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Monday Profile: Yoav Weiss

Yoav WeissThe Code conference is upon us this week! Monday Profile is again with one of our international speakers, Yoav Weiss.

Yoav is a Web performance and browser internals specialist, whose talk at Code focuses on third party content on websites, mitigating its impact on performance and security, and its longer term implications.

This interview is also in the second issue of our Scroll Magazine.

Q What made you decide you could do this for a living?

A I grew up in Israel where software development is the major industry. So, before I started higher education, I decided to work for a while to save up some money that would help me get myself through school. With software being the major (if not only) non-minimum-wage option, I started working as a software tester, picked up programming while doing that, and moved to software development a few weeks later.

I found it to be extremely fun and creative and I loved the problem solving part of it. Before I knew it, I was deep in the trenches in a software engineer position.

Took me few more years to actually take some time off in order to go to school and complete a Computer Science B.Sc.

Q Have you ever coded live on stage, or in front of an audience? How did it go?

A No, I have not. I don’t think that my typing skills are up for the task. If I had to demonstrate code on stage, I’d probably use a pre-recorded video.

Q How do you further develop and extend your skills? Books, courses? Noodling by yourself?

A I read professional books from time to time, but most of my reading is done online. A large chunk of my work day (and evenings) is dedicated to reading the latest blog posts, standards discussions and specification changes. Whenever I encounter a new subject that I need to study, I usually tackle it with a mix of tutorial reading and playing around with it in practice.

Q Is it better to learn HTML then CSS then JavaScript, or JavaScript then HTML then CSS, or all three at once, or something else?

A HTML is the foundation upon which the web is built, and it’s certainly not advised to reimplement basic HTML functionality in JavaScript. So, if your job is to build Web pages, you probably want to learn the foundations first, starting from HTML, then CSS and then JavaScript.

That way you can be sure that you’re tackling the problems you encounter with the right tools for the job, creating page components with HTML, styling them with CSS and adding functionality on top of that using JavaScript.

Q What’s the best way to get more women coding?

A I think the real question is how do we avoid discouraging the women and other under-represented groups about to enter the field from feeling marginalized and unwelcome. To me, the key is to create welcoming and “noob-friendly” environments. Many projects use the “meritocracy” narrative in order to justify shitty behaviour to people new to the project, or to people in general.

That behaviour is particularly hostile to women and other under-represented groups, but at the end of the day, it’s bad for everyone. No-one likes to have to take verbal abuse as part of their work, and certainly not as part of their off-hours open source participation.

I believe that a code of conduct with clear rules regarding unacceptable behaviour and strict enforcement of those rules helps everyone, enables everyone to express themselves, and encourages new people of all kinds to participate.

Q Frameworks. What’s your take? Are they good, bad or does it depend on how you use them?

A Frameworks help speed up development and have certain UX advantages, but they often do that at the expense of our users. Our users often have to run more code on their machines than necessary, which can be taxing for both loading and runtime performance. Especially today, when more and more of our users are on mobile devices, the performance price of frameworks must be taken into account when deciding to use them.

At the same time, the wide use and popularity of frameworks indicates that there’s a need for the abstraction they provide. As someone working on browsers and the Web platform, I give a lot of thought to that subject. I’m hoping that one day we can figure out a way to provide the UX and development ease of frameworks as part of the platform itself.

Q Tabs or spaces?

A Vim.

Q What’s on your horizon?

A I plan to continue working on browsers and their performance-related features, at least until I feel that loading performance is no longer an issue. I don’t think that will happen anytime soon :)

Another issue that’s close to my heart is getting more people involved in Web standards and browser work, which is why I took on co-chairing the Web Platform Incubation Community Group (or WICG for short). So I intend to continue to do what I can in order to make “getting involved” as painless a process as possible.


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