Havoc Inspired

Chris Mills is a Web Evangelist & Dev Relations Editor for Opera (or Opera Jackass for short), his main role is technical writing and editing for dev.opera.com and labs.opera.com, he’s also put together the excellent Web Standards Curriculum which is a must read for anyone starting out or needing to update their skills. In this weeks episode Chris takes me through his career and his goals for the future.

Chris Mills – The Highlights

So what’s your job title?

…let me think, it’s change about 3 times since getting to Opera, it’s Web Evangelist and Dev Relations Editor, there you go, previous to that it was Developer Relationship Manager which I hated because it made me sound like an agony aunt for developers with emotional problems or something like that. May I just add that I think job titles in this industry and quite laughable because most of them don’t really mean very much, you tend to have the obvious separation between developer type guy and designer type guy, although you do get some insanely talented folks like Shaun Inman and Dmitry Baranovskiy who can do both pretty damn well, gits!

You work for Opera, what do you do there?

“I do loads of things at Opera, the main stuff that I do is technical writing and technical editing, I publish articles on dev.opera.com and labs.opera.com which is kind of our main two outreach sites where we tell people how to use new Opera features and new web standards features when we start to support new CSS3 features and stuff like that, I tend to release articles about them. I’ve also done this little thing called the Web Standards Curriculum which is our big educational course aimed at teaching the world how to develop websites properly *laughs* and I’m going around universities at the moment talking to students about the work that they are doing, creating websites, I’m also trying to put as much pressure as possible on teachers to insure that web type topics at universities are taught properly and students aren’t leaving with bad habits which happens far too much these days.

So just to expand on that a little bit, the universities you’re going to are they actually running web design courses?

This is an interesting one, the universities that want you to come with open arms are the ones that have already got it right and they’re definitely the minority, it’s a bit difficult, it’s always this case of preaching to the converted. I think there is still value in going to universities that have good web courses because it’s often very good for the lecturer to get an actual industry figure, I’m not trying to same I’m this amazing big guy from the industry or something, but to get anybody from the industry in to talk to the students tends to have quite a lot of weight and tend to make them sit up and think “Oh this is kind of cool, this guy must know what he’s talking about” and I think it makes them take the lectures that I do a little bit more seriously and it’s useful to give a real world insight as is always the case when you’re study a course on anything you can do as much studying in the world as you want but there’s no substitute to getting some kind of real world experience no matter how slight so I think that’s still useful. In terms of the universities that don’t care about teach web standards and best practices properly it’s a lot more difficult to get through to them. It’s kind of best to try and approach universities that will teach something vaguely related such as design or multimedia design or computer science so you’ve got the design and art approach and the hardcore programming approach because the web will feature at some point in those course even if it’s just a minor little feature because it’s a very important thing these days, which is good that at least they can recognise that but of it is very difficult because their courses are stuck in 1998 and the really don’t have a clue about how to teach best practices and it’s like a lot of them just don’t see it, a lot of them will be like “This is what it was like when I learn’t to write a web page, so I don’t see the point in changing and I don’t see the point in doing all this extra work to update my curriculum when there’s already one in place that I think is perfectly reasonable”. So it takes a while to find these guys but we have got somewhere in at least trying to get these people to consider material that we’ve made available.

What’s your defining moment?

It would have to be the Web Standards Curriculum, it was an idea I’d had in my head for maybe 6 or 7 years before I actually did it, it’s a huge project have to do in my own time and I’d never found a company that would cough up the cash and actually let me do it on work time. I’d felt for years it would be great, there’s this education problem, people aren’t getting taught properly at universities so what we really need is this free resource which is the ultimate resource that everyone can turn to to learn this stuff, it’s released under a creative commons so you can remix it and re-release it however you want as long as you’re not just trying to sell it and of course it’s turned into a much bigger thing that that I’m also part of the WaSP Education Task Force contributing to the WaSP InterAct Curriculum project which is another fantastic educational resource and of course I’ve also become a core comity member of this new Open Web Education Alliance that’s a W3C incubator group which we’re also aiming to do really big thing in the future, that’s really kind of a think tank where we’re trying to work out what we really need for a standard for Web Standards education and then we’re going to sort of  create some kind of super curriculum and build up a big outreach arm of the alliance to help us get to a lot more universities than we could before.

Where do you see yourself in the future?

I think I see myself carry on all this education work that I’m doing, I’d really really like to build that up into some a lot more definite and concrete because it’s very very nascent at the moment. I think I see Opera as definitely having a larger market share in some of the western countries where we don’t have a very good market share because we’re doing a good job about getting the word out about that and I think I’m still going to be hanging around claiming to be heavy metal but really just being a parent of two who has to go to bed early every night so he can get up for work.

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Enjoy.