podcast on Ajaxian : Joe Hewitt interview

This dude is cool. A Titan.

I highly recommend skating over to Ajaxian.com and queue-ing up the podcast

Hewitt …orig worked at Netscape since 2000 …… DHTML ever since… worked on Netscape 6 and 7… …then helped create FireFox (he says “we wanted to create a browser that didn’t suck”)… pretty much single-handedly created Firebug (which pretty much every Ajax dev uses nowadays)… created Parakey spinoff from Firefox with fellow FireFox dev Blake Ross…acquired by FaceBook this month. [It sounds like, from Joe, we will see the fruits of Parakey’s labors in the near future. As prolific as Joe Hewitt is, they have not yet released the product they have been working on for 2 years, and Facebook bought it. It's going to be fun to watch what happens there]

(…check out iUI…)

Hewitt sayz:

‘Apple has the lead in CSS (WebKit)’

‘Mozilla has the lead in JavaScript (Gecko)’

‘Python is my favorite language’

“between Mozilla and Microsoft, my grandchildren will write some great apps”

“Mozilla has a large legacy codebase… spending a lot of time refactoring code, instead of creating new features”

“I liked what Flock did… would have liked to see more of that with FireFox… maybe they’re right, because Flock is struggling”

iPhone: “I’m as cynical as it gets with mobile development. But the iPhone is going to be huge. Every other manufacturer will copy the form factor. Hopefully many will follow by using WebKit … Nokia uses WebKit …WebKit is amazing. Open Source. Small and Light. Nothing stopping anyone who doesn’t have political reasons for using WebKit”

This is pretty funny conversation from the podcast:

When asked ‘how come you are able to churn out so many apps, side projects like Firebug, iUI, in addition to parakey work, etc’:

Hewitt: “No no… I decided a few years ago I was going to do nothing else but write code”

[big laughter from Ben, Dion]

Hewitt: “I’m not even kidding… my girlfriend and I broke up, I have this routine where I--

Almaer [jokes]: “...the dog died…”

Hewitt: “hey you have to put food in the bowl, who has time for that?!”

Great stuff. And awesome information.