Thoughts on The Future

In March of 2025, my employer mandated that everyone use AI for coding. Agentic coding had not yet arrived. I could vibe code some slop but I couldn't get it to move TypeScript import statements from one file to another without the agent getting confused. The models evolved. People tried elaborate "prompt engineering" or Ralph loops but, still, agentic coding hadn't yet arrived.

How do you improve bad software architecture? Introducing low risk, incremental changes is pretty straight forward but improving architecture often involves bold leaps such as complete rewrites. Where do you start? Here's a strategy I've been using: Imagine the future you want without worrying about how to get there. I'm calling this a North Star Exercise.

When studying Sound and Film at art school, I spent most weekends renting as much equipment as possible, wheeling it into my dorm room, and staying up late creating work. I've been called a workaholic for this kind of behavior and maybe it's true; I really love working on meaningful projects. I also realize that it's an honor and privilege to work on projects I care about. After Mozilla, I'll be joining Bluecrew full time to help build a platform for working. Bluecrew creates apps for on-demand staffing (temp work) but with a twist: workers receive W-2 status and everything that comes with it. This includes minimum wage protection, overtime / sick pay, workers' comp., eligibility for healthcare, etc. Bluecrew connects people to jobs like light industrial work, hospitality, and logistics, providing opportunities at varying skill levels.

I originally sent this as an all-company email. Below is an edited version. After 9 fantastic years I’ve decided to move on from Mozilla. Here are some reflections about what makes Mozilla such a special place to work at. My first commit was a simple right to left localization fix on addons.mozilla.org -- wow, I couldn't believe I was shipping a web app used in 40 languages! It has been an honor to make such a powerful impact in so many people’s lives all over the world. Thanks to Mozilla for inviting me to be a part of their unique and crucial mission. Since then I've had the chance to work on many different projects and technologies, most recently in UI engineering. Working in the open has been fascinating to me...

Oh, hey! I almost forgot I have a blog. I wanted to write a quick note about where you can find stuff I write. Short and frequent updates! @kumar303 On the Mozilla Hacks blog: https://hacks.mozilla.org/author/kmcmillanmozilla-com/ On the Mozilla WebDev blog: https://blog...

David Lowery wrote a piece on how downloading music is hurting musicians (which is a response to Emily White's piece on admitting to not buying music). Here is my response. Music is a really interesting "product," especially when distributed digitally for $0.001 cents per download (that's my snarky guess at the production costs of a download: bandwidth, storage, etc). The real production costs are for the time put in by the artist, studio fees, and creativity. Besides the creativity part, that formula sounds a little bit like the FDA drug market, right? It costs about $0.001 cents to manufacture a pill so the hefty price tag goes to recoup the money spent on drug research. Or does it? Pharmaceuticals is a messed up industry...

At ORD Camp last weekend Ben Huh led a discussion about how we -- a group of geeks and artists -- can save the Internet. We won the fight against SOPA and PIPA for now but those laws will just sneak in through some other bill. Will wikipedia be there to black out again in protest? The fight is nowhere near from over and we have to get organized...

Most people at Mozilla are remote so each quarter we sync up face to face as a group for an all-hands meeting. There are over 600 employees! We of course sync up in smaller groups more frequently but this is a chance to see what's going on across the entire Mozilla horizon. So what's happening at Mozilla? We're on the cusp of a huge shift towards an open web platform. That is, something more than a web browser -- something you can run "native" apps on. There's a lot of work left to do, of course. Here is a random dump of interesting projects in the works...

The release of Google Plus presents a unique opportunity to open up the social web. Why? Because it's a compelling product -- it's intuitive and fun with innovative features like circles, hangouts, sparks, etc. In many ways it's a clone of Facebook but that's just a reinforcement of what Facebook (and before that, Friendster) got right. If Plus continues to succeed then the optimist in me envisions this as a golden opportunity! ...

A few services have been popping up lately that let you stream music from any computer or device (the so called "cloud"). Amazon just released theirs, uncreatively named Cloud Player. I'm pretty excited about this one because it's the first I've seen to actually offer sane, reasonable pricing ...

Firefox 4 is near the end of its beta cycle but what is so special about this release? Why not see for yourself on the new demo site, the Web of Wonder (requires Firefox 4 beta but some demos do work in Chrome and Safari). I'll be honest, as a web developer, the new power of HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WebGL, etc totally blows my mind...

The Internet was invented so that data could be decentralized and liberated. Well, so much for that idea. With the rise of services such as Facebook and Twitter we are back to the original mainframe problem: everything is stored and controlled by a central authority. Ironically, today's "to the cloud" meme is making us depend on central authorities even more. So what about data privacy? In this centralized model we go about our online lives constantly posting data to all these different servers that we trust...

As web developers we are faced with this problem: how do we scale up our code to handle high traffic? A lot of time and engineering goes into this problem -- time to simulate the traffic we expect and add servers to our cluster, cache heavy database access, etc, in anticipation of the load. Time is precious. This time could be spent optimizing the usefulness of our web product and creating interesting content. No one really congratulates you when a website works, they expect it to work. When Google App Engine was released their pitch was...

Whenever I'd hear about someone from the Python community getting hired by Mozilla I'd get really excited because I knew they'd continue to share and collaborate in the open source world that I was a part of. So here I am about a month into joining Mozilla myself to work with the WebDev team. Everything Mozilla does is right out in the open: ideas are posted on blogs, code is committed to public repositories--free to use, free to fork, etc. They take a firm stance that everything you do on the web should be free and open even to the point where the new Firefox 4 audio API (which is amazing) doesn't even support the patented, closed MP3 format despite its ubiquity. This transparent approach to technology is really powerful...

CHIRP Radio in Chicago is looking for someone to help us build a custom Android application so that our listeners can have a better experience on their Android phone. There are already a few Android apps for radio but they are clunky. Also, we have some plans to better engage listeners on phone apps with currently playing tracks, click-to-request-a-song, and other ideas like that. We already have a pretty slick iPhone application created by volunteer John Carlin and after only a few months it already has 1,000+ downloads...

Most deployment systems depend on PyPI, the Python Package Index, for fetching and installing dependencies. Although performance and reliability has greatly improved, there are still days when you may find PyPI down and thus are unable to deploy through the normal fashion. Fi...

Zed Shaw recently wrote a clear and concise defense for why he used the GPL on Lamson. I've seen a few mentions on twitter that alarmed me because people seemed to think now is the time to release all software as GPL. Here's what you need to ask yourself before you license your code as GPL. First, do you have a business plan that involves selling your software? Most people do not, most business plans have to do with actually using custom software. If that's you then your software and your business become better as more developers work on your software. I.E. when your software is applied to more real world situations, more bugs are fixed and more patches for features are received. GPL does not help you gain users because it shuts out most commercial enterprises ...

At PyCon 2009 the fact that Python needs to solve the "packaging problem" came up a few times. This is not a new discussion. However, the problem is still not completely solved so here I'll point out the details of the problem, the unsolved parts, the solved parts, and how the solved parts could be solved better ...

I came across this article today on Coding Horror about how Google has a monopoly on search engines and how something must be done about it. I'm not one who falls into the "Google Is Evil" camp; I actually think they are a benevolent force in the world :) However, as with any monopoly, the lack of competition stifles progress. And when I think about the state of today's technology, I can't help but wonder why Google has not fixed the most fatal flaw in their Googlebot : It does not behave like a web browser. Search engines are made for people and the majority of people browse the Internet with a web browser. The first comment on the article is a cry for help: "What can we do?" I have an answer to that question. And you can take my answer and turn it into a business plan and climb the golden staircase to success. Any smart investor would be begging you to take their money. Google generated $5.37 billion dollars in Q2 of 2008 and their flagship product doesn't even work! In fact, I'm going to give this to you all for free; all I ask is that you visit me one day and say thanks. Are you ready?

Python 3.0 is out. Woo! Some people have been saying that they'd like to be able to run it alongside 2.6, 2.5, etc to test it out. Well, Python is actually designed for this. All you have to do is build it with make altinstall and that will give you a python3.0 binary without touching your default python binary. But on Mac OS X it's a little different ...

As the US economy spins into a death spiral I unfortunately now know some highly skilled web developers (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc) in the Chicago area who are looking for work. And I mean highly skilled people whose ninja like qualities will be sorely missed. Most hiri...

Last year at the Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) 2007, the talk by Atif was one of my favorites. He had been working on a system of model based testing for desktop GUI applications (affectionately called GUITAR) and hinted that he will be applying the work to web applications next. Now, at GTAC 2008, here is a taste of what his dept. has been up to. The talk is by Oluwaseun Akinmade and Prof. Atif M. Memon. Both are at University of Maryland. The idea of automated model based testing hints at a future where software can be used to figure out how to test itself. That is, when software is modeled in a way that exposes inputs, outputs, event handlers, and end-points, then introspection can be done to find all possible interactions within an application and test them. Yes, it is one step away from artificial intelligence. This is fascinating to me but I think it still needs a lot of work. Atif is asking for as much feedback as possible from industry professionals to find out how this can best be used in the real world. Here are my notes from the talk ...

This was one of the talks at GTAC 2008 that I was most looking forward to before the conference. It was excellent, I was not let down. The talk was given by Markus Clermont and John Thomas who work at Google. Since the talk was right after lunch they decided to take a Q & A approach. It sort of went off in tangents at points but overall the format seemed to work. In my own work I've been struggling at maintaining a now bloated test suite for an AJAX website but their approach made something click in my head. I'm already working on a refactoring plan. Here is my abbreviated interpretation of the talk ...

Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) is my all-time favorite conference. It's free. It's on a single track — this means you don't miss any talks and everyone experiences the same journey of thought. Also, since you have to apply for admittance with a short essay, everyone who attends is really passionate about testing. It's still sort of "underground" which keeps it small and very social. Last year, I made some kind of attempt to live blog summaries of the GTAC talks but I never made it past part 1. We'll see how far I get this year, stay tuned. The videos for 2008 aren't online yet but check youtube often because last year they were up in less than a day. The Future of Testing was the first talk of the GTAC 2008 conference on Thursday Oct 23rd given by James A. Whittaker, a very entertaining speaker who works for Microsoft. His talk was excellent and I highly recommend keeping a lookout for the video. Here are my notes...

Telemarketing is one of the most ineffective forms of advertising. Hello? Yes? I'm cooking dinner, why would I want to buy something? How do you know I'm even remotely interested in your product? Online advertisements like text ads and banner ads are slightly different. I usually buy things online out of convenience so the venue is good for advertising. There is also a lot of information about me online ...

Someone passed me a link to this really nice article, Annals of Science: The Eureka Hunt, which talks about how neuroscientists have been studying what goes on in the brain when we get those amazing ideas that seem to come from nowhere. In my own life I can think of several times where I've experienced a sudden "burst" of thought like this. Sometimes it seems like...

Mozilla Labs releases the Ubiquity add-on for Firefox. In a nutshell: With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do. Big congrats to Aza and everyone else who worked on this! As innovative as Humanized was, building somethi...

Ulf Wiger has been experimenting with making Erlang indentation-senstive. He followed up with a Part 2 after comments. For most people who start working in the Erlang language, the most annoying new concept is all the various line-terminators you have to know. Damien Kat...

Like many of you, I've had my jaw on the floor since the release of Google App Engine. Although there are skeptics out there, a careful read of their terms will show you that it's for real — Google has released GOOGLE to the world and it's not for scary marketing purpos...

...that's right, it's not molded or prefabbed, it's not made on a production line or in a lab. Are we insane??! Here is a hilarious probe into the darker side of this art we call programming.

I started learning about Google's Open Social API and gave a lightning talk on it at the last Chicago Python User Group meeting. It wasn't much more than a brief overview and fodder for "diving in" to the Open Social platform. Here it is again, in more of a tutorial fo...

I just got back from the GTAC (Google Test Automation Conference) in New York and had a great time. It spanned 2 days and had a single track — this made it very laid back (no headaches trying to decide what talk to attend) and the timing was perfect. Especially since my travel...

Slashdotters are getting bummed out that Amazon is trying to patent its Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement. The bitterness seems to be in the gist of "computers are taking over the world, oh no!" or something. As some comments note, this is a logical fo...

It's because they don't know that you have to 1) wring out or shake off extra water then 2) rub your hands vigorously under the dryer. If you don't do that, it doesn't work (unless it's some turbo dryer I've seen in restaurants recently). Most dryers do not have these instr...