A little while ago, I walked in to my favorite neigborhood bakery and took notice of the t-shirt of the employees was wearing: a simple white on black ‘Die Techie Scum’. I found it mildly disturbing, and my first reflex was to make a comment to that effect. Luckily, I heard my remark in my brain before it went out my mouth, which in turn triggered me to shut the hell up and instead wonder why I felt that way.

A friend jokingly suggested I shouldn’t have left a tip that day. Because as a wealthy individual, that should be the way you communicate your discontent with the opinions of someone making less money than you do. Not.

I, unavoidably and unwillingly, identify as a techie: white, male, upper middle class, SF transplant, graduate in CS and working as an engineer at a top tech company. I was part of the second batch, the one from 2007. I moved to my first apartment in San Francisco because the shuttles allowed me to. Like the eternal September or yore, the three years after the Google IPO marked the beginning of an influx that was only slightly slowed down by the recession.

These days, the valley regales itself week after week of news stories of how Uber threatens journalists and of how Twitter fails to handle the abuse and harassment happening on their network. The language and actions of disruption have become stronger – ads for Prius-leasing companies targeting Lyft drivers are popping up on the web. VC money keeps pouring in, sometimes financing the most absurd projects.

And despite the obvious escalation, the Chronicle published a piece positing that the anti-tech movement has become irrelevant. I think it nails it when even one of the protesters against this year’s Crunchies is quoted speaking against the personal turn that the protests seemed to have taken:

Outside the Crunchies, Marc Bruno, a longtime North Beach activist who ran against current Assemblyman David Chiu for supervisor in 2012, said the antitech movement fell short in part because it failed to win enough potential allies. Tech workers, like the ones he often sees helping feed the hungry at church dinners, could have rallied against industry excess and income inequality, he said. Instead, protests felt like an indictment of techies themselves, hindering the movement.

I never really had any hope that protesting Google shuttles would ever stop the new fangled shiny condo buildings from mushrooming around mid-Market. Getting tech companies to pay up for the use of Muni stops only went so far. Techies are not going away – there’s no other place for them to get jobs. So, as far as t-shirts go, I much prefer the one worn by Diane Lane when she was shot by Andy Warhol:

She, of course, meant the San Fernando valley. Times have changed.

I’m a sucker for good astronomical pictures and NASA recently released a stunning new high definition picture of Jupiter’s moon Europa. What’s always surprised me about the solar system is the variety of worlds it contains. Even when bodies are roughly in the same locality like the Jovian moons, it’s as if the slighest change in position or inital composition has the potential to yield wildly different results.

Europa is of particular interest since it is a prime candidate for being amenable hosting life. The liquid ocean lying under its frozen surface might be heated by the volcanic activity resulting from Jupiter’s massive tidal forces. There might be an entire ecosystem thriving in the dark depths of a tiny moon orbiting 600 milion of kilometers away.

I’ve been geeking out a bit about Europa and found a Wikipedia list of the geological features identified on Europa. As was done for our Moon, scientists and geologists have named the various ridges, mountains and regions of Jupiter’s satellite.

I really wonder how they came up with and agreed upon the nomenclature but there are two general themes. The first is names appearing in ancient greek mythology and in particular those related to Europa the character. The other theme is that of celtic mythology: Annwn Regio, Murias Chaos, Amergin Crater… I’d be curious to find out how that came out to be. But it’s a pleasant thought that people in astronomy labs are giving a damn about this and refer to a physical location as ‘Castalia Macula’ rather than just ‘that dark spot up there’.

We’ll have to settle for robots for another while, but I can’t wait for the day a human sets foot on Narbeth Chaos.

You read it here first! Two days ago, Facebook unveiled the Android and iOS ports of their React framework, targeting native platforms using Javascript as a source language:

Joking aside, it looks like React Native has been in the works for a while and I don’t think my line of reasoning was particularly insightful. But I do think it is nice to see Javascript become a prime language for mobile applications and I think Facebook will be quickly followed at least by Google.

I also very much like that the Facebook engineering team isn’t setting cross-platform compatibility as a goal of the React project – as mentioned in the first part of the keynote, React is more concerned with promoting programming practices rather than with providing a full-blown multi-platform compatibility layer. ‘Write once, Run anywhere’ becomes ‘Learn once, Write anywhere’.

In any case, between Twitter’s Fabric, Facebook’s React and Google’s Polymer, the number of options to work with is growing, which is a Good Thing™ for developers, for the industry and ultimately for the users. Let’s hope it keeps Microsoft and Apple on the tip of their toes.