

John Resig Discusses jQuery and Decision to Join Khan Academy - jmtame
http://www.startupsopensourced.com/2011/06/21/john-resig-discusses-jquery-and-decision-to-join-khan-academy/

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flyosity
I'm really interested in John's switch because, as far as I know, at Mozilla
he was working on JavaScript evangelism and performance, but at Khan Academy
he'll actually be building software which I think is a pretty large change.

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shii
John works mostly as the maintainer for the Khan-exercises open source
project, basically the Exercise Dashboard piece of Khan Academy.

Remember, it's _open source_ [1], so don't hesitate to join in and help
revolutionize education. There's some very cool and interesting things we're
working on that get used by millions of kids (and adults!) everyday. You know
some js, python, HTML/CSS? Interested in documentation, searching for bugs, or
doing usability testing? You're cordially invited.

[1]: <https://github.com/Khan/khan-exercises>

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ISeemToBeAVerb
This is great news. After watching Salman Khan's speech at TED I got really
excited about what he's trying to do for education. I really wish more public
schools would shift their focus from in-class lectures to working with
students in a more personal way.

I certainly hope the site gets more contributors from other disciplines, the
majority of their content is still mathematics. Anyhow... I'm excited to see
where they take this in the future.

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kenjackson
I think its interesting how he notes that a lot of server-side devs can't make
it as client-side devs. This seems like a big change from 15 years ago when UI
development was considered easy and server side dev was considered more
difficult.

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mechanical_fish
I think that was a mistaken impression even then. Believe me, table-based
layout on a large scale was not for the lazy, and early CSS was a minefield.

The big difference 15 years ago is that everything was so fresh, and so few
people knew how to make anything good, that everyone was really forgiving. You
could go really far with lousy design. And you had to, because designing
something un-lousy was a lot more work.

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kenjackson
Actually, I wasn't thinking webdev when I said that, but I guess it does apply
to webdev. I was thinking more like VB front-ends.

But I think your general thesis holds in any case. As front-ends have become
less CRUDdy (whether web or rich), and almost more game like, they've become
more challenging to build. And I think the DOM is a legacy model which is
great for largely static pages, but a far less useful model for actual web
apps -- and that just makes client dev work harder too.

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patrickaljord
Thanks for switching to youtube, appreciated.

