Archive: December, 2018

I posted to adactio.com 1,387 times in 2018:

• 4 articles (two conference talks, a book chapter, and an article for 24 ways),
• 97 blog posts,
• 763 links,
• 523 notes.

In amongst those notes were:

• 10 quotations,
• 20 books,
• 24 destinations (in 15 countries),
• 108 check ins,
• 356 photos.

In my blog posts, the top tags were:

1. frontend and development (42 posts),
2. serviceworkers (27 posts),
3. design (20 posts),
4. writing and publishing (19 posts),
5. javascript (18 posts).

In my links, the top tags were:

1. development (305 links),
2. frontend (289 links),
3. design (178 links),
4. css (110 links),
5. javascript (106 links).

When I wasn’t updating this site:

• I made 1,542 Github contributions,
• I sent out 24 Clearleft email newsletters,
• I spoke at 19 events (in 11 countries), and
• I wrote 1 book.

But these are just numbers. To get some real end-of-year thoughts, read posts by Remy, Andy, Ana, or Bill Gates.

I wrote just shy of a hundred blog posts in 2018. That’s an increase from 2017. I’m happy about that.

Here are some posts that turned out okay…

• Ends and means. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
• Thanos. Avengers are wizards; Thanos is a prophet.
• Frustration. Applying the principle of least power to tools and technologies.
• The Gęsiówka Story. Republishing a forgotten piece of history.
• Robustness and least power. A tale of two principles.
• Preparing a conference talk. The four steps I took in putting together a presentation.
• Prototypes and production. Don’t build prototypes with a production mindset. Don’t release prototype code into production.

A lot of my writing in 2018 was on technical topics—front-end development, service workers, and so on—but I should really make more of an effort to write about a wider range of topics. I always like when Zeldman writes about his glamourous life. Maybe in 2019 I’ll spend more time letting you know what I had for lunch.

I really enjoy writing words on this website. If I go too long between blog posts, I start to feel antsy. The only relief is to move my fingers up and down on the keyboard and publish something. Sounds like a bit of an addiction, doesn’t it? Well, as habits go, this is probably one of my healthier ones.

Thanks for reading my words in 2018. I didn’t write them for you—I wrote them for me—but it’s always nice when they resonate with others. I’ll keep on writing my brains out in 2019.

I read twenty books in 2018, which is exactly the same amount as I read in 2017. Reflecting on that last year, I said “It’s not as many as I hoped.” It does seem like a meagre amount, but in my defence, some of the books I read this year were fairly hefty tomes.

I decided to continue my experiment from last year of alternating fiction and non-fiction books. That didn’t quite work out, but it makes for a good guiding principle.

In ascending reading order, these are the books I read in 2018…

A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge

★★★☆☆

I started this towards the end of 2017 and finished it at the start of 2018. A good sci-fi romp, but stretched out a little bit long.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

★★★★☆

I really enjoyed this, but then, that’s hardly a surprise. The subject matter is tailor made for me. I don’t think this quite matches the brilliance of Gleick’s The Information, but I got a real kick out of it. A book dedicated to unearthing the archeology of a science-fiction concept is a truly fascinating idea. And it’s not just about time travel, per se—this is a meditation on the nature of time itself.

Traction by Gino Wickman

Andy was quite taken with this management book and purchased multiple copies for the Clearleft leadership team. I’ll refrain from rating it because it was more like a homework assignment than a book I would choose to read. It crystalises some good organisational advice into practical steps, but it probably could’ve been quite a bit shorter.

Provenance by Ann Leckie

★★★☆☆

It feels very unfair but inevitable to compare this to Ann Leckie’s amazing debut Imperial Radch series. It’s not in quite the same league, but it’s also not trying to be. This standalone book has a lighter tone. It’s a rollicking good sci-fi procedural. It may not be as mind-blowingly inventive as Ancillary Justice, but it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, with guest editor Juliet Ulman

★★★☆☆

This book is free to download so it’s rather excellent value for money. It alternates sci-fi short stories with essays. Personally, I would skip the essays—they’re all a bit too academic for my taste. But some of these stories are truly excellent. There’s a really nice flow to the collection: it begins in low Earth orbit, then expands out to the Mars, the asteroid belt, and beyond. Death on Mars by Madeline Ashby was a real standout for me.

The Best of Richard Matheson by Richard Matheson, edited by Victor LaValle

★★★★☆

For some reason, I was sent a copy of this book by an editor at Penguin Classics. I have no idea why, but thank you, Sam! This turned out to be a lot of fun. I had forgotten just how many classics of horror and sci-fi are the work of Richard Matheson. He probably wrote your favourite Twilight Zone episode. There’s a real schlocky enoyment to be had from snacking on these short stories, occassionally interspersed with genuinely disturbing moments and glimpses of beauty.

Close To The Machine: Technophilia And Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman

★★★☆☆

Lots of ’90s feels in this memoir. A lot of this still resonates today. It’s kind of fascinating to read it now with the knowledge of how this whole internet thing would end up going.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

★★★★☆

This gripped me from the start, and despite its many twisty strands, it managed to keep me with it all the way through. Maybe it’s a bit longer than it needs to be, and maybe some of the diversions don’t entirely work, but it makes up for that with its audaciousness. I still prefer Goneaway World, but any Nick Harkaway book is a must-read.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

★★★★☆

Terrific stuff. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ve got about one tenth of the story. The book charts a longer arc and provides much deeper social and political context.

Dawn by Octavia Butler

★★★☆☆

This is filled with interesting ideas, but the story never quite gelled for me. I’m not sure if I should continue with the rest of the Lilith’s Brood series. But there’s something compelling and unsettling in here.

Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

★★☆☆☆

Frustratingly inconsistent. Here’s my full review.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

★★★★☆

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

★★★☆☆

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

★★★☆☆

I devoured these books back-to-back. The Fifth Season was terrific—packed to the brim with inventiveness. But neither The Obelisk Gate nor The Stone Sky quite did it for me. Maybe my expectations were set too high by that first installment. But The Broken Earth is still a fascinating and enjoyable series.

Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks

I was really looking forward to this one, but I found its stiff academic style hard to get through. I still haven’t finished it. But I figure if I could read Sapiens through to the end, I can certainly manage this. The subject matter is certainly fascinating, and the research is really thorough, but I’m afraid the book is showing its thesis roots.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

★★★☆☆

This plays out its conceit well, and it’s a fun read, but it’s not quite a classic. It feels more like a Neil Gamain or Lauren Beukes page-turner than, say, a Margaret Atwood exploration. Definitely worth a read, though.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

★★★★☆

The world-building (or maybe it’s world rebuilding) is terrific. But once again, as is often the case with Kim Stanley Robinson, I find the plot to be lacking. This is not in the same league as Aurora. It’s more like 2312-on-sea. It’s frustrating. I’m torn between giving it three stars or four. I’m going to be generous because even though it’s not the best Kim Stanley Robinson book, it contains some of his best writing. There are passages that are breathtakingly good.

A Thread Across The Ocean by John Steele Gordon

★★★★☆

After (temporarily) losing my library copy of New York 2140, I picked this up in a bookstore in Charlottesville so I’d have something to read during my stay there. I was very glad I did. I really, really enjoyed this. It’s all about the transatlantic telegraphic cable, so if that’s your thing—as it is mine—you’re going to enjoy this. It makes a great companion piece to Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet. Come for the engineering, stay for the nautical tales of derring-do.

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

★★★★☆

Not as disturbing as the Southern Reach Trilogy, but equally unsettling in its own way. Shades of Oryx and Crake, but in a more fantastically surreal setting.

The Airs Of Earth by Brian Aldiss

★★★☆☆

A good collection of short stories from the master of sci-fi. I’ve got a backlog of old pulpy paperback Aldiss collections like this that make for good snackfood for the mind.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

A Christmas present from my brother-in-law. I just cracked this open, so you’ll have to come back next year to find out how it fared.

Alright. Now it’s time to pick the winners.

I think the best fiction book I read this year was Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon.

For non-fiction, it’s a tough call. I really enjoyed Hidden Figures and A Thread Across The Ocean, but I think I’m going to have to give the top spot to James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History.

But there were no five star books this year. Maybe that will change in 2019. And maybe I’ll read more books next year, too. We’ll see.

In 2017, seven of the twenty books I read were by women. In 2018, it was nine out of twenty (not counting anthologies). That’s better, but I want keep that trajectory going in 2019.

Here are five songs that came out in 2018. I enjoyed hearing them. Maybe you will like them too.

1. Comeback Kid by Sharon Van Etten.
2. Lights Shine by The Equatorial Group.
3. As A Man by Anna Calvi.
4. We Appreciate Power by Grimes.
5. Me & My Dog by boygenius.

I wrapped up last year with a list of some of the best audio I listened to in 2017. This year I huffduffed about 260 pieces of audio, so I could do a similar end-of-year list for 2018. But I thought I’d do something a little different this time.

It seems like podcasting is going from strength to strength with each passing year. Some friends of mine started new podcasts in 2018. Matt started Hobby Horse, where he talks to people about their tangential obsessions. Meanwhile Khoi started Wireframe, a jolly good podcast about design.

Apart from the trend of everyone having their own podcast these days, there’s also been a trend for quite short and manageable “seasons” of podcasts. See, for example, Horizon Line by Atlas Obscura, which is just four episodes long. Given the cherry-picking nature of my usual audio consumption (the very reason I made Huffduffer in the first place), this trend suits me quite well. There have been a few podcast runs in 2018 that I can recommend in their entirety.

The Secret History Of The Future is a collaboration between Seth Stevenson and Tom Standage, one of my favourite non-fiction authors. They look at modern technology stories through the lens of the past, much like Standage has done in books like The Victorian Internet. There are annoying sponsor blurbs to skip past, but apart from that, it’s a top-notch podcast.

I discovered Settling The Score this year. It’s a podcast all about film scores. The two hosts have spent the year counting down the top 25 scores in the American Film Institute’s list of (supposedly) greatest scores in American cinema history. It’s a pleasure to listen to them take a deep dive into each film and its score, analysing what works and what doesn’t. It will also make you want to rewatch the movie in question.

By far my favourite podcast listening experience this year was with Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years. It’s just six episodes long, but it manages to tell the sweep of human history and technology in an entertaining and fascinating way. I’ll admit I’m biased because it dwells on many of my hobby horses: the printing press, the telegraph, Claude Shannon and information theory. There are no annoying sponsorship interruptions, and best of all, you’ve got the wonderful voice of Stephen Fry in your earholes the whole time. Highly recommended!

So there you have it: three podcasts from 2018 that are worth subscribing to in their entirety:

• The Secret History Of The Future,
• Settling The Score, and
• Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years.

2005 feels like a pivotal year in my memory. That’s the year that Rich, Andy and I formed Clearleft. It was also the year that the three of us went to South by Southwest for the first time. That was amazing. Not because of the event itself, but because of the people. I met, hung out with, and formed firm friendships with people whose blogs I had been reading for years—it really was like my RSS reader had come to life. It’s also where I met Cindy for the first time.

We ended up hanging out a lot there, and afterwards. She came to England. We met up in Florida (her family is in Jacksonville, not far from St. Augustine, where Jessica’s family is from—in fact, we may well have been in the same St. Augustine pastry shop at the same time before we even met). And of course we’d see each other at conferences …like that one time in San Diego, when she joined me in my first ever karaoke experience (little did I know that she was in on the rick-rolling). Wherever geeks gathered, Cindy was there. Cindy could outgeek all of us, whether it was nerding out about good food or Star Wars. That was until she met her match at the Web Directions North conference in Vanouver in early 2007.

Matt came all the way from England for that conference. I distinctly remember sitting with him on the bus back from the post-conference snowboarding trip to Whistler after the conference. He was able to point out all the filming locations from The X Files, Battlestar Galactica, and every other sci-fi TV show. He met Cindy the next day and, of course, they clicked.

Cindy ended up moving to San Francisco, and I’d visit her den of nerdery whenever I was in town. Meanwhile, Matt was crossing the Atlantic at every available opportunity to spend time with Cindy. On one of those trips, they went down to the courthouse and tied the knot.

Given the short notice for the wedding, they decided that they’d have a bigger marriage celebration further down the line. At that year’s South by Southwest, Cindy and Matt took me aside and asked if I’d officiate at their wedding. “But I can’t officiate a wedding!”, I said. “I’ve got no qualifications!” “A-ha!”, they pointed out, “It’s technically not an official marriage ceremony—we’re already married.”

That’s how I came to give the most important public speaking engagement of my life. It was nerve-wracking and wonderful.

I’ll never forget when Cindy and Matt came to Boston for An Event Apart a few years later. I was so happy to see Cindy that I didn’t even notice the most striking thing about her; after we hugged, she just stared at me and pointed at her belly until the lightbulb went off over my head. Cindy was pregnant!

They had a beautiful baby boy named Apollo. Isn’t that an awesome name?

They managed to match that awesomeness with the naming of their second boy, Orion. Apollo and Orion!

When Cindy was pregnant with Orion, she didn’t have the opportunity to surprise me with the news in person, like she had done with Apollo. She Facetimed me and Jessica to tell us the news. But she had other news to share with us that she didn’t want to be widely known. She had just been diagnosed with cancer.

I don’t really want to talk about that, but just consider what it must have been like to be going through treatment and being pregnant at the same time! Orion is a miracle, and Cindy was the miracle worker.

(The reason I don’t want to talk about Cindy’s cancer is, well, for one, she didn’t want it to be known so I’m still thinking of it as a private matter, but also Cindy could never be defined by how she died, but rather how she lived.)

By this time Cindy and Matt had moved to Pittsburgh. Myself and Jessica visited when we could. I was there for my birthday last year, and together we recreacted delicacies from that pastry shop in Saint Augustine.

A lot of my memories of Cindy involve amazing food. Like that time we all went to The French Laundry. This year we made plans to go to Alinea in October. Cindy got reservations. Jessica and I booked our plane tickets. But it wasn’t to be. It became clear that Cindy wasn’t able to travel and that there wasn’t much time left. Instead of a trip to Chicago, we made a trip to Pittsburgh. We were hoping to see Cindy one last time. But she died just a few days before we showed up.

But remember what I said about Cindy being defined by her life, not her death? It’s so, so true. Literally everyone who knew her was a better person for it. Her energy. Her indominatable spirit. She really was truly inspiring. She still inspires me. I know it sounds like a cliché to say that only her body has gone, while her spirit lives on, but in this case, it’s really true. Her spirit is alive in every single person who knew her. And if that isn’t enough of a cliché, I’m going to come right out and say it: I’m a better person for having known Cindy.

What happened to Cindy was so horribly, horribly unfair (did I mention that she didn’t smoke, or drink, or even use bad language?). But there’s one thing that I’m so very grateful for: I’m so, so glad that she had Matt. I always knew that Cindy was amazing—she’s Wonder Woman—but I’ve come to realise that she really did find her match. Matt is Superman. I am in awe of his strength. I cannot imagine what he is going through right now. Like Cindy, he is an inspiration to me.

Cindy is gone, but that love between Cindy and Matt …that’s forever.

Back in December 1997, when Jessica and I were living in Freiburg, Dan came to visit. Together, we boarded a train east to Vienna. There we would ring in the new year to the sounds of the Salonorchester Alhambra, the band that Dan’s brother Andrew was playing in (and the band that would later be my first paying client when I made their website—I’ve still got the files lying around somewhere).

That was a fun New Year’s ball …although I remember my mortification when we went for gulash beforehand and I got a drop on the pristine tux that I had borrowed from Andrew.

My other memory of that trip was going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum to see the amazing Bruegel collection. It’s hard to imagine that ever being topped, but then this year, they put together a “once in a lifetime” collection, gathering even more Bruegel masterpieces together in Vienna.

Jessica got the crazy idea in her head that we could go there. In a day.

Looking at the flights, it turned out to be not such a crazy idea after all. Sure, it meant an early start, but it was doable. We booked our museum tickets, and then we booked plane tickets.

That’s how we ended up going to Vienna for the day this past Monday. It was maybe more time than I’d normally like to spend in airports in a 24 hour period, but it was fun. We landed, went into town for a wiener schnitzel, and then it was off to the museum for an afternoon of medieval masterpieces. Hunters in the Snow, the Tower of Babel, and a newly restored Triumph of Death sent from the Prado were just some of the highlights.

There’s a website to accompany the exhibition called Inside Bruegel. You can zoom on each painting to see the incredible detail. You can even compare the infrared and x-ray views. Dive in and explore the world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Microsoft’s Edge browser is going to switch its rendering engine over to Chromium.

I am deflated and disappointed.

There’s just no sugar-coating this. I’m sure the decision makes sound business sense for Microsoft, but it’s not good for the health of the web.

Very soon, the vast majority of browsers will have an engine that’s either Blink or its cousin, WebKit. That may seem like good news for developers when it comes to testing, but trust me, it’s a sucky situation of innovation and agreement. Instead of a diverse browser ecosystem, we’re going to end up with incest and inbreeding.

There’s one shining exception though. Firefox. That browser was originally created to combat the seemingly unstoppable monopolistic power of Internet Explorer. Now that Microsoft are no longer in the rendering engine game, Firefox is once again the only thing standing in the way of a complete monopoly.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a while now, and I can heartily recommend it. You should try it (and maybe talk to your relatives about it at Christmas). At this point, which browser you use no longer feels like it’s just about personal choice—it feels part of something bigger; it’s about the shape of the web we want.

Jeffrey wrote that browser diversity starts with us:

The health of Firefox is critical now that Chromium will be the web’s de facto rendering engine.

Even if you love Chrome, adore Gmail, and live in Google Docs or Analytics, no single company, let alone a user-tracking advertising giant, should control the internet.

Andy Bell also writes about browser diversity:

I’ll say it bluntly: we must support Firefox. We can’t, as a community allow this browser engine monopoly. We must use Firefox as our main dev browsers; we must encourage our friends and families to use it, too.

Yes, it’s not perfect, nor are Mozilla, but we can help them to develop and grow by using Firefox and reporting issues that we find. If we just use and build for Chromium, which is looking likely (cough Internet Explorer monopoly cough), then Firefox will fall away and we will then have just one major engine left. I don’t ever want to see that.

Uncle Dave says:

If the idea of a Google-driven Web is of concern to you, then I’d encourage you to use Firefox. And don’t be a passive consumer; blog, tweet, and speak about its killer features. I’ll start: Firefox’s CSS Grid, Flexbox, and Variable Font tools are the best in the business.

Mozilla themselves came out all guns blazing when they said Goodbye, EdgeHTML:

Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.

Tim describes the situation as risking a homogeneous web:

I don’t think Microsoft using Chromium is the end of the world, but it is another step down a slippery slope. It’s one more way of bolstering the influence Google currently has on the web.

We need Google to keep pushing the web forward. But it’s critical that we have other voices, with different viewpoints, to maintain some sense of balance. Monocultures don’t benefit anyone.

Andre Alves Garzia writes that while we Blink, we lose the web:

Losing engines is like losing languages. People may wish that everyone spoke the same language, they may claim it leads to easier understanding, but what people fail to consider is that this leads to losing all the culture and way of thought that that language produced. If you are a Web developer smiling and happy that Microsoft might be adopting Chrome, and this will make your work easier because it will be one less browser to test, don’t be! You’re trading convenience for diversity.

I like that analogy with language death. If you prefer biological analogies, it’s worth revisiting this fantastic post by Rachel back in August—before any of us knew about Microsoft’s decision—all about the ecological impact of browser diversity:

Let me be clear: an Internet that runs only on Chrome’s engine, Blink, and its offspring, is not the paradise we like to imagine it to be.

That post is a great history lesson, documenting how things can change, and how decisions can have far-reaching unintended consequences.

So these are the three browser engines we have: WebKit/Blink, Gecko, and EdgeHTML. We are unlikely to get any brand new bloodlines in the foreseeable future. This is it.

If we lose one of those browser engines, we lose its lineage, every permutation of that engine that would follow, and the unique takes on the Web it could allow for.

And it’s not likely to be replaced.

There’s a worrying tendency for “real” programmers look down their noses at CSS. It’s just a declarative language, they point out, not a fully-featured programming language. Heck, it isn’t even a scripting language.

That may be true, but that doesn’t mean that CSS isn’t powerful. It’s just powerful in different ways to traditional languages.

Take CSS selectors, for example. At the most basic level, they work like conditional statments. Here’s a standard if statement:

if (condition) {
// code here
}

The condition needs to evaluate to true in order for the code in the curly braces to be executed. Sound familiar?

condition {
// styles here
}

That’s a very simple mapping, but what if the conditional statement is more complicated?

if (condition1 && condition2) {
// code here
}

Well, that’s what the decendant selector does:

condition1 condition2 {
// styles here
}

In fact, we can get even more specific than that by using the child combinator, the sibling combinator, and the adjacent sibling combinator:

• condition1 > condition2
• condition1 ~ condition2
• condition2 + condition2

AND is just one part of Boolean logic. There’s also OR:

if (condition1 || condition2) {
// code here
}

In CSS, we use commas:

condition1, condition2 {
// styles here
}

We’ve even got the :not() pseudo-class to complete the set of Boolean possibilities. Once you add quantity queries into the mix, made possible by :nth-child and its ilk, CSS starts to look Turing complete. I’ve seen people build state machines using the adjacent sibling combinator and the :checked pseudo-class.

Anyway, my point here is that CSS selectors are really powerful. And yet, quite often we deliberately choose not to use that power. The entire raison d’être for OOCSS, BEM, and Smacss is to deliberately limit the power of selectors, restricting them to class selectors only.

On the face of it, this might seem like an odd choice. After all, we wouldn’t deliberately limit ourselves to a subset of a programming language, would we?

We would and we do. That’s what templating languages are for. Whether it’s PHP’s Smarty or Twig, or JavaScript’s Mustache, Nunjucks, or Handlebars, they all work by providing a deliberately small subset of features. Some pride themselves on being logic-less. If you find yourself trying to do something that the templating language doesn’t provide, that’s a good sign that you shouldn’t be trying to do it in the template at all; it should be in the controller.

So templating languages exist to enforce simplicity and ensure that the complexity happens somewhere else. It’s a similar story with BEM et al. If you find you can’t select something in the CSS, that’s a sign that you probably need to add another class name to the HTML. The complexity is confined to the markup in order to keep the CSS more straightforward, modular, and maintainable.

But let’s not forget that that’s a choice. It’s not that CSS in inherently incapable of executing complex conditions. Quite the opposite. It’s precisely because CSS selectors (and the cascade) are so powerful that we choose to put guard rails in place.