Blog
Ian Hickson's Web log. Commentary on events of interest, cats, and idiocy around the world. Well, Ian's world.
Over the past few months I've been writing notes for how I would write an LLM-based development tool. Specifically, giving these tools the power to run programs (especially compilers and tests) without having to either check every command for unexpected side-effects or trusting an LLM to do this checking for you, so as to avoid a disaster . This week, I dumped the entire notes document into…
Over the past few months, I've been putting together some notes for future creators of UI frameworks, based on my experiences of the past 25-30 years. The work was originally commissioned by a customer for their use, but it seems like it might be of wider interest so I've decided to publish it. The primary copy is a Google doc, available at https://software.hixie.ch/ui-frameworks , on which people…
When you build something, you have to pick some design goals and priorities. Ideally you do so explicitly, but even if you don't, you're still implicitly doing so based on your design choices. These choices are trade-offs. If you want to write a quiet song, it won't be loud. If you are writing a software tool and you want to prioritize speed over simplicity, then it won't be as simple as if you'd…
My involvement in web standards started with the CSS working group. One of the things that we struggled with as a working group was that we would specify how the technology should work, but the browser vendors' implementations weren't exactly what we intended, and web authors would then write web pages that worked with those browsers, even though that meant the web pages themselves were also not…
I often get asked how many people contribute to Flutter. It's a hard question to answer because "contribute" is a very vague concept. There's tens of thousands of packages on pub.dev , all of which are written by contributors to the community. There's over 100,000 of issues filed in our issue database , filed by more than 35,000 people over the years (the exact number is hard to pin down because…
Despite my departure from Google, I am not leaving Flutter — the great thing about open source and open standards is that the product and the employer are orthogonal. I've had three employers in my career, and in all three cases when I left my employer I continued my job. With Netscape I was a member of the team before my internship, during my internship, and after my internship. With Opera…
I joined Google in October 2005, and handed in my resignation 18 years later. Last week was my last week at Google. I feel very lucky to have experienced the early post-IPO Google; unlike most companies, and contrary to the popular narrative, Googlers, from the junior engineer all the way to the C-suite, were genuinely good people who cared very much about doing the right thing. The oft-mocked "…
Decline meetings aggressively. Always try to resolve issues by e-mail or chat first if possible. Decline any meeting without an explicit agenda (I make exceptions for my immediate manager). Decline any meeting where the agenda doesn't seem relevant to your work. Decline any recurring meeting with more than one other person. Keep track of how productive recurring meetings are being. If they're not…
"Open Source" is a broad spectrum, with various axes. The following is an attempt to describe various ways to look at openness to aid project leaders in determining what they want their project to look like. I originally wrote this for my colleagues at Google, but the concepts apply widely and I figured they might be of use for others. In practice, every project is a unique snowflake and there are…
Software has an infinite number of bugs. How can we tell which ones to fix? I propose that it makes the most sense to optimize for people-happiness per unit bug fixing time, maximizing how much our effort improves the product for our users. To put it in mathematical terms, we want to fix bugs with the highest N·ΔH / T, where: N is the number of people the bug affects ΔH is the increase…