Kelly Norton is a designer and software engineer living in Atlanta, Georgia. He holds degrees
from Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and from the MIT Media Lab
where he studied under John Maeda. From 2006–2012, he was a software engineer at Google
working on Google Web Toolkit, Speed Tracer, Google Chrome and other stuff. He co-founded
Connexxia LLC in 2000 to help universities effectively recruit high school seniors though
online social engagement. He is now building a new company, but more about that later.
INSPIRATION MUST FIND YOU WORKING
As a person who builds things, I constantly struggle with what I should be working on right now. You probably do too. But years ago, I thought it was just me. I was naive. I thought I had too many ideas and not enough fingers. Now I know that everyone has a lot more ideas than they can actually build. What I did not realize until recently, however, is how this indecision shapes a company’s culture.
NO, WE DON'T DO SYNCHRONOUS
There are a few questions I see repeatedly on the GWT developers list, and one of the most common seems to be why in the world we were so clueless as to forget to support synchronous XMLHttpRequest. Ok, most of the people asking don't call us clueless; they simply ask why the feature is excluded. But the question has been asked so often that I feel inclined to answer it somewhere easily linkable, namely here.