People on the Edge: Jonathan Sampson

In a new series of posts, I want to introduce the world to people I work with. People who work on the Microsoft Edge browser and related technologies. The faces and voices behind the product.

Today I’m starting with an interview with Jonathan Sampson (@jonathansampson). Jonathan spends a lot of time on the web and channels like Stack Overflow and Reddit looking out to help people with their questions about Microsoft Edge and browser interoperability. He is also always on the hunt for interesting technology implementations that can be used to test the limits of the browser.

The video is on YouTube.

Amongst other things, you’ll hear about:

• How to keep an ear to the ground trying to predict what developers need and want
• How the work of Ana Tudor is not only pretty but also functions as a great CSS engine benchmark
• How topics like accessibilty are sadly enough not hot topics and yet need to be high on our radar
• How IE burned people in the past and how that makes it hard for the Edge team to get listened to
• How Edge is much more like Webkit than it is like IE
• How to collect and publish information that answers the how and why rather than just giving a quick answer
• How to deal with trolls and not to take product criticism as a personal attack
• How moving out the office makes you learn a lot about what real people use to surf the web Thanks must go to Jonathan for answering my questions and Seth Juarez and Golnaz Alibeigi of Channel 9 for filming and producing the series.

Transcript (of sorts, created from automated and cleaned captions)

Chris Hello, I’m here with Jonathan Sampson. You’re one of those people
that goes on the web alot and has conversations with people on very a ctive channels like Reddit and Stack Overflow. What do you do there?

Jonathan I don’t typically go on the web a lot – I just really don’t get off the web. I stay on it pretty much like everybody else all the time. I’m super active on Stackoverflow and Twitter. And Reddit is more of an addiction – I guess – than a job obligation.

But, no, that’s it basically – trying to get a feel for what people are expecting of a browser today. What are developers trying to do that they’re finding very difficult in a browser?

You know, we’ve been making a lot of efforts over the past few years; we kind of want to get a sense for how they’re registering in the community. Some developers may have had difficulty achieving a high degree of interop in the past and of course we want to understand if that is getting better. Is that trend line coming downward? The amount of effort to make something work cross browser. Getting a sense for just what people are playing with. You know we’ve got people out there like Ana Tudor, who is finding out thesemost brilliant ways to to break Edge and other browsers by doing the most complicated CSS stuff in the world.

Absolutely astounding! And we want to see it first and start to try and pave the way to make stuff like that work when it will start to become more mainstream. And so yeah, it is a lot of just moving about the community and seeing what people are doing.

Chris: So how do we break that concept of… I find the trend is in the community to impress each other with cool stuff more than actually building things on the web. So, the message of “look I just fixed it to work across browsers” is massively downvoted, whilst, “ok here is a 3d graph with 15 waterfalls and pixelated things in the background and a video playing at the same time” is celebrated.

You just mentioned with Ana, that she’s doing really out there experimentation. How do we get developers more excited about building things for end users again? Cause, it seems like to me we are a very small crowd that talks to each other rather than solving problems by now.

You know, in the office yesterday had a discussion about hearing impaired users and how they perceive and interact with media. Visually impaired users. It is like that no one is really given these individuals a voice in this whole discussion. Just the other day someone – I was listening to a podcast – was asking “can blind people even go online?”. Of course they can! We have some really amazing screen readers. How do we make ground on on areas that just aren’t super attractive as they’re not super flashy? You know we’re not talking about really radical canvas displays and stuff. In some of these things it’s difficult to to win somebody over because it’s just not appealing and so we just have to do the work regardless.

Right now, in fact, I just came here from another meeting where we’re looking at API support in various browsers. As in, what is the web using versus what is uniquely supported in individual browsers as proprietary stuff? Maybe experimental implementations.

And, if you look at that the graph, the very front of it – all the most popular stuff – is supported everywhere. All the major stuff is supported. There’s a couple things that are only supported in other browsers and some people make really fun demos with those but the fact is, that those aren’t ready for the web today. No one is ready to build a business or or stake their profit margins or anything on something like that. They don’t have a real need. It’s fun, it’s really cool maybe it will be ready tomorrow. It is important having constant communication with people you know trying to share data with them.

I think just having that dialogue goes a long way. Those are difficult discussions to have. Those are exciting things, that just qualitatively don’t add up today for us to spend a whole lot of effort on.

Chris: What is the most annoying truism that you see keep getting repeated and you have to tell people continuously: “no it’s actually not that way”

And it’s like “No! you know we we’ve been doing amazing work here. Like we’ve ripped out tens of thousands – hundreds of thousands – of lines of code and put in even more code! Edge has become more WebKit than IE ever was. We ripped out a lot of proprietary ms prefixed stuff. We added a whole bunch of WebKit prefixes for interop purposes. We have today the best ECMAScript 6 support among any other browser and, I think, still any transpiler out there which is really neat.Transpilers have a lot of liberty and a lot of great flexibility.”

When you actually show people the stuff you show them “hey if you want to yo really kind of brush up ES6, the ideal environment right now is Chakra. It has the most vibrant support right now”.

The moment you show people that they blow their heads off and they think this is the most amazing thing in the world. I got no idea and all my presuppositions about IE and Edge in Microsoft just kind of get thrown out the window. IE and Edge and Microsoft have been making some inways to really advance ourself and our craft and everything and so we’ve actually really been pushing the boundaries.

We’ve all been burned over the years we’ve all spent hours and hours and hours on IE6, 7 and 8 and 9 a little bit, too, trying to get things to work right. We realized the gravity of that pain and agony that people feel and it’s burned people to the point where they just don’t really want to take another look. That’s why it is important to find those opportunities to say “hey, have a look today – Edge provides a lot of opportunities – it is a fundamentally different browser”. Which it is and people realise that “Yeah, all broken things I remember there are no longer true. They’re still true about the old, remnant versions of IE that sometimes pop up on the web here and there but they don’t really apply to Edge in this day and age”.

Chris: I think it’s a general consensus, that every question that you see on Stack Overflow and others, answer the “how” immediately and not the “why”. Those are the ones that get upvoted. As a developer I don’t think it helps you to know the how without understanding what it does. That’s why we have the all these outdated libraries on the web. That’s why people keep copying and pasting really terrible code. How can we break that spell, how can we make it easier for people to start listening more and also dealing with an answer that is not a straightforward answer but one that makes you think more cause that’s what you learn from?

Chris: Seeing how often you go online and how active you are you must have grown quite a thick skin. How do you think we can we can we work with the problem of trolls? There’s a lot of new developers that do get either shot down or get some really stupid advice from somebody “for the lulz”. It’s great to see somebody do something stupid. How can we break that? Do you think it really is that rampant? Do you see it’s going going downhill? Or do you see it as not that much of a problem?

Chris This is also the fastest growing part of the community

So, it’s all about communication, all about a conversation and it’s good that we have Jonathan out there as our a firewall in Stack Overflow and other environments. So if you meet him, be nice to him – we have some good information for you.