Ben Goodger
@bengoodger
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kiwi in silicon valley / web fan since ages ago / helped create chrome and firefox / making software easier for humans
Bay Area, CA
Joined September 2008
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Probably sounds like stating the obvious but… the best products are built by people who hold themselves to the highest standards in user experience. By people who challenge themselves to find new ways to be thoughtful and create moments of delight. (1/2)
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I saw there was some discussion on here last week about how we shouldn't celebrate developers who don't know how the whole system works, end-to-end. 🧵/1
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Some personal news… I’ve joined the supremely talented folks at
@OpenAI
! I’m thrilled to be working at the frontier of technology, helping to develop products that benefit everyone!
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Not sure what's worse - being abandoned by your government or watching your fellow citizens celebrating that abandonment.
@GroundedKiwis
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Arc is a cool browser (typing this inside it!) but it's worth asking why web pages are the way they are. Web creators are trying to share their knowledge and get supported while doing so. I get how this helps users - how does it help creators? Without them there is no web...
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Holy shit, Fauci sounds completely different. Confident, uncowed, full of details.
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One of the best things about this experience is discovering a network of brilliant kiwis around the world. Appreciate you all. Kia kaha.
@GroundedKiwis
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@ananavarro
Bought this 4 years ago, it's sat unopened in the fridge until 10 minutes ago. Cheers!
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So excited to see
@Photoshop
launch on the web today! For all who see the web as the ultimate collaborative surface, this is a huge leap forward - and a fantastic example of why it's important to keep making the web more powerful! Congrats & thanks to everyone involved!
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Don’t listen to obnoxious gatekeepers who will try and define your success according to their own small mindedness. Believe in your own deep well of curiosity, your own passion. The sky’s the limit. Thanks for reading. /fin
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Today I’m a Distinguished Engineer at Google leading the team that builds the Web Platform in Chrome. Not bad for someone who made his way by “looking shit up on the internet!” /27
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@MatthewHootonNZ
What I'm more ticked about is the govt limiting citizen access so they can provide "bread and circuses". If they can hide the cost of the border measures from most kiwis, they'll remain popular, and they can keep them in place for longer. Comes at the expense of offshore kiwis.
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lol
Bill Campbell emails Sergey Brin
February 17, 2005
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@publicaddress
@richardhills777
"I had a problem therefore the system must be burned to the ground and rebuilt from first principles in a way that makes sense to me."
Who's the snowflake supposed to be again?
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Everyone starts somewhere, everyone has their own unique journey. And crushing people’s confidence by minimizing their unique stories is the opposite of helpful. /31
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The first is, holy shit is the web awesome. In the 1990s it had the ability to teach technology to the non-technical, of far more modest means than other computing platforms. Oh and those bones are still there today folks. It is the world’s most open, accessible platform. /29
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Spare a thought for Kiwis who flew to Oz to spend Xmas with family returning in Jan, only to have border slammed shut, then excl. from Jan 6 lotto, given a priority voucher for next lotto, then next lotto postponed indefinitely. Talk about abusive, gaslighting behavior.
Due to the unprecedented number of Omicron cases coming into New Zealand and MIQ, a decision has been made to postpone the next room release scheduled for 20 January.
More info at
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I want to express how wild this was for a 19 year old in New Zealand to get a job offer from one of the (then) shining lights of Silicon Valley. I packed up my stuff and arrived in Mountain View in January 2000. /21
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Ultimately, I ended up playing a significant role in the creation and development of both the Firefox and Chrome browsers, which wouldn’t have happened if I’d been discouraged at an earlier point from pulling the thread of web development. /25
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The second is, look, I agree it can be extraordinarily helpful to know more about any system. But to say that’s the only thing is obnoxious gatekeeping. /30
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In a few seconds I became a web developer. I didn’t understand how the engine worked but I was inserting my own words and figuring out what the commands in the funny angle brackets did. Searching on AltaVista helped me find guides to that explained more of the incantations. /8
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Look, I’m not going to argue that knowing more about a system isn’t helpful. But I found the tone of this argument to be incredibly unhelpful. /2
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@MorganGodfery
They need to route this shit from the party if they want to get any of those voters they lost to Labour back. MAGA hats, like Confederate flags, are symbols of hate. No place in NZ political discourse.
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@DrBradMcKenna
@SarahMMcKay
Looking forward to the "you should be grateful stop whinging" brigade to show up and explain this one.
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@gmurphy
told me last night that today marks 5,074 days since Chrome launched its first beta in 2008. Why significant? That date was 5,074 days since Mosaic Netscape 0.9 beta launched on 10/13/94. Excuse me while I find my slippers and cane. 🤯🤯🤯
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I wasn’t interested in building websites because I was keen to understand the principles of computer science. I liked making things. Visual things. It was like interactive art. /10
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Unlike the command line, this medium was highly visual. Every new thing I tried led to a dramatic change in the page I made. It was so satisfying. Free hosting from Geocities let me put it up to share with everyone. /9
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Found this little gem while cleaning. Still powers right up and plays.
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It was possible to take a precompiled build of Mozilla and dive into its resources folder and modify the JavaScript in the same way I’d modified web pages and made them my own. Except this time, I was changing the way the browser itself looked and worked! /18
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I say this as the poor kid from Ōtāhuhu who still often marvels at how he got here. There were so many offramps, so many times I could just have given up and turned away. I’m deeply grateful to those who helped inspire me to continue. /32
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@joshm
My 2 cents, I think there’s a path to success for y’all that’s a bit more mindful of what’s magical about the web and maybe a bit less adversarial. The web made it this far as much due to people helping each other as poking each other in the eye :-) /end
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@MatthewHootonNZ
Somehow, all the people screaming "but it's a global pandemic" as a reason why our citizenship rights are abridged change their tune when it comes to a narrow set of economic interests that these rules are designed to satisfy.
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In 1999 the team at Netscape working on this new version of Mozilla had really only just begun working on it, and the UI was quite basic. So I dove in and began cleaning things up, and sending changes by email to the engineers I had discovered in an online newsgroup. /19
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I heard many comments that I wasn’t a “real engineer” because I wrote JavaScript. My opinion was regularly minimized because I wasn’t seen as a serious programmer, just some kid ignorantly applying magic. /23
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The America Biden described, the one of hope and possibilities, is the one I moved to. So happy.
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If you're wondering what it's like to be an expat Kiwi right now, it's dealing with a constant stream of takes like this.
Wants to get back into the Country after ditching it. And WTF is Dan Wootton? criticises Jacinda Ardern's 'unimaginable cruelty' after pregnant Kiwi in Afghanistan fails MIQ bid
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But, there were people who were more open minded, believed in me and helped me. For that I’m hugely thankful. Working with them kept my confidence up. And so I kept going. /24
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And so I’d say to anyone else who’s interested in tech - even if it’s not motivated by kindling a deep joy in computer science but something more artistic or creative - you do you. /33
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Something critical to our ability to innovate in early Chrome was adopting a mindset of “everything is on the table.” We’d seen plenty of browsers, and there were many well-worn patterns. We expected we’d end up adopting more than a few of them. [1/15]
Probably sounds like stating the obvious but… the best products are built by people who hold themselves to the highest standards in user experience. By people who challenge themselves to find new ways to be thoughtful and create moments of delight. (1/2)
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When we started Chrome, I was a JS developer. Chrome is mostly C++.
At the risk of stating the obvious:
A competent software engineer can pick up a new framework rapidly - when familiar w the language - and learn to use a new programming language quickly.
If you hire for framework or language knowledge, you are missing out on a lot of people.
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Because equal to knowledge and wisdom is confidence and conviction. (Not replacement for, but equal to). Without confidence, nothing big can be accomplished.
Once again in the midst of this discourse there was a belittling of JavaScript programmers. Let me tell you a story. /3
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For engineers, it helps to see a UX spec as a jumping off point for creativity and dialog with UX & PM - not a constraint or just another checkbox in a backlog of tasks to be completed. (2/2)
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I had an old computer at home, and so to continue playing with this magic, I’d take floppy disks, and sneaker-net my HTML files back and forth - working on them offline in a text editor, and then uploading them and researching a bunch of new magic when I was online. /12
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There was a little article tucked in the back about JavaScript with a link to a site that would explain this new language. I wrote the URL on my hand and hurried back to the car. /14
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@GroundedKiwis
We are entitled though. Entitled to re-enter our own country. That type of entitlement should not be easily revoked, or left to the whim of "public opinion."
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People would often ask us what methodology we used when building Chrome in 2006-8. I'd say, well, we have a good sense about what we're trying to do, and we turn up every day and do that. There's no substitute for clarity.
Skype went all-in on Scrum 2011-12 right as WhatsApp overtook it in market share.
I asked the WhatsApp founder Jan Koum if they used it at all. His response:
“To be honest i have no idea what this Scrum garbage is and we never uttered the word Scrum when i was at WhatsApp.”
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What was amazing to me is that coupled with the web’s visually rich rendering model, I now had the ability to build software. /16
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Setting aside how you feel about the tone of Elon's changes at Twitter, I'm really quite fascinated by this idea that code produced by the consensus of hundreds is somehow automatically superior to something a few hackers can throw together... /1
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Of course none of those details were by themselves enough to justify a decision to choose to use Chrome. But together they represented an ethos of care for the total consumer experience that we liked and people seemed to appreciate. [6/6]
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I guess my point is, when people throw themselves into work it’s not always automatically toxic. But it’s also not the only way to build amazing things. /end
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Using an early browser (Internet Explorer 2 I think), I found the view source menu and got to pull back the curtain and see how everything worked. It was tantalizing - could I just copy and paste this and make some changes? What would happen? I tried it. /7
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I didn’t quite understand it at first, but using my same approach of find something that looks cool, view the source and modify it, I taught myself to program./15
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8yo, punching me: "SLUG BUG"
me: "That's a Passat, not a bug. You can't just hit me every time you see a VW."
8yo, punching me again: "SLUG PASSAT"
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But there was something compelling to me about the medium that was developing on the web. Something about its model of interaction - it mimicked human thought - an endless series of connections. Visually rich in a way nothing on a computer had been before other than games. /6
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"MIQ [..] operated in a way that meant New Zealanders’ right to enter their country could be infringed in some
instances in a manner that was not demonstrably justified in a free and democratic
society."
This government's law breaking finally acknowledged by the courts.
High Court delivers decision on Grounded Kiwis challenge to the MIQ system:
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@secondzeit
@publicaddress
If y'all don't want the NZ govt's nationwide comms approach to COVID, can you please send it over to America? We could use a hand.
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Eventually I discovered Mozilla, which was at the time the largest application written in JavaScript. /17
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"One of the things about this administration, if you don't know the answer, don't guess." -- Fauci.
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(As an aside, I didn’t write C++ full time until we started Chrome in 2006.) /26
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Sonos is a cautionary tale of what happens when you cut engineers with good judgment out of the decision making loop. This and Crowdstrike have to be the biggest tech self-owns in 2024 so far.
What is happening at Sonos is hard to believe.
The company released a new app that is a big regression in reliability, usability and functionality vs the old one.
Sales are falling thanks to the new app.
There is no quick fix.
They want to re-release the old app... but cannot
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@aboodman
I now have imposter syndrome for the platform that I started coding in because of my imposter syndrome.
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One evening on the way into the office we stopped at a petrol station. While the car was filling up I went inside and found a copy of NetGuide and flipped through. /13
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@GuyDealership
It's really a shit-show and truly disrespectful to customers. I've waited hours in the past - sometimes ruining an entire weekend afternoon. Most recently I used a broker who delivered the car to my front door, handed me a folder of papers with little flags saying sign here here
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Years ago I sat in a car at the local auto show. As I sat in the driver's seat my left hand fell to my side and into the door pocket. The inside of the pocket was lined with felt, fitted carefully all the way to the edges. [1/6]
Probably sounds like stating the obvious but… the best products are built by people who hold themselves to the highest standards in user experience. By people who challenge themselves to find new ways to be thoughtful and create moments of delight. (1/2)
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@migueldeicaza
@bgalbs
@shaver
@dalmaer
@darinwf
2/ Readability - while our small team had experience with Gecko, most of the team had yet to be hired and WebKit/KHTML was an easier to read codebase. I've heard Gecko has improved a lot in the years since though!
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#1
... who gets rid of the name "HBO"
#2
... who, in doing so, decides that that stellar rebrand is important enough to force everyone to have to re-enter their password on their *TV* without a phone/laptop option.
🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
@StreamOnMax
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@joshm
One of the web's most fundamental properties though IMO is that it democratizes creative freedom in ways that have made it the hub of so many major shifts in technology over the past 35 years. /2
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@joshm
A side effect of this is that the user experience can be “messy.” I used to describe a lot of website design as “DVD menus but for software”. Those inconsistencies are a price I’ll happily pay as a user for the legion of new services that were born on or because of the web. /3
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I spent the next year working at Netscape’s HQ in the mad rush to finish the browser that I’d been sending patches to. Along the way I would regularly encounter people who didn’t quite understand what it was I did. /22
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7yo wrote this note to herself on a Jenga block, found in her backpack.
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I’m sometimes asked for advice for folks starting out on their career journey. What I’ve settled on is - cultivate a sense of ownership in the work you’re doing, and set the scope of your ownership as broad as practical. /1
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I should also mention that my household was not flush with money, and so my access to the internet was not in my living room, but on a spare terminal at the office where my mum often worked late nights. /11
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@joshm
There are lots of things that can be done to make the web experience better - and I’m glad y’all are working on exploring ways to do that - so please don’t view this as pushback against exploration. I think you have a super interesting product with some great ideas. /4
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@joshm
Hey Josh - a few thoughts. The web is not now nor has ever been perfect - it's a system in evolution in a complex world. /1
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Ok I won't say I've perfected this ma po tofu but after a few tweaks the recipe is pretty darn good...
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The fun thing about working on Firefox in 2003/4 was that it was the opportunity to "get right" most of the obvious stuff that Netscape had screwed up. /1
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This is the speaker of the house in NZ, telling people (effectively) to panic buy. He's not an outlier, the PM made similar comments yesterday. Quite stunning.
Omicron is coming and when it arrives it will spread quickly. If you can afford it it will pay to stock up a bit. There will be thousands of close contacts a day. If I’m not one of them I will be happy to do grocery and medicine runs for Wainuiomata people.
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Working on it!
On a daily basis we have constant reminders of how amazing web apps have gotten just in the past few years: fully real-time, fully multi-player, unlimited compute and storage, rich interaction with the desktop, insane performance and graphics. Let’s keep this going. 🚀☁️
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A cool thing about the Web is that everyone can have a say in its future.
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Kept not getting enough heat from my stir fry with a few thai chilies, so added 20 instead.
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@GroundedKiwis
@rlpldn
MIQ isn't practical for many people/family situations. Not to mention every time someone speaks out they receive nasty attacks by bullies.
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