
Joe Hewitt : I'm an indie developer now.  - threepointone
http://joehewitt.com/post/creative-tools/
======
CoffeeDregs
It's always exciting to bump into, meet or find out about someone who can see
interesting possibilities where others see nothing. I don't know Joe, but he
seems like one of those people (Firebug, FTW!).

At the same time, I'm always kind of bummed when those people are snapped up
by a large company because their ability to produce the mind-binding ideas
seems diminished or, at least, less visible among the many large
accomplishments/events of a large company. Good to see that one of the lateral
thinkers is returning to where we can more easily see his ideas in practice.

Firebug: I remember the first time I left behind the edit-save-refresh-cry-
because-my-padding-was-wrong cycle of HTML/CSS development for the Firebug-
driven-tweaks flow. Excellent.

~~~
noibl
Re 'Firebug-driven-tweaks flow' [Sorry if this is OT]

With Stylebot when you make these kinds of tweaks it builds up a supplementary
ruleset in a single location that you can afterwards copy and transfer to your
CSS file. With Firebug it's relatively tricky to make sure you transfer all
the tweaks you just did. Feature request. :)

~~~
joehewitt
Making it easy to save Firebug CSS changes back to the source file was at the
top of my todo list in 2007, and I was really bummed that I didn't get the
chance to build it. Years later the Backfire extension came out, which does
alleviate some of the pain of saving CSS, but I still think there's room for
improvement.

~~~
madewulf
For the line of JetBrains IDE (PyCharm, IntelliJ, PhPStorm), there is a
wonderful plugin, called css-x-fire that allows to save all tweaks you did in
Firebug back to your source file. It gave me hours of life back.... I bet
there exist something similar for lots of IDE.

~~~
Griever
Woah. Just installed this and I'm getting that giddy feeling a web developer
rarely feels when doing CSS editing. This is a godsend! Thanks :D

~~~
csomar
I have switched to "Stylizer" for CSS editing and have never looked back.

Firebug is pretty good for JavaScript and DOM. Chrome for profiling and the
network.

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nathanlrivera
Haha: <img class="profilePic" src="/themes/pimp/me.jpg" title="Ladies - I'm
taken.">

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wallflower
"I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until
2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won’t wait." -Joe Hewitt
[1]

I wonder if Joe Hewitt is not going to wait, and he will channel his energies
into helping HTML5 catch the native app rocket ships. Go beyond Firebug.

[1] <http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/joe-hewitt-web-development/>

~~~
nupark2
_... helping HTML5 catch the native app rocket ships._

Can it? It feels like the browsers are slaves to their own success; what the
web desperately needs to compete with native applications is the antithesis of
what the web has become. To compete, the web would need:

\- A runtime environment that can run complex applications -- including games
-- with high performance on low-end mobile devices.

\- Support for languages other than JavaScript, without having to compile to
JavaScript (for why javascript is not an adequate compilation target, see
above).

\- A common, consistent, high-level application UI toolkit, with support for
re-usable UI components. The seperation between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is
the wrong one. We need 'native' widgets rendered in canvas, using a coherent
hierarchical view-based design -- not the DOM. You can build this on top of
HTML/JS/CSS (see Obj-J/Cappuccino), but that's like saying that all turing
complete languages are equal because they can emulate each other.

Any progress that a particular vendor might make (such as WebSockets, NaCL)
will be held back by the other vendors (looking at you, Mozilla).

If you help the web catch up to modern native apps, you'll have just re-
created native apps -- sandboxed, native code execution speed, coherent
application libraries, etc...

~~~
nekoZonbi
There is one huge company, whose name start with g, highly interested in all
of the above (they want to make a web apps based os). but seems like they have
lacked the inspiration, or... mm.... maybe they are quietly doing it right
now, with NaCl

~~~
kayoone
That doesnt change the fact that mozilla isnt interested in NaCl, which is sad
because it could enable alot of cool stuff, especially in regards to games and
realtime apps.

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6ren
It sometimes seems it's difficult to make money from making tools, because
developers expect them for free, and with source (like Firebug). But of course
it is possible, with products like Joel's FogBugz, like Jira and some IDE's.

Even serious money: Microsoft's _Developer Tools (Visual Studio)_ business
made over $1B revenue last year:
[http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/microsofts_11_billi...](http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/microsofts_11_billion-
dollar_businesses_and_what_they_say_about_the_company.html)

~~~
teaspoon
Some other good "indie" examples: TextMate, Charles, GitHub, Opacity, and
Acorn.

~~~
akadien
Balsamiq

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KVFinn
Firebug is a boon to humanity. Seriously.

The second it came out, it personally started saving me hours of work every
single week. If you multiply that by the number of people working with the
web, damn, that's like millions of hours? Billions?

I think it was Vint Cerf who said something like: if you want to have the most
profound effect on the world you can, rather than work on a particular
problem, work on tools that help problems get solved and accelerate the
process everywhere.

------
jarin
Leaving Facebook to reinvent Firebug is actually pretty baller, I gotta say.

~~~
weaksauce
I think he has enough credit to be able to go back if he wanted to.

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soapdog
I just want to thank you for firebug again. Day after Day it just saves my
life.

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pvsnp
Thanks for making firebug. Good luck on future projects.

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kunalb
As someone about to join Facebook for his first job in a few months, posts
like these make me even more enthusiastic about starting work!

It would have been even more cool to work alongside the creator of firebug,
though.

~~~
mcmc
Look me up, maybe we can watch GOT together in PA each sunday or something.

~~~
kunalb
er, "GOT"?

~~~
mcmc
Game of Thrones

------
threepointone
Btw, the submission title is from his tweet announcing this blog post.

~~~
unwantedLetters
<http://twitter.com/#!/joehewitt/status/66662766093664256>

(Link to the status)

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guelo
I have no idea what Joe's option situation is, but supposing that he's cashing
them in and dumping them in the secondary market it goes to show that Facebook
is squandering the employee lock-in advantage of having pre-IPO stock. It's
probably in Facebook's interest to shut down the secondary market, but I
imagine zuck and co like being somewhat liquid for personal reasons.

~~~
mcslee
If your goal is to have people doing creative, innovative work, then I would
strongly disagree that there is any advantage whatsoever to be derived from
making people feel "locked in." In practice, I have only seen this achieve the
opposite effect -- disengaged people hanging around longer than they should
and poisoning the atmosphere for passion-driven folks around them.

Joe's post made it quite clear that Facebook's management strategy is to
provide freedom and autonomy, not handcuffs. This is one of the key reasons
people love working there. The only thing Facebook is "squandering" is the
opportunity to be experienced as a corporate financial prison.

The idea that any of this would be driven by Zuck's personal desire for
liquidity is way off the mark.

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rman666
Continued success, Joe! Thanks for Firebug, and all your other work.

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_ankit_
This is great news for us developers and designers. Inspiring too

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jcampbell1
Between firebug, three20, iui, joe has a history of making tools that make
really hard things easy. I look forward to what he builds next.

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waynesutton
Thinking since @joehewitt left @facebook he's going to be drinking @milk with
@kevinrose soon.

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danzheng
Can't wait to see what Joe comes out with next. But do take some time off
first

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thezilch
@joehewitt, open source? And where can we expect to start contributing to the
tool-chain?

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asadotzler
Dom Inspector FTW!

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jerhewet
I'd love to work with this guy. Wonder if he's up for a position with a small
team of craftsmen... (yeah, we're actually hiring, if anyone is interesting in
working out of a small office in Carlsbad, CA!)

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jcampbell1
>Working at Facebook was like having my own startup, but with a paycheck
instead of ramen

Joe Hewitt hasn't worked for Facebook in years. This is old. Second, he
wouldn't be eating ramen anyhow. Facebook bought his company for the employees
(primarily him). He went on to make the iPhone facebook app, which has been
wildly popular.

~~~
pablasso
A while ago he stopped working on the Facebook iOS app and the Three20
framework, not in Facebook itself.

