Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it’s a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It’s pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn’t let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon’s recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they’ve made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don’t really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding – though again this varies by group, so it’s luck of the draw. They don’t give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don’t have any of our perks or extras — they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that’s the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.

To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn’t take most of it even if it were free.

I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.

I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it’s given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it’s created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.

But there’s one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.

Micro-managing isn’t that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn’t list it as a strength or anything. I’m just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We’re talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people “who runs the company” when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular… well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don’t get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word “hardened interface” a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.

Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon’s vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon’s dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:

– pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.

– every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.

– monitoring and QA are the same thing. You’d never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says “oh yes, I’m fine”, it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say “I’m fine, roger roger, over and out” in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it’s indistinguishable from automated QA. So they’re a continuum.

– if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups’ code via these services, then you won’t be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can’t have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.

– debugging problems with someone else’s code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox.

That’s just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they’re not supposed to trust external developers.

This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.

At this point they don’t even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they’re still afraid of that; it’s pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they’ve come to understand that it’s the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it’s the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.

That’s what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn’t (and doesn’t) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.

You wouldn’t really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?

Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they’d built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel’ o’ other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.

The other big realization he had was that he can’t always build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn’t use the goddamn website. It’s not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn’t really matter, because nobody’s mom can use the goddamn website. In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for over half a decade. I’ve just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold.

I’m not really sure how Bezos came to this realization — the insight that he can’t build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn’t matter, because he gets it. There’s actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It’s called Accessibility, and it’s the most important thing in the computing world.

The. Most. Important. Thing.

If you’re sorta thinking, “huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?” then you’re not alone, because I’ve come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn’t been able to get through to you yet. It’s not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software — or idea-ware for that matter — fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.

Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there’s more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.

But I’ll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

So yeah. In case you hadn’t noticed, I could actually write a book on this topic. A fat one, filled with amusing anecdotes about ants and rubber mallets at companies I’ve worked at. But I will never get this little rant published, and you’ll never get it read, unless I start to wrap up.

That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t “get” platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

But no. No, it’s like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don’t know. It’s pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don’t think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.

It’s a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they’re building products. And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I’m concerned, it’s none of them. Stubby’s great, but it’s like parts when you need a car.

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: “So is it the Stalker API?” She got all glum and said “Yeah.” I mean, I was joking, but no… the only API call we offer is to get someone’s stream. So I guess the joke was on me.

Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It’s been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don’t eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: “Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let’s go contract someone to, um, write some games for us.” Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.

You can’t do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don’t have a Steve Jobs here. I’m sorry, but we don’t.

Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn’t need to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products: interfaces and workflows that they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party developers to do it, and it would happen automatically.

I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I’m saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It’s incredibly frigging obvious. Except we’re not doing it. We don’t get Platforms, and we don’t get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility.

So yeah, Microsoft gets it. And you know as well as I do how surprising that is, because they don’t “get” much of anything, really. But they understand platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you’ve never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because it’s staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform. Too big in fact, because they can’t design for squat, but at least they’re doing it.

Amazon gets it. Amazon’s AWS (aws.amazon.com) is incredible. Just go look at it. Click around. It’s embarrassing. We don’t have any of that stuff.

Apple gets it, obviously. They’ve made some fundamentally non-open choices, particularly around their mobile platform. But they understand accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development and they eat their dogfood. And you know what? They make pretty good dogfood. Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft’s, and have been since time immemorial.

Facebook gets it. That’s what really worries me. That’s what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate… plussing, or whatever it’s called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it’s a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it’d be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I’m insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be.

After you’ve marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn’t look because I didn’t want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It’s like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader.

Please don’t get me wrong here — I know for a fact that the dev-rel team has had to FIGHT to get even this much available externally. They’re kicking ass as far as I’m concerned, because they DO get platforms, and they are struggling heroically to try to create one in an environment that is at best platform-apathetic, and at worst often openly hostile to the idea.

I’m just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider. It looks childish. Where’s the Maps APIs in there for Christ’s sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. And the APIs for everything I clicked were… they were paltry. They were obviously dog food. Not even good organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it’s all snouts and horse hooves.

And also don’t get me wrong about Google+. They’re far from the only offenders. This is a cultural thing. What we have going on internally is basically a war, with the underdog minority Platformers fighting a more or less losing battle against the Mighty Funded Confident Producters.

Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are underdogs — Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in that direction. But it’s hard for them to get funding for it because it’s not part of our culture. Maestro’s funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming platform: it’s a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they’ll never be competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they’re not getting any resource love. I mean, I assume they’re not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet right now, and it doesn’t even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks pretty unloved to me.

Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace. But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app. Facebook — that is, the stock service they offer with walls and friends and such — is the killer app for the Facebook Platform. And it is a very serious mistake to conclude that the Facebook App could have been anywhere near as successful without the Facebook Platform.

You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I’m a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We’re not arrogant, by and large. We’re, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. I did start this post — if you’ll reach back into distant memory — by describing Google as “doing everything right”. We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we’re arrogant it’s because we didn’t hire them, or they’re unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They’re inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.

But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we’re being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever — it doesn’t matter in the end, because it’s foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone.

And so we wind up with a browser that doesn’t let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I’m actually going blind. For real. I’ve been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they’re quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you’re blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.

It’s not just them. It’s everyone. The problem is that we’re a Product Company through and through. We built a successful product with broad appeal — our search, that is — and that wild success has biased us.

Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers… if only they could be monetized somehow… you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight.

Microsoft started out as a platform, so they’ve just had lots of practice at it.

Facebook, though: they worry me. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure they started off as a Product and they rode that success pretty far. So I’m not sure exactly how they made the transition to a platform. It was a relatively long time ago, since they had to be a platform before (now very old) things like Mafia Wars could come along.

Maybe they just looked at us and asked: “How can we beat Google? What are they missing?”

The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up. We don’t do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don’t do external ones. This means that the “not getting it” is endemic across the company: the PMs don’t get it, the engineers don’t get it, the product teams don’t get it, nobody gets it. Even if individuals do, even if YOU do, it doesn’t matter one bit unless we’re treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can’t keep launching products and pretending we’ll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later. We’ve tried that and it’s not working.

The Golden Rule of Platforms, “Eat Your Own Dogfood”, can be rephrased as “Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything.” You can’t just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate — ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it’ll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can’t cheat. You can’t have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

I’m not saying it’s too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late.

I honestly don’t know how to wrap this up. I’ve said pretty much everything I came here to say today. This post has been six years in the making. I’m sorry if I wasn’t gentle enough, or if I misrepresented some product or team or person, or if we’re actually doing LOTS of platform stuff and it just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just never heard about it. I’m sorry.

But we’ve gotta start doing this right.

Let me preface the rest of this post by mentioning that what follows is going to get relatively technical, and it would be helpful to have some background in coding for WordPress, particularly making themes, before diving into what follows.

For a preview of what this will output on my lame, single-author blog, check out this page. Keep in mind that this will generate a relatively large page for a blog with any sizable number of authors and/or posts, and moreover, generating the page is expensive, requiring a lot of database queries, so you should definitely have a caching solution in place.

Let’s dive right in: The two important functions that I use are get_users and query_posts (I could have used get_posts instead, but query_posts sets up a Loop in the correct way, whereas get_posts didn’t seem to quite as well. Know the reason why this is so? Let me know in the comments). First I get all the authors and above of the blog, like so:

$args = array( 'orderby' => 'display_name', 'order' => 'ASC', 'who' => 'authors' );
$authors = get_users( $args );

This explicitly leaves out any subscribers to the blog. Now, since this archive page might be relatively large, direct links (anchors) to a particular author’s section of the archive might be useful. So let’s loop through the authors to print this “header” out, using the pipe character as a separator between each author:

// Loop through all the users, printing their names, with links to their section of the
// archives. We can't use a foreach loop because we don't want to print the separator
// for the last author
for ( $i = 0; $i < count( $authors ); ++$i ) {
	$author = $authors[$i];
	echo "<a href='#{$author->user_nicename}'>$author->display_name</a>";
	if ( $i < count( $authors ) - 1 ) {
		echo ' | ';
	}
}

Now that we’ve displayed this “header,” let’s loop through all the authors again, this time printing out their posts, if they have any:

foreach ( $authors as $author ) {
	// Add the anchor for this author, as linked from the "header section"
	echo "<a name='{$author->user_nicename}'></a>";
	// Set up a Loop, querying only for the current user's posts
	$args = array( 'author' => $author->ID );
	$posts = query_posts( $args );
	// Now that we have the posts, simulate a Loop here or use get_template_part
	// if we already have the output in another template
	if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
		// Let's just print the title of each post
		echo '<p>' . the_title() . '</p>';
	endwhile; else:
		echo '<p>This author has not yet published any posts</p>';
	endif;
}

Now of course we could have made the output of each post a bit fancier, maybe printing the publication date, an excerpt, etc., as well as adding some styling to it. As I mentioned in the comment above, we could have even used get_template_part to print out all the posts for us, since we set up a Loop. However, for the sake of this example, I wanted to keep things simple, and you know how you want to style your archive page better than I do, anyway. But just for fun, I include some nicer-looking output in the full code listing at the bottom of this post.

Okay, so now that you have the code, how would you use this all? Well, the easiest way would be to wrap it up into a plugin that “listens” for a shortcode, which you would then put into a Page on your site on which you actually want to display the archives. However, I’m not going to make it quite that easy for you, mainly because it seems excessive to make a plugin just for this archive page.

So how else? Well, those who have built themes probably already know how. But I’ll give a run-down for those lucky enough to have never had to build a theme. I’d recommend that you still output these archives using a WordPress Page. You simply upload a file called all-author-archives.php to your theme (or a child theme!) on your server with the full code (handily available below). Once you’ve done that, make a new Page. On the right side of this new page, under Page Attributes, you should now be able to select a Template of “All Author Archives.” (If you don’t see a Template section under Page Attributes, or don’t see “All Author Archives” in the template drop-down, then something else went wrong. Make sure the file is actually in your current theme’s folder.) Once you select this new template, you can give your Page a title, which will display above the archives. You can preview your archives, and publish when ready.

Alternatively, rather than creating a page template, you could simply put the code for these archives in your theme’s folder with a filename of page-archives.php, and give your Page, as created above, the slug “archives” (that means changing the part of the permalink that is editable). As long as the slug matches the part of the filename after “page-” and before “.php”, this new Page will be displayed with the file you uploaded because of WordPress template hierarchy magic. This makes the archives a bit more one-off.

And now, without further ado, a listing of the full code that you’ll need to make this happen. Of course, you’ll probably want to edit the display of the individual posts to your needs (though the version included below adds users’ Gravatars to the left of their posts listing). And you might not need the “container” or “content” div elements, nor might you want to display a sidebar.

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: All Author Archives
 * Code: Scott Bressler (http://www.scottbressler.com/blog)
 * Explanation: http://www.scottbressler.com/blog/2011/03/wordpress-archive-page-with-all-authors-and-all-posts
 */
get_header(); ?>
<div id="container">
	<div id="content">
		<div id="all-authors-archive">
			<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
<?php
// Arguments to pass to get_users
$args = array( 'orderby' => 'display_name', 'order' => 'ASC', 'who' => 'authors' );
// Query for the users
$authors = get_users( $args ); ?>

			<div id="authors-listing"><p><strong>Authors: </strong>
<?php
// Loop through all the users, printing their names, with links to their section of the archives
for ( $i = 0; $i < count( $authors ); ++$i ) {
	$author = $authors[$i];
	echo "<a href='#{$author->user_nicename}'>$author->display_name</a>";
	if ( $i < count( $authors ) - 1 ) {
		echo ' | ';
	}
} ?>
			</p></div>

<?php
// Loop through all the users, printing all of their posts as we go
foreach ( $authors as $author ) { ?>
			<a name="<?php echo $author->user_nicename; ?>"></a>
			<div class="author-posts-wrapper" id="author-<?php echo $author->ID; ?>-posts-wrapper">
				<div class="author-avatar" id="author-<?php echo $author->ID; ?>-avatar">
					<?php echo get_avatar( $author->ID, 96 ); ?>
				</div>
				<div class="author-posts" id="author-<?php echo $author->ID; ?>-posts">
					<h2><a href="<?php echo get_author_posts_url( $author->ID ); ?>"><?php echo $author->display_name; ?></a></h2>
	<?php
	// Set up a Loop, querying for all of the current user's posts
	$args = array( 'author' => $author->ID, 'posts_per_page' => -1 );
	$posts = query_posts($args);
	// Now that we have the posts, simulate a Loop here or use get_template_part
	// if we already have the output in another template, like:
	// get_template_part( 'loop', 'all-authors' ); // Pulls in loop-all-authors.php from theme
	if ( have_posts() ) : ?>
				<ul class="author-post-list" id="author-<?php echo $author->ID; ?>-post-list">
		<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); // Print whatever we want for each post - for now the title and date ?>
					<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> &mdash; <?php echo get_the_date(); ?></li>
		<?php endwhile; ?>
				</ul><!-- #author-post-list -->
	<?php else: ?>
					<p>This author has not yet published any posts</p>
	<?php endif; ?>
				</div><!-- #author-posts -->
			</div><!-- #author-posts-wrapper -->
<?php } // End looping over all users ?>

			<p>See <a href="http://www.scottbressler.com/blog/2011/03/wordpress-archive-page-with-all-authors-and-all-posts">this post</a> for an explanation of the motivation behind this page</p>
		</div><!-- #all-authors-archive -->
	</div><!-- #content -->
</div><!-- #container -->
<style type="text/css">
/* We would certainly put this in a separate file for production use */
#all-authors-archive h1 {
	margin-bottom: 15px;
}
#all-authors-archive h2,
#all-authors-archive .author-posts-wrapper {
	margin-bottom: 10px;
}
#all-authors-archive .author-posts-wrapper {
	position: relative;
	padding-left: 111px;
	min-height: 106px;
}
#all-authors-archive .author-avatar {
	position: absolute;
	left: 0;
}
#all-authors-archive .author-post-list li {
	word-wrap: break-word;
	font-size: 14px;
}
</style>
<?php
get_sidebar();
get_footer();
?>

You can alternatively download the code directly. Make sure the file is named all-author-archives.php before uploading to your server. And consider moving the CSS to your theme’s (or child theme’s) style.css file. And just as a head’s up regarding browser compatibility, I tested this code (mostly the individual article display with avatars, since that’s where the CSS really comes into play) in Firefox 3.6, Internet Explorer 7-9, Chrome 10, and Safari 5 (all on Windows). Things don’t work as well in IE6, so if you’re targeting IE6 users, you’ll probably want to fix things up just a wee bit.

I hope that this code helps you. Sound off in the comments below with your thoughts, feedback, or experience using it!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the rest of the team that makes this all possible—thanks for your hard work and for putting up with my perfectionism: Andrew Spittle, Daniel Bachhuber, and Mo Jangda.

Read more about the latest release in our official post. Also, if you use Edit Flow, take our survey to let us know what you think. Finally, click through the break to watch a quick video detailing the newest features.

Thanks, Andrew, for whipping this up!

Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) is far and away one of the most incredible places I have visited in my life. In the span of 10 hours, we saw a spectacular sunset, a million stars in a clear sky, and a magnificent sunrise after a pre-dawn hike.

A 4.5-hour bus ride from Hangzhou, Huangshan is far enough away from the pollution covering every big (and probably small) city in China. After a fake-out “arrival” two hours into the ride which turned out just to be a rest stop (apparently we were the only ones fooled – I blame Sally since Becca and I couldn’t understand the Chinese directions), we made it to the base of Mount Huang (also known as Huangshan).

We ate lunch where we were dropped off and tried to figure out the deal for the next day since we went on this excursion/tour without many details. Sally managed to get a cab to the base of the mountain from where we thought we would hike up. When told that the cable car was how everyone was going up, Becca and I let out a sigh of relief; as much as we wanted to go hiking, the cable car sounded like a better plan. Still we’re unsure if it’s even possible to hike all the way up or down the mountain.

After our ascent up the mountain in the cable car (made in Switzerland, of course!), affording only the beginning of what would be a day and night filled with incredible views, we spent a few hours hiking to and around North Sea (beihai in Chinese) to places like “Monkey overlooking the sea” and others. The vistas (or as Becca says, veeestas) were amazing; we had hiked up to level of the clouds and in many places were above them (blue skies!).

We were told that Purple Cloud Peak near was the best vantage point for the sunset and was at least a 45-minute hike away. We only had about 50 minutes. Thankfully, as we realized, this was a typical Chinese estimate doubled in length, and we were able to make it there with plenty of time. I tried climbing up to a treacherous area but came back down (sneaking through hole in a barbed-wire fence) when Becca and Sally didn’t want to take the risk. We watched the sunset up in the clouds in an almost surreal setting sitting on top of a slippery mountain face.

After sunset, we hiked back down to our hotel for dinner, which was one of the most expensive of the trip at a $20 buffet per person! As everyone else filed to sleep leaving the hotel dead at 9pm, we soldiered on, resolute to view the stars in the clear night sky. After some searching, we found a dark open area from which to gaze, brought out some blankets from our dorm-style rooms against the guards wishes, and sat out until almost 1am. I spotted at least 15 shooting stars. I never expected I would see such a clear sky in China.

We finally went to bed hours after everyone else apparently had; their loss missing out on the stars. We set our alarms for 4am to zoom out and catch the sunrise at Bright Summit at 5:07am. A grueling 2.5-km early morning hike without any water later, we made it just in time for the sun to peak over the clouds as the hundreds surrounding us starting crying out and screaming back and forth in excitement. To their credit, the sunrise was absolutely incredible, and the setting even more fantastic. As usual, everyone there save a few filed out within 10 minutes while we hung around for an hour or more taking in the morning view.

Completing our journey, we went back to the hotel, took a short nap, and then hiked back to Bright Summit to get all the way to the cable car that would bring us down, a 9km+ hike. Along the way we encountered the most terrifyingly steep staircase any of us had ever seen (alas, there was an easier way down) that, to our chagrin, allowed for two-way traffic. When we got back down by cable car, the woman in the restaurant where we had dined the day before had already prepared us lunch so we could eat before boarding our bus back to Hangzhou.

From Hangzhou, we immediately took the train to Shanghai to round out my portion of the trip and soldiered through our fatigue to go out our first night there. As Becca remarked, it was one of the starkest changes in environment in 24 hours that I have ever experienced: from an incredible sunrise surrounded by mountains and nature to a Mexican bar in Shanghai named Zapata’s filled with expats, dancing, and American music.

More about Shanghai, some more cultural observations, and the end to my China tour next time… then I can start posting about my trip to the National Parks out West on which I’m currently embarking.

But when traveling even I (!) understand the importance of totally enjoying the experience and not missing out on anything while tapping away on a phone. It can be important when going on new adventures or sharing a unique experience at home, too. I’ll admit that sometimes I might need some reminding. I still need to improve when I have a BlackBerry at my disposal, but I’m working on it. I got ample opportunity to do so in China for the majority of the trip (when given no other choice).

It was a liberating feeling. To some extent. But at the same time, when you’re used to instantaneous answers to any question you might have, particularly practical (and important) ones such as where am I (GPS) or what’s the address of the place I want to go to, it can be aggravating. I ended up losing time having to figure out certain details ahead of time – small details that would be easy to look up while out and about.

Of course 5-10 years ago none of what is now possible was available to international travelers. At least not economically. More extensive planning was usually necessary. But it’s nice to be able to wander with no concerns about where or when you’re going to meet someone or how to get there.

I got a local China phone soon after losing mine so I could meet up with people there. It was a practical (and cheap) purchase. However, not long before the era of smartphones, the idea of a world phone (or buying a local mobile phone) at all was unheard of. Meeting up with someone abroad meant agreeing upon a pre-determined place and time. I am thankful for being able to be more mobile thanks to such recent innovations. Traveling is more enjoyable because of it. And that’s why I was sure to get a local phone shortly after losing my BlackBerry.

So what are your thoughts on disconnecting from the connected world? Would you consider leaving your smartphone behind altogether when embarking on a new journey? Do you ever feel overly connected or are you content with the convenience afforded by your smartphone?

Ed. note: This post was written on my (new) BlackBerry.

Update: Right after posting this I spent 3 days in Yellowstone without absolutely any connection whatsoever: no phone signal, no WiFi, nothing. It was great to be forced to disconnect, as I alluded to above. I find it humorous that I had better signal cruising down the Yangtze River in the middle of the Three Gorges than I did anywhere in the U.S.. I wonder if the National Park Service has intentionally kept the cell companies out of the parks.

I’m sure people who work in the parks know what they’re getting into, but it’s hard to imagine, in this day and age, living without a cell phone entirely. Maybe they have satellite phones, but calls on those are very pricey I imagine, and they probably use land-line phones more than the rest of us do anymore. While they have access to computers, they are, however, seemingly forced to live like the Amish pretending the technology of the past decade doesn’t exist. Maybe they like it that way.

I arrived in Hangzhou (pronounced han-joe) two days ago after my short stay in Xi’an. As cheap as cabs are (<$15), I decided to take the airport bus to the city ($3) and after much pointing at the address of the hostel I’m staying at in Hangzhou that I thankfully acquired while in Xi’an, I found out that I should get off at the first stop on the bus at the railway station. 45 minutes later, I did so and then tried to take a cab to my hostel. No one would take me. I started thinking they didn’t like that I’m white—I’ve been informed the word for white person in Chinese literally translates to “white devil”—but really they just didn’t know the obscure side-street on which the hostel is located.

Going into the nearest hotel, I got some more directions and took the public bus a few stops, though the bus driver himself had no idea where the stop that I wanted to take was. After walking a bit, I finally called the hostel myself (the hotel I stopped in also did this, but apparently their directions were insufficient), hailed a cab, and gave the phone to the cab driver. That’s been a popular method of telling a cab driver where to take me when I don’t have the Chinese address. Apparently I was close to the hostel, because three minutes later we were there. But not before another phone call to the hostel when the taxi driver got lost, during which he screamed at nearly the top of his voice at the hostel asking where to go. Screaming seems pretty common here, so I don’t think the lady at the hostel was all that taken aback.

The hostel is nice, although tucked onto a very hard to find side road. There are a lot of people here, many of whom hang out in the common areas, and it’s fun to talk to them and hear about their trips. I met one Frenchman who went to school in Toulouse this year, and I was just so glad to practice my French some. Apparently my French accent (and unpracticed French itself) was far more understandable for him than my New Yorker accent, which he claimed was thick. Both a (surprising) compliment and a diss at the same time—Manhattanites don’t have accents!

Exploring the market

The first night, while Becca and Sally were still returning from their excursion to Suzhou, I went out and explored the area around the hostel. There was a gigantic street market with many blocks littered with stalls selling local wares (and more of the same that every other city has), such as fans, jade bracelets, Chinese flutes, light-up flying toys (the Chinese versions of the wooden airplanes always being demoed at FAO Schwartz), stamps with your name, and pictures painted on the spot. As always, I saw very few Westerners there — apparently locals love exploring these, too.

The best part of this market area was the large open space at the beginning of it, at which there were hundreds of people all doing this perfectly-coordinated dance. It was quite a spectacle as they performed many songs in a row and everyone was in perfect sync.

Eventually found some food as I hadn’t eaten since right before my flight around noon. My dinner included what I think/hope were chicken and beef skewers/kebobs (wow, Chrome doesn’t like that spelling, actually) and some noodles. A lot of pointing and putting up one or two fingers to explain what I wanted and how many. Worked out and pretty delicious in the end. Walked back to the hostel after this stopping to watch the New Zealand vs. Slovakia World Cup match on a gigantic TV in the same area where there had been dancing before (ended 1-1 when NZ scored with moments to spare). I met up with Becca and Sally once back in the hostel when they got back from Suzhou (farther away than they thought it was), and we planned our 6:30am departure for the next day (yesterday), continuing the trend of not sleeping past 7am since Beijing!

Dragon Boat Festival

Yesterday was the Dragon Boat Festival, a public holiday in China. To celebrate, Becca, Sally, Sally’s family (dad, brother, two cousins—an adorable 8-year-old and a 22-year-old—and aunt and uncle), and I went to a river to race dragon boats and also went boating through a cave! It was a great local, cultural experience as everyone in Hangzhou celebrates the festival in some similar way. The buses for this local tour group left around 7:30, thus the very early morning. We couldn’t even find breakfast around the bus departure point it was so early, but Sally’s dad kindly provided some snacks that Becca and I made into breakfast. Becca and I were the only two “foreigners” (i.e. white devils) on the excursion, and the tour guide was certain to make mention of that “welcoming” us (in Chinese—there was no English translation this time around).

The dragon boat races, like the rest of the day, were a culturally eye-opening experience. A “one-hour” bus ride was actually 2+ hours each way, but we eventually made it to the river and boarded boats. The young people splashed with their paddles, getting my camera soaked (thankfully it’s resistant enough), and the older folk, including the man behind me, shouting loudly about not wanting to get a drop of water on him. For once I was thankful that I didn’t understand Chinese and couldn’t be blamed for this. Or at least I could feign ignorance.

The rowing was fun and the racing was sort of a joke, particularly because our puny oars didn’t really accelerate us through the water much at all; it really was the guy steering at the back with a large oar that actually had any effect on our speed.

After the race, we got back on our tour bus, and after making a few more stops, one simply to take a group photo with a large banner, we eventually made it to lunch where food was already in the middle of every table. The best dish: turtle. Only freaked me out a little bit, but tasted pretty good actually. There were also many zongzi on the table, the classic dish for the festival, as shown below. After the tables were mostly cleared, two women came around to everyone at every table letting them take a slip of paper out of a box: raffle time! The ensuing scene was more raucous than any of the previously mentioned shouting matches. The best prize we encountered: a face towel. I won a $15 gift certificate that expires at the end of June applicable toward another tour with the same tour company—how perfectly useful!

Zongzi, the classic dish/dessert to celebrate Dragon Boat Festival.

After lunch we eventually arrived at a cave through which we also traveled by boat. The sides of the cave was all lit up with bright multi-colored neon lights (tacky!), and everyone in our boat was shouting (the Chinese way), so the experience was anything but natural or peaceful, but it was a fun, and again eye-opening, experience.

Becca and I noted the lack of efficiency or logic with much of our itinerary throughout the day. For instance, why didn’t we do the group photo where we were doing other activities rather than just at some random stop wasting time getting off and right back on the buses.

Evening activities

We then boarded the buses back and made it back to Hangzhou around 5pm. Some of us then walked around West Lake, the main attraction in Hangzhou. It’s a gigantic park with some ancient things tucked away inside. As it got dark, the park lit up and looked great at night. There was a spectacular fountain light show, though it didn’t quite rival the Bellagio’s in Vegas. We ended the night with dinner at a local place with lots of different stalls. Price of dinner for 4? $8.60.

A long hike and beautiful views

Today Sally hung out with her family while Becca and I explored Hangzhou some more. After wasting over an hour failing to find a bank that would accept and change Becca’s traveler’s checks, we made our way to West Lake; it really is one of the main attractions for the seemingly relatively unattractive city. We decided to walk all the way around the lake (15km) including a few hour-long hike in the middle to Baochu Pagoda. There were absolutely incredible views from the top, and every path we took on our hike led to some new, fantastic area tucked away in the hills.

Last few days

We’re leaving Hangzhou early early tomorrow morning for a (longer) hike/stair-climbing on Huangshan and then staying in a hotel at the top for one night. Once we get back down we’ll take a train to Shanghai, where I’ll conclude my trip early next week! I’ll try to post again one more time from Shanghai before heading home.

When I finally made it to Xi’an (flight last night was canceled, stayed in airport hotel in Beijing, and then got here at 8am this morning), I quickly made my way around the sights.

I visited the Terracotta Army (incredible, mostly in quantity), the Muslim Quarter (delicious food – Chinese “pizza” and zongzi), and biked around the City Wall at sunset (13.7 km, or 8.5 mi, long). So much fun! Off to Hangzhou tomorrow.

Highlights

• Being whisked past all the lines by the tour guide I hired to see the Terracotta Army. Well, really just cutting all the lines as her insistence. Pretty awesome. Definitely worth the $15 for the two-hour tour she tried to give in English.
• Making friends with the owner of a sidewalk stall of his wife’s artwork. He worked in government for 19 years only to be fired when he had his second daughter (illegal here). He wants to move to San Francisco, get a green card (feasible within 5 years, he said), and bring his family over to the US. He also said all the jade (popular in Xi’an) sold at the street stalls is crap imitation, mostly glass. No surprise there.
• Being asked by the manager of the steamed cold noodle place (also popular in Xi’an) to translate some of the items on the menu to English
• Continuing my tradition of pretending to be a wedding photographer when I saw a shoot going down on the City Wall. The tradition started at least in Luxor, Egypt, if not before. Off the bike I went to snap away. For a short while, only.

• Spitting! Everyone does it (men and women), anywhere and everywhere.
• Squatting – a rarely seen position in the Western hemisphere, it’s very common here for people to squat on their haunches.
• Lining up – lines do not exist in China. Well, most of the time. In airports they kind of do. But most of the time, if you want something and you don’t cut to the front and push your way (more than even a New Yorker is used to), you will be waiting around for a long time.
• Few beggars – there are very few homeless on the street or in underground passageways. Stark contrast with New York. Alwyn explained that in Singapore there are some, but they sell packets of tissues since strictly begging is illegal.

On the streets

• Construction everywhere – when people say China is up and coming to be the world’s most powerful nation, I don’t doubt it. There are some incredibly large cities here that put many American metropolises to shame, and the skyline of each one is scattered with cranes all over creating new high-rises.
• No traffic laws – similar to no lines, there are seemingly no traffic laws, as one cabbie in Beijing actually said himself. “Why don’t you signal when you change lanes,” Remus asked in Beijing. “If I signal before changing lanes, then the cars won’t let me in,” the taxi driver responded. “You just have to go for it and push your way in.” Drivers frequently seem to enjoy driving on the sidewalks.

Meals

• Eating quickly – the Chinese eat meals very quickly. Numerous times I’ve waited in line a while for a meal and ended up being surrounded by people eating said food in less than half the time we queued for.
• Leaving meals immediately – when done with a meal, the Chinese don’t seem to care to linger. This was one of the most stark things I noticed since Westerners often so enjoy the opportunity just to sit and chat long after all the food is gone.
• (Almost) no breakfast – distinct breakfast foods aren’t very common, and I believe this is true throughout much of Asia. Many of the dishes that can be enjoyed for lunch or dinner could be and are just as easily consumed in the morning. That said, my breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and kaya toast in Singapore was delicious and very “breakfasty”

English

• Almost no one speaks it – numerous times I’ve called Sally or a hotel or other contact to explain things in Chinese when I just can’t get my idea across. When taking cabs, you need the Chinese address.
• Spelling out words – those that do speak some English (tour guides, etc.) often spell out words after they say them. Amusingly, they’re usually the simplest words and the ones that are pronounced best.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll update this post if I notice or think of any others.

Update: Happened again from Beijing to Xi’an (chicken and rice again, even), except that flight was less than an hour and a half! Take that U.S. airlines!

June 3-6: Singapore
June 7-10: Beijing
June 10-13: Yangtze River
June 13-15: Xi’an
June 15-18: Hangzhou
June 19-21: Shanghai

After about 48 hours of planning (gasp! atypical? not really…), I started the trip last weekend in Singapore visiting Alwyn, my friend from Wash. U.. He and his brother gave me an excellent feel for the small country and took me to try all the incredible foods that the country has to offer. We all took tons of photos and I had a great time. The weather there is more extreme than almost any climite I’ve been in, with nearly 100 degree heat and extreme humidity, but I welcomed the warm air and the blue skies (little did I realize how rare these would be going forward).

Monday morning I flew from Singapore to Beijing and met up with Remus, my friend from Choate, for a few days in the historical city. We went to all the main sights: The Forbidden City and Tian’anmen Square, the 798 Art District, the Great Wall (the Juyongguan section – slightly off the beaten path but still filled with tourists), the Summer Palace, hutong (pluralization?), and finally the Temple of Heaven. We ate Peking duck two nights in a row and had tons of dumplings and buns – food rivaling Singapore (albeit very different).

I then left Beijing for Chongqing where my Yangtze River cruise was to depart. Little did I know that Chongqing is a massive city – more massive than Beijing itself (yes, I didn’t believe that either at first, but Wikipedia confirmed). The municipality has a population of more than 31 million! I met up with Becca (a friend from Wash. U.)  and her best friend from high school, Sally, had a quick dinner, and navigated we set off to navigate our way to the cruise docks. Eventually we found our way – Sally speaking Chinese might have helped just a bit. We embarked on our cruise, filled with 9 foreigners and probably about 100 Chinese people. We thought it was a foreigner cruise, but frankly it was great and probably much more authetntic having all the “locals” aboard, even if that meant that Sally had to translate often.

The cruise went through the gorgeous Three Gorges and finally the incredible Three Gorges Dam just this morning. We saw lots of temples, delighted in a cultural show or two on board, and enjoyed all our meals with a South African couple and two couples from Holland (demonym for Holland? Hollanders?).

Perhaps as a sign that this cruise wasn’t quite geared toward college kids, each morning began with breakfast at 7am; we often were exhausted by about 8pm. Apart from maybe two kids on board, we were the youngest there and stuck out like a sore thumb. Everyone loved us, particularly when we took to the dance floor for the YMCA. Throughout the journey, many made requests to take photos with Becca and me (more Becca than me) - white people are like a wonder to many of the Chinese.

The Three Gorges (and the lesser Three Gorges) were probably one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. Cavernous cliffs tower over the boat hundreds of feet into the air and lush greenery is everywhere. Almost as stark of a contrast as could be possible, the dam was one of the most incredible man-made sights I have ever seen. We arrived at the dam at 10pm last night and spent 4 hours slowly making our way through the five locks slowly descending from 146m above sea level to 65 meters above sea level. It was so enthralling I stayed up the entire time watching the process as our ship, as well as three others trapped in with us, made it from one side of the dam to the other. When the dam is fully completed, the start will be 175m above sea level, 29 meters higher than it currently is.

I could go on and on about the history of the dam and its creation, including the more than 1 million locals that were “relocated” (a euphemism at best)  as the dam was built and their homes were flooded, but Wikipedia would do far more justice than I.

After a tour of the dam site this morning, we finished our cruise at the dock in Yichang. Right now I’m sitting at the airport in Yichang waiting for my flight to Xi’an where I’ll explore the terracotta warriors tomorrow.

That’s all for now; I certainly left out tons of detail for the sake of brevity, but leave a comment here and I will happily be sure to include more in my next post!