Replying to a tweet from @Lady_Ada_King
Looks great!
Archive: May 30th, 2019
Welcoming @rem to Homebrew Website Club Brighton.
OH: “H.P. Lovecraft? I thought you said PHP Lovecraft.”
Characteristics of a Strong Performance Culture | TimKadlec.com
Tim looks at the common traits of companies that have built a good culture of web performance:
- Top-down support
- Data-driven
- Clear targets
- Automation
- Knowledge sharing
- Culture of experimentation
- User focused, not tool focused
Few companies carry all of these characteristics, so it’s important not to get discouraged if you feel you’re missing a few of them. It’s a process and not a quick one. When I’ve asked folks at companies with all or most of these characteristics how long it took them to get to that point, the answer is typically in years, rarely months. Making meaningful changes to culture is much slower and far more difficult than making technical changes, but absolutely critical if you want those technical changes to have the impact you’re hoping for.
Indie web events in Brighton
Homebrew Website Club is a regular gathering of people getting together to tinker on their own websites. It’s a play on the original Homebrew Computer Club from the ’70s. It shares a similar spirit of sharing and collaboration.
Homebrew Website Clubs happen at various locations: London, San Francisco, Portland, Nuremberg, and more. Usually there on every second Wednesday.
I started running Homebrew Website Club Brighton a while back. I tried the “every second Wednesday” thing, but it was tricky to make that work. People found it hard to keep track of which Wednesdays were Homebrew days and which weren’t. And if you missed one, then it would potentially be weeks between attending.
So I’ve made it a weekly gathering. On Thursdays. That’s mostly because Thursdays work for me: that’s one of the evenings when Jessica has her ballet class, so it’s the perfect time for me to spend a while in the company of fellow website owners.
If you’re in Brighton and you have your own website (or you want to have your own website), you should come along. It’s every Thursday from 6pm to 7:30pm ‘round at the Clearleft studio on 68 Middle Street. Add it to your calendar.
There might be a Thursday when I’m not around, but it’s highly likely that Homebrew Website Club Brighton will happen anyway because either Trys, Benjamin or Cassie will be here.
(I’m at Homebrew Website Club Brighton right now, writing this. Remy is here too, working on some very cool webmention stuff.)
There’s something else you should add to your calendar. We’re going to have an Indie Web Camp in Brighton on October 19th and 20th. I realise that’s quite a way off, but I’m giving you plenty of advance warning so you can block out that weekend (and plan travel if you’re coming from outside Brighton).
If you’ve never been to an Indie Web Camp before, you should definitely come! It’s indescribably fun and inspiring. The first day—Saturday—is a BarCamp-style day of discussions to really get the ideas flowing. Then the second day—Sunday—is all about designing, building, and making. The whole thing wraps up with demos.
It’s been a while since we’ve had an Indie Web Camp in Brighton. You can catch up on the Brighton Indie Web Camps we had in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Since then I’ve been to Indie Web Camps in Berlin, Nuremberg, and Düsseldorf, but it’s going to be really nice to bring it back home.
The event will be free to attend, but I’ll set up an official ticket page on Ti.to to keep track of who’s coming. I’ll let you know when that’s up and ready. In the meantime, you can register your interest in attending on the 2019 Indie Webcamp Brighton page on the Indie Web wiki.
Replying to a tweet from @ambrwlsn90
Kaffeeklatsch!
Is CSS Turing Complete? | Lara Schenck
This starts as a good bit of computer science nerdery, that kind of answers the question in the title:
Alone, CSS is not Turing complete. CSS plus HTML plus user input is Turing complete!
And so the takeaway here is bigger than just speculation about Turing completeness:
Given that CSS is a domain-specific language for styling user interface, this makes a lot of sense! CSS + HTML + Human = Turing complete.
At the end of that day, as CSS developers that is the language we really write. CSS is incomplete without HTML, and a styled interface is incomplete without a human to use it.
Replying to a tweet from @KenjiBaheux
I wish that websites would put that sentence right next to their “sign up now!” call to action:
Every project eventually dies, effectively or in practice.
Then, people would be informed about what they’re getting into.
Replying to a post on xavierroy.com
Alas, no! It’s a shame—I really liked that Hack Farm project. 😔
Decimal Clock
If we had ten hours in a day, instead of 24, and if each of these hours had 100 minutes instead of 60, and if every minute had 100 seconds, our clocks would look like this…
Replying to a tweet from @Una
As always, it depends, but I find that for many sites (e.g. publishing sites) a framework would be overkill. Unless complex state management is a requirement, vanilla JavaScript is more than up to the task of sprinkling in interactivity.
Replying to a tweet from @triblondon
None of these are “surely a good thing” if you look at them from the perspective of a user:
Replying to a tweet from @triblondon
Only if you tell people in advance, when they’re signing up to use your product, that this is what’s going to happen.
The mismatch in expectations should definitely not be applauded.