6 ms·

Joe Hewitt : I'm an indie developer now.

284 points by threepointone 15y ago

threepointone 15y ago
Btw, the submission title is from his tweet announcing this blog post.
- unwantedLetters 15y ago
  http://twitter.com/#!/joehewitt/status/66662766093664256 http://twitter.com/#!/joehewitt/status/66662766093664256 (Link to the status)
nathanlrivera 15y ago
Haha: <img class="profilePic" src="/themes/pimp/me.jpg" title="Ladies - I'm taken.">
jarin 15y ago
Leaving Facebook to reinvent Firebug is actually pretty baller, I gotta say.
- weaksauce 15y ago
  I think he has enough credit to be able to go back if he wanted to.
rman666 15y ago
Continued success, Joe! Thanks for Firebug, and all your other work.
pvsnp 15y ago
Thanks for making firebug. Good luck on future projects.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
CoffeeDregs 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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. :)
  - CoffeeDregs 15y ago
    > [Sorry if this is OT] Nah. You were on-topic (at least, on-topic for my off-topic bit...). Agreed. The Firebug-driven-tweak cycle ain't lovely, but it's positively gorgeous when compared to the old ways... And thanks for the pointer to Stylebot. Checking it out now.
    - hboon 15y ago
      Also see http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/ http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/. Mac-only.
  - joehewitt 15y ago
    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.
jcampbell1 15y ago
>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.
- lukejduncan 15y ago
  Old? he tweeted it an hour ago.
- pablasso 15y ago
  A while ago he stopped working on the Facebook iOS app and the Three20 framework, not in Facebook itself.
wallflower 15y ago
"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/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/joe-hewitt-web-development/
- nupark2 15y ago
  ... 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...
  - wslh 15y ago
    ... and a good IDE to build the stuff with drag & drop.
  - nekoZonbi 15y ago
    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
kunalb 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Look me up, maybe we can watch GOT together in PA each sunday or something.
  - kunalb 15y ago
    er, "GOT"?
    - mcmc 15y ago
      Game of Thrones
danzheng 15y ago
Can't wait to see what Joe comes out with next. But do take some time off first
asadotzler 15y ago
Dom Inspector FTW!
6ren 15y ago
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_billion-dollar_businesses_and_what_they_say_about_the_company.html http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/microsofts_11_billi...
- teaspoon 15y ago
  Some other good "indie" examples: TextMate, Charles, GitHub, Opacity, and Acorn.
  - akadien 15y ago
    Balsamiq
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  Microsoft makes money on its development tools because a huge percentage of the world's biggest organizations are its clients. If you try a startup development tool, especially a non-canonical (VS might as well be required for .NET development) tool, good luck making anything close to that number within 5-10 years.
guelo 15y ago
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.
- kevinpet 15y ago
  They may have already written off the employee lock-in effect and are taking their time going public just to avoid the disclosure and compliance hassles associated with it.
- mcslee 15y ago
  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.
- pbreit 15y ago
  Being able to work on small teams on interesting projects that reach 100s of millions of users and get paid reasonably well is sufficient incentive to work for Facebook I should think.
jerhewet 15y ago
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!)
_ankit_ 15y ago
This is great news for us developers and designers. Inspiring too
soapdog 15y ago
I just want to thank you for firebug again. Day after Day it just saves my life.
jcampbell1 15y ago
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.
thezilch 15y ago
@joehewitt, open source? And where can we expect to start contributing to the tool-chain?
waynesutton 15y ago
Thinking since @joehewitt left @facebook he's going to be drinking @milk with @kevinrose soon.
KVFinn 15y ago
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.

284 points by threepointone 15y ago

threepointone 15y ago

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

unwantedLetters 15y ago
http://twitter.com/#!/joehewitt/status/66662766093664256 http://twitter.com/#!/joehewitt/status/66662766093664256 (Link to the status)

nathanlrivera 15y ago

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

jarin 15y ago

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

weaksauce 15y ago
I think he has enough credit to be able to go back if he wanted to.

rman666 15y ago

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

pvsnp 15y ago

Thanks for making firebug. Good luck on future projects.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

CoffeeDregs 15y ago

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 15y ago
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. :)
- CoffeeDregs 15y ago
  > [Sorry if this is OT] Nah. You were on-topic (at least, on-topic for my off-topic bit...). Agreed. The Firebug-driven-tweak cycle ain't lovely, but it's positively gorgeous when compared to the old ways... And thanks for the pointer to Stylebot. Checking it out now.
  - hboon 15y ago
    Also see http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/ http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/. Mac-only.
- joehewitt 15y ago
  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.

jcampbell1 15y ago

>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.

lukejduncan 15y ago
Old? he tweeted it an hour ago.
pablasso 15y ago
A while ago he stopped working on the Facebook iOS app and the Three20 framework, not in Facebook itself.

wallflower 15y ago

"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/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/joe-hewitt-web-development/

nupark2 15y ago
... 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...
- wslh 15y ago
  ... and a good IDE to build the stuff with drag & drop.
- nekoZonbi 15y ago
  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

kunalb 15y ago

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 15y ago
Look me up, maybe we can watch GOT together in PA each sunday or something.
- kunalb 15y ago
  er, "GOT"?
  - mcmc 15y ago
    Game of Thrones

danzheng 15y ago

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

asadotzler 15y ago

Dom Inspector FTW!

6ren 15y ago

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_billion-dollar_businesses_and_what_they_say_about_the_company.html http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/microsofts_11_billi...

teaspoon 15y ago
Some other good "indie" examples: TextMate, Charles, GitHub, Opacity, and Acorn.
- akadien 15y ago
  Balsamiq
cookiecaper 15y ago
Microsoft makes money on its development tools because a huge percentage of the world's biggest organizations are its clients. If you try a startup development tool, especially a non-canonical (VS might as well be required for .NET development) tool, good luck making anything close to that number within 5-10 years.

guelo 15y ago

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.

kevinpet 15y ago
They may have already written off the employee lock-in effect and are taking their time going public just to avoid the disclosure and compliance hassles associated with it.
mcslee 15y ago
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.
pbreit 15y ago
Being able to work on small teams on interesting projects that reach 100s of millions of users and get paid reasonably well is sufficient incentive to work for Facebook I should think.

jerhewet 15y ago

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!)

_ankit_ 15y ago

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

soapdog 15y ago

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

jcampbell1 15y ago

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.

thezilch 15y ago

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

waynesutton 15y ago

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

KVFinn 15y ago

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.