Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith

Making websites. Writing books. Speaking at events. Living in Brighton. Working at Clearleft. Playing music. Taking photos. Answering email.

Journal 2602 sparkline Links 8299 sparkline Articles 72 sparkline Notes 4644 sparkline

Monday, September 16th, 2019

Sunday, September 15th, 2019

Saturday, September 14th, 2019

Reading The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie.

map

Checked in at Cobh / An Cóbh. Hometown — with Jessica

Friday, September 13th, 2019

5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe | Filament Group, Inc.

The Jevons Paradox in action:

Faster networks should fix our performance problems, but so far, they have had an interesting if unintentional impact on the web. This is because historically, faster network speed has enabled developers to deliver more code to users—in particular, more JavaScript code.

And because it’s JavaScript we’re talking about:

Even if folks are on a new fast network, they’re very likely choking on the code we’re sending, rendering the potential speed improvements of 5G moot.

The longer I spend in this field, the more convinced I am that web performance is not a technical problem; it’s a people problem.

Thursday, September 12th, 2019

Wednesday, September 11th, 2019

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Session — with Jessica map

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Session — with Jessica

The Ugly Truth about Design Systems

The video of a talk in which Mark discusses pace layers, dogs, and design systems. He concludes:

  1. Current design systems thinking limits free, playful expression.
  2. Design systems uncover organisational disfunction.
  3. Continual design improvement and delivery is a lie.
  4. Component-focussed design is siloed thinking.

It’s true many design systems are the blueprints for manufacturing and large scale application. But in almost every instance I can think of, once you move from design to manufacturing the horse has bolted. It’s very difficult to move back into design because the results of the system are in the wild. The more strict the system, the less able you are to change it. That’s why broad principles, just enough governance, and directional examples are far superior to locked-down cookie cutters.

Tuesday, September 10th, 2019

Request mapping

The Request Map Generator is a terrific tool. It’s made by Simon Hearne and uses the WebPageTest API.

You pop in a URL, it fetches the page and maps out all the subsequent requests in a nifty interactive diagram of circles, showing how many requests third-party scripts are themselves generating. I’ve found it to be a very effective way of showing the impact of third-party scripts to people who aren’t interested in looking at waterfall diagrams.

I was wondering… Wouldn’t it be great if this were built into browsers?

We already have a “Network” tab in our developer tools. The purpose of this tab is to show requests coming in. The browser already has all the information it needs to make a diagram of requests in the same that the request map generator does.

In Firefox, there’s a little clock icon in the bottom left corner of the “Network” tab. Clicking that shows a pie-chart view of requests. That’s useful, but I’d love it if there were the option to also see the connected circles that the request map generator shows.

Just a thought.

Simplicity (II)

When you ever had to fix just a few lines of CSS and it took two hours to get an ancient version of Gulp up and running, you know what I’m talking about.

I feel seen.

When everything works, it feels like magic. When something breaks, it’s hell.

I concur with Bastian’s advice:

I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to programming:

less code === less potential issues

And this observation rings very true:

This dependency hell is also the reason why old projects are almost like sealed capsules. You can hardly let a project lie around for more than a year, because afterwards it’s probably broken.