
I attended my first [Webstock](http://www.webstock.org.nz/17/) this year and I was blown away. I wasn't aware going into the conference that it usually has a political element to it but apparently this year was a step up. Interspersed with more traditional technical or interest driven talks were honest people getting up and saying what they felt about issues that effect everyone. All of which I feel centered around remembering that we are all still humans and how its all to easy to let shiny new tech get in the way of our humanity and even at times hide what is actually a sinister pattern of behavior by some of our favorite tech companies.

Most of the speakers were American so it's not surprising that they would mention the various actions of the newly elected President Trump, especially at a conference known for having a political bent. But there were two in particular that took it to the next level and it really spoke to me and resonated with what I have been thinking and feeling over the last few years since I left the start up scene.

The first speaker I'm going to mention is [Lisa Welchman](https://twitter.com/@lwelchman) and she was also the first to push their political statements past a joke or a glancing mention and she did this with full throttle as she admitted she couldn't do her talk about artificial intelligence and staying human because of what was going on in her home country.

Lisa has a strong message of action in the face of despair and encouraging us to focus on the things we **can** do rather that being paralyzed to the things we **can't**. Along side that though was both an explicit and implicit message of humility and respect. I didn't feel like she was ranting about a political agenda or telling us to do anything in particular other than care more, try more and use our positions as well educated people in one the most influential sectors of our business communities. I think her whole message was poetically summed up in how she started her talk by saying "before I forget to say it later, I love you all and I care about you" to a room of complete stranger on the other side of the world expecting a talk about artificial intelligence.

![Lisa Welchman on stage at Webstock with a slide saying "Activism is not an event, it's a daily commitment. Normalize advocacy.](/content/lisa-welcham-at-webstock.jpeg)

The other speaker that resonated with me was [Anil Dash](https://twitter.com/anildash) who's talk was called "Toward Humane Tech". If you've ever spent any time with me in the last year or so you'd have heard me rant about how Facebook's claim to be about connecting people is disingenuous and how Uber is in fact less efficient than a traditional taxi company and provides very little innovation to the transportation industry among other gripes I have.

Anil spoke poignantly and with much more clarity than I have heard from anyone else about exactly what is going with the communities and markets that dominate our online world world. The highlight for me was his insights into the evolution of what we have thought of as traditional markets where we had buyers and sellers and consumers has price and choice into what we have now with services Facebook, Google and Uber.

For example in the case of Uber which purports to be a marketplace for drivers and riders to find each other and to be a better alternative to the old taxi services. With taxis there are multiple companies that all rely on connecting to the riders with some combination of advertising, price and proximity to the rider. While Uber might **seem** like the same thing with an app attached it only really offers the _illusion_ of choice for both the driver and the rider and in the end is simply a natural monopoly of a global transportation company masquerading as a tech company. The driver **cannot** set their, the rider doesn't really have a choice over the price of the ride or who's service they use because in the end its always going to be an Uber driver. When you couple that idea with the fact that Uber has **never turned a profit** and can only really become profitable if they raise their prices considerably or pay their drivers less the picture becomes even more gloomy.

If you are not following and still want to use Uber then I'll put it the same way that Amil did. I imagine if you have taken an Uber you have done what I and almost everyone else feels compelled to do and ask the driver "so how does this work for you? Do you like Uber?" or something like that. Why do you think that is? Is it because it just feels like there is something wrong in this equation and you just don't feel quite right about it? Uber can't buy bulk insurance, it can't buy bulk cars or repairs and in **reality** each ride is actually **more costly** (i.e. less efficient). But you are paying less per ride? There is just something that doesn't add up.

Another example he used is Facebook which although is supposed to about helping people share and connect with their friends but often the algorithms that decide what you see and what you don't see will hide content from your friends or family because it made a decision that it was not something that you were likely to engage with. And without engagement Facebook cannot sell advertising and there in lies the rub. This is even more alarming when you think about the fact that when engagement by users is the metric for successful content creation there is a financial intensive to publish misleading or incorrect information as long as its likely to get user engagement. Which all to often it is.

He didn't just speak of doom an gloom but he spoke of ideas and solutions. One of the most interesting is on the topic of a professional body for the tech industry much like lawyers, doctors or engineers. The tech community and profession has exploded so fast and to have such influence that the normal process of self-governance hasn't had time to mature and perhaps its time for us to step up and look at what we are creating. Instead of just focusing on the next app or the next billion dollar unicorn we need to think about the social, economic and political outcomes of the online communities we are a part of and creating.

Even before I went to Webstock I was having these sorts of thoughts and feelings coupled with a sudden urgent need to actually do something instead of just feeling like something needs to change. Whether it be get involved in local government initiatives that are already going on, or deleting Uber or even doing something as small as talking to my friends and family and trying to get them to understand what is happening. As Lisa Walchman said in her talk "we are the reason that it will get better".

**Further Reading on Uber**

- [Uber the billion dollar loss-maker](http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/201831450/uber-the-billion-dollar-loss-maker)
- [Wall Street loans Uber $1 billion to offer subprime auto leases](http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/3/11852940/uber-subprime-auto-loans-drivers-xchange)
- [Uber's real time car tracking is fake](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/uber-algorithm-fake)

**More fron Anil Dash**

[Tech's Moral Reckoning - Podcast interview covering the topics in this article](https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/anil-dash-techs-moral-reckoning)



After my first day at the brand new Intergen offices in Wellington I'm  reflecting on how much I've changed over the years both professionally and personally. The most important change is how much more connected I feel to Aotearoa, to our people and to my home city of Ōtautahi Christchurch.

For the longest time I have never *quite felt* like a "Kiwi" and I've never really understood why but now I think I do. Maybe its was the constant barrage of people telling me I have an accent growing up. Maybe it's because I wasn't born here. Maybe its because I don't at all relate to any of the stereotypical things that are often associated with being a Kiwi male. If I were to follow sport rugby would not be on my list, I'll never be a "blokey" guy, I'm not handy in the slightest and almost proud that I don't know jack about cars because I don't need one.

Now I've found a career I am passionate about, discovered my voice in my music and accepted myself for who I am I'm starting to realize just how wrong I was. The caricature in my mind of New Zealand as a sheep loving, Speights drinking, number 8 wire wrangling, rugby playing people is just that; a caricature imposed on myself. As soon as I shed that image I realised everything that New Zealand is built on and stands for is everything I'm passionate about and more and it's up to all of us to make sure it stays that way.

My social, political, spiritual and artistic visions have come together as one, like many streams joining forces to to form a river driving toward an open sea. Living just five minutes from Parliament in what is one of the most vibrant artistic centers of our country I couldn't be in a better place.

Farewell Ōtautahi and kia kaha, you are stronger than you think you are.


Right now there is a lot of buzz around [Conversational User Interfaces (CUI)]() and all the major players are jumping into some form of voice controlled services focussed on reducing the friction between user's and their devices. Over the years the imagination of science fiction world has [inspiring and predicting future technology](https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=science+fiction+inspired+technology+evidence&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiiwJnb8-jRAhWKpZQKHWdrBxkQgQMIFjAA). I think once again Star Trek has paved the way in voiced controlled user interfaces with [Computer](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Computer) (_Caveat I am not saying Star Trek was the first_).

## What is a Conversation User Interface

A conversational user interface (CUI) is user interface that is based around a user conversing in some way with the program, rather than clicking buttons or giving discrete commands. The first time I heard this term was in the write up for [Microsoft's Bot Framework](https://blog.botframework.com/2016/03/30/BotFramework/) and it made me think about the various things that had crept into the mainstream over the last decade or so.

In a sense the first CUI was the command line interface:

```bash
cd my-directory # change directory into "my-directory"
dir # tell me what is in the current folder
```

But as you can see **we** have to learn **the computer's** language. But now with the emergence of chat bot's and voice assistants the machines are starting to learn to speak Human!

## How close are we?

It seems to me that we are on the verge of having near feature parity with the Star Trek Computer in terms of voice and speech recognition. With Microsoft's technology being about to [beat a human at transcribing human speech](http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/18/historic-achievement-microsoft-researchers-reach-human-parity-conversational-speech-recognition/) in both accuracy and speed all that is really lacking is the "intelligence" part.

Having played around with various machine learning ideas and services, having a **very** cursory understanding of how they work, I think we have a bit of work ahead of us until we can ask The Computer anything and it will accurately understand not only the words but the intent behind them. Humans are unpredictable and there are a lot of jumps of logic and context that goes into a "natural" interaction with another person. But it's getting there.

With the massive investment being made by the major players it's hard to see this technology not becoming ubiquitous soon. Amazon has their [Alexis]() home assistant. Microsoft is hard at work with their [Bot Framework and Services](https://dev.botframework.com/), [Cognative Services](https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/apis) and [Cortana](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana_(software)>) as well as proclaiming that [training chat bots is going to be future job description](http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/7/12111028/microsoft-bot-framework-artificial-intelligence-satya-nadella-interview); Apple has long been a leader in this space with [Siri](http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/7/12111028/microsoft-bot-framework-artificial-intelligence-satya-nadella-interview). And there are more coming out every day.

## What does this mean for app and developers

I'll leave you with one thought because as I mentioned before the idea of the conversational user interfaces has made me think about the future of user interfaces. I wonder how long complex and wieldy mobile applications will last when instead of navigating through a small touch screen with big fingers you can simply tell your phone what you want to do. Imagine an calendar/email app that you could set up a meeting simply by saying:

"Computer setup a meeting with Number 1 in my ready room as soon as possible!"



[Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/)(VS Code) is a great text editor that can used to debug Node, C#.NET, TypeScript and thanks to its [extensions and marketplace](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/VSCode) many more! I've been using VS Code since it came out for debugging JavaScript and later .NET Core but recently I as I was developing my website which at the time of writing is a WordPress site. I decided to try it out for debugging PHP. I was ready for pain after my experience setting up XDebug and PHP development on Apache with other IDEs but VS Code makes it a dream! Follow along to learn how to do this yourself.

> **Note:** This tutorial is assuming that you already have a a WordPress install running on your and Visual Studio Code installed

Since the WordPress application code is running in Apache and we're not launching it using Visual Studio Code itself we need to 'attach' the debugger to the PHP process. This is done using [Xdebug](https://xdebug.org/index.php) a "PHP extension for powerful debugging".

### Install XDebug

The best way to install XDebug is by following these steps to use their custom installation wizard:

<BlockQuote>
  **Note:** There are other ways of getting the phpinfo() output but the vary on
  different server configurations. If you know a way that is easier on your
  machine then you can skip to step 3.
</BlockQuote>

1. Create a file `phpinfo.php` in you htdocs or other apache accessible directory with the following content:

   ```php
   <?php phpinfo(); ?>
   ```

1. Open the file in a browser (for example http://localhost/phpinfo.php) then copy and paste the text by pressing (Ctrl/Command + A) (Ctrl/Command + C).
1. Open the [custom installation wizard by clicking here](https://xdebug.org/wizard.php)
1. In the text box paste in the `phpinfo()` output from the clipboard
1. Click **Analyse my phpinfo() output**
1. Follow the instructions that are output. They should look something like this:

   ![Screenshot of XDebug tailored installation instruction output](/content/x-debug-tailored-instructions-1-768x176.png "XDebug tailored installation instruction output")

### Configuring VS Code

To debug PHP in VS Code you need to install the [PHP Debug extention here](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=felixfbecker.php-debug). Once you've done this follow these steps:

1. Open the root of your WordPress installation in VS Code
2. Press F5
   > **Note:** This will prompt you to select a language
3. Select PHP

### Debugging WordPress

Completing these steps will create a file in your workspace .vscode/launch.json here is mine as of posting this:

```json
{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "name": "Listen for XDebug",
      "type": "php",
      "request": "launch",
      "port": 9000
    },
    {
      "name": "Launch currently open script",
      "type": "php",
      "request": "launch",
      "program": "${file}",
      "cwd": "${fileDirname}",
      "port": 9000
    }
  ]
}
```

Now you [create breakpoints](https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/debugging#_breakpoints) in can press F5 and VS Code will attach to XDebug and will stop on breakpoints. For example in the following screenshot I have put a breakpoint in the **functions.php** in the twentyseventeen default WordPress theme.

![Screenshot of debugging WordPress theme file](/content/debugging-wordpress-with-visual-studio-code-1-1024x759.png "Debugging WordPress theme file")

Giving you a fully featured debugging experience in PHP!


Creating change through creativity, technology and leading by example

Articles - Page 3 of 3

Humane Tech - We are the reason it will get better

Farewell Ōtautahi - New Beginnings

Star Trek pioneered the Conversational User Interface

Debugging WordPress with Visual Studio Code (VS Code)