise ship. You're young and agile in a way that you'll likely never be again. As a result, you're more risk-tolerant as well.

Risk accordingly.

Despite that, don't confuse commitment and risk. The bay is a big place. It's expensive to live in, and full of unlikely opportunities in equally unlikely places.

Find a month to month lease if you can, or crash with somebody you know. Don't lock yourself down with a long lease, the environment moves too fast and your priorities will evolve even faster once you hit the ground here. I think you'll appreciate the agility. It's a mistake I made, and would probably change given a do-over.

Another miscellaneous thought: there are so many startups and things like this going on in the bay that it's actually a bit of a blur, and while it's easy to meet many people doing what you describe, they're all very much wrapped up in their own version of the story. A job at google actually gives you proximity to bigger names, for longer, and with more purpose. From a networking standpoint, that has value. I don't think it negates the sole-suckingness of a giant org for someone with your personality, but it's at least worth noting.

> In our world we might have 10,000 people sitting in a room pulling our mobile app over a crappy wifi connection.

Just to reinforce this point to folks who are skeptical, there's this great writeup called "Page Weight Matters" by Chris Zacharias where he talks about how smaller page size for a YouTube video literally lit up African, South American, and Southeast Asian smartphone traffic.

By minimizing page size through switching to html5, the page load times dropped to a sufficient level where people who previously did not have access to youtube could finally get access.

Key quotes:

> Further investigation revealed that, in these places, the average page load time under Feather was over TWO MINUTES! This meant that a regular video page, at over a megabyte, was taking more than TWENTY MINUTES to load!

> This was the penalty incurred before the video stream even had a chance to show the first frame. Correspondingly, entire populations of people simply could not use YouTube because it took too long to see anything.

Link: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

Only sort of related, but one time some of the YouTube engineering team made a code change to kill off usage of Internet Explorer 6 by bypassing the usual code screening process to circumvent management. Their boss reprimanded them but eventually got in on it, without going through the appropriate channels. Then the Docs team saw the banner they showed YouTube users, thought they had actually received approval from management and used it as evidence to convince their managers to implement their own banner (who would have normally refused).

All they received was a small rebuke. In fact, management praised the team for the end result of decimating IE6 usage, as intended.

Then one of the architects of the scheme blogged about it in retrospect years later.

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Good point - I missed that.

Your comment reminds me of a story [1] about how a Google engineer once significantly reduced the size of the YouTube video page but average load times got worse. Turns out they were getting lots of new users from third world countries with much worse connection speeds.

I also wonder to what degree this effect counters the argument that average incomes in Australia and US have not risen for decades [2]. Perhaps native-born people see their incomes rise, but the average is dragged down by immigrants who typically have lower incomes.

[1] http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

[2] http://www.rossgittins.com/2017/09/sorry-but-using-migration-to-boost.html?m=1