Jeremy Keith

The Crushing Weight of the Facepile—zachleat.com

Using IntersectionObserver to lazy load images—very handy for webmention avatars.

7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

This is a wonderfully written post packed with hard-won wisdom.

This are the myths that Monica dispelled for herself:

1. I’m a senior developer
2. Everyone writes tests
3. We’re so far behind everyone else (AKA “tech FOMO”)
4. Code quality matters most
5. Everything must be documented!!!!
6. Technical debt is bad
7. Seniority means being the best at programming

CURRENT FUTURES: A Sci-Fi Ocean Anthology—XPRIZE

A collection of sci-fi short stories about oceans, featuring contributions from Madeline Ashby, Lauren Beukes, Elizabeth Bear, and more.

BBC - Future - How to build something that lasts 10,000 years

As part of the BBC’s ongoing series on deep time, Alexander Rose describes the research he’s been doing for the clock of the long now—materials, locations, ideas …all the pieces that have historically combined to allow artifacts to survive.

When should you be using Web Workers? — DasSur.ma

Although this piece is ostensibly about why we should be using web workers more, there’s a much, much bigger point about the growing power gap between the devices we developers use and the typical device used by the rest of the planet.

While we are getting faster flagship phones every cycle, the vast majority of people can’t afford these. The more affordable phones are stuck in the past and have highly fluctuating performance metrics. These low-end phones will mostly likely be used by the massive number of people coming online in the next couple of years. The gap between the fastest and the slowest phone is getting wider, and the median is going down.

ffconf - Web development & JavaScript conference in Brighton, UK

All of the talks from ten years of FF Conf …including this pretentious one from five years ago.

Relearn CSS layout: Every Layout

A new site from Heydon and Andy that provides CSS algorithms for common layout patterns.

If you find yourself wrestling with CSS layout, it’s likely you’re making decisions for browsers they should be making themselves. Through a series of simple, composable layouts, Every Layout will teach you how to better harness the built-in algorithms that power browsers and CSS.

HTML is the Web ~ Pete Lambert

The lowest common denominator of the Web. The foundation. The rhythm section. The ladyfingers in the Web trifle. It’s the HTML. And it is becoming increasingly clear to me that there’s a whole swathe of Frontend Engineers who don’t know or understand the frontend-est of frontend technologies.

This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine.

What you see really is what you get. I like this style!

Breaking the physical limits of fonts

This broke my brain.

The challenge: in the fewest resources possible, render meaningful text.

• How small can a font really go?
• How many bytes of memory would you need (to store it and run it?)
• How much code would it take to express it?

Lets see just how far we can take this!

The Lost tags of HTML

I’ll be in my bunk.

Mornington Crescent - Esolang

A (possibly) Turing complete language:

As the validity and the semantics of a program depend on the structure of the London underground system, which is administered by London Underground Ltd, a subsidiary of Transport for London, who are likely unaware of the existence of this programming language, its future compatibility is uncertain. Programs may become invalid or subtly wrong as the transport company expands or retires some of the network, reroutes lines or renames stations. Features may be removed with no prior consultation with the programming community. For all we know, Mornington Crescent itself may at some point be closed, at which point this programming language will cease to exist.

Baking accessibility into components: how frameworks help

A very thoughtful post by Hidde that draws a useful distinction between the “internals” of a component (the inner workings of a React component, Vue component, or web component) and the code that wires those components together (the business logic):

I really like working on the detailed stuff that affects users: useful keyboard navigation, sensible focus management, good semantics. But I appreciate not every developer does. I have started to think this may be a helpful separation: some people work on good internals and user experience, others on code that just uses those components and deals with data and caching and solid architecture. Both are valid things, both need love. Maybe we can use the divide for good?