Archive: June, 2019

Lights at sea

Lighthouses of the world, mapped.

Get off of Twitter | Read the Tea Leaves

You can’t criticize Twitter on Twitter. It just doesn’t work. The medium is the message.

Nolan’s plea for sanity.

Write blog posts. Use RSS. Use micro.blog. Use Mastodon. Use Pleroma. Use whatever you want, as long as it isn’t manipulating you with algorithms or selling access to your data to advertisers.

The Patterns Day Edition | Amy Hupe, content designer.

Amy’s talk at Patterns Day was absolutely brilliant! Here’s an account of the day from her perspective.

The evident care Jeremy put into assembling the lineup meant an incredible mix of talks, covering the big picture stuff right down to the nitty gritty, and plenty in between.

Her observation about pre-talk nerves is spot-on:

I say all of this because it’s important for me and I think anyone who suffers with anxiety about public speaking, or in general, to recognise that having a sense of impending doom doesn’t mean that doom is actually impending.

Patterns Day

Here’s a nice little round-up of Friday’s Patterns Day.

Weeknotes #16 | Trys Mudford

Just look at these fantastic pictures that Trys took (very unobstrusively) at Patterns Day—so rock’n’roll!

Patterns Day notes

Stuart took copious notes during every single talk at Patterns Day—what a star!

Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #33 - Did you ever want to simply give up and quit, because of your inner voice? : The Red Hand Files

Nick Cave, like Ana, is blogging about the inner critic:

The truth is that virtually anybody who is trying to do anything worthwhile at all, especially creatively, has seated in his or her brain, a horrible homunculus that blows a dreadful little trumpet, and only knows one song – a song that goes, “You are not good enough. Why bother?” This evil little gnome is full of bad jazz, and is, in the words of author Sam Harris, “an asshole.” The enemy of aspiration, this atrocious inner voice demands you turn away from whatever your higher calling may be and become a second-rate, cut-price version of yourself. As your very own personal detractor it is deeply persuasive in its dark business.

How to speak Silicon Valley: decoding tech bros from microdosing to privacy | US news | The Guardian

Every one of these is chef’s kiss.

What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble – SimpleBits

Twenty hard-won lessons from Dan from ten years of Dribbble.

We sent 50 shirts along with a card to friends and colleagues announcing Dribbble’s beta back in 2008. This first batch of members played a pivotal role in the foundation of the community and how it would develop. The shirt helped guilt them into actually checking out the site.

I think I still have my T-shirt somewhere!

Clarity and Style · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Styling something is easy. Making something crystal clear is hard.

Phenological Mismatch - e-flux Architecture - e-flux

Over the last fifty years, we have come to recognize that the fuel of our civilizational expansion has become the main driver of our extinction, and that of many of the species we share the planet with. We are now coming to realize that is as true of our cognitive infrastructure. Something is out of sync, felt everywhere: something amiss in the temporal order, and it is as related to political and technological shifts, shifts in our own cognition and attention, as it is to climatic ones. To think clearly in such times requires an intersectional understanding of time itself, a way of thinking that escapes the cognitive traps, ancient and modern, into which we too easily fall. Because our technologies, the infrastructures we have built to escape our past, have turned instead to cancelling our future.

James writes beautifully about rates of change.

The greatest trick our utility-directed technologies have performed is to constantly pull us out of time: to distract us from the here and now, to treat time as a kind of fossil fuel which can be endlessly extracted in the service of a utopian future which never quite arrives. If information is the new oil, we are already, in the hyper-accelerated way of present things, well into the fracking age, with tremors shuddering through the landscape and the tap water on fire. But this is not enough; it will never be enough. We must be displaced utterly in time, caught up in endless imaginings of the future while endlessly neglecting the lessons and potential actions of the present moment.

Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites

1,841 instances of dark patterns on ecommerce sites, in the categories of sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, and forced action. You can browse this overview, read the paper, or look at the raw data.

We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.

Finch Front-End · Edinburgh · 23rd-25th September 2019

This looks like an excellent conference line-up! Alas, I won’t be able to make it (I’m out of the country when it’s on) but you should definitely go if you can.

In defence of graceful degradation and where progressive enhancement comes in by Adam Silver

This does a really good job of describing the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation …but I don’t buy the conclusion: I don’t think that feature detection equates to graceful degradation. I do agree though that, when it comes to JavaScript, the result of progressive enhancement is that the language degrades gracefully.

This is progressive enhancement. An approach to making interfaces that ensures JavaScript degrades gracefully—something that HTML and CSS do automatically.

But there’s a difference between something degrading gracefully (the result) and graceful degradation (the approach).

Frank Chimero on causing ‘good trouble’ and re-imagining the status quo to combat achievement culture | Creative Boom

It’s really easy to think that not working full bore is somehow failing your teammates or that withholding effort is poor work ethic and moral weakness. That thought is worth interrogating, though, and it all seems kind of ridiculous once you get it out in the open. There should be no guilt for refusing to work hysterically.

Julio Biason .Net 4.0 - Things I Learnt The Hard Way (in 30 Years of Software Development)

Lots and lots of programming advice. I can’t attest to the veracity and efficacy of all of it, but this really rang true:

If you have no idea how to start, describe the flow of the application in high level, pure English/your language first. Then fill the spaces between comments with the code.

And this:

Blogging about your stupid solution is still better than being quiet.

You may feel “I’m not start enough to talk about this” or “This must be so stupid I shouldn’t talk about it”.

Create a blog. Post about your stupid solutions.

BBC World Service - 13 Minutes to the Moon

I’ve been huffduffing every episode of this terrific podcast from Kevin Fong. It features plenty of my favourite Apollo people: Mike Collins, Margaret Hamilton, and Charlie Duke.

Rotating Space Station Numbers

Ever wondered what would happen if you threw a ball inside an orbital habitat? Well, wonder no more!

You can adjust the parameters of the space station, or choose from some pre-prepared examples: an O’Neill cylinder, a Stanford torus, a Bernal sphere, Rama, a Culture orbital…

BBC Shows and Tours - Shows - James Burke: Our Man on the Moon

I wish I were here for this (I’m going to be over in Ireland that week)—an evening with James Burke, Britain’s voice of Apollo 11.

Here is your chance to find out what went on behind the scenes as James revisits the final moments of the Apollo mission. He’ll recreate the drama, struggling to make sense of flickering images from NASA and working with the limitations of 1960s technology. We’ll hear what went wrong as well as what went right on the night! Illustrated with amazing archive material from both the BBC and NASA, this will be the story of the moon landings brought to you by the man who became a broadcasting legend.

Apollo 11 in Real-time

What a magnificent website! You can watch, read, and listen to the entire Apollo 11 mission! Do it now, or wait until until July 16th when you can follow along in real time …time-shifted by half a century.

A simple starter kit for Eleventy - Hylia Starter Kit

Andy has made this very handy pre-configured starter kit for anyone who wants to get a blog up and running on Netlify with Eleventy.

Hack the Moon

The history of Apollo’s hardware and software—the technology, the missions, and the people; people like Elaine Denniston and Margaret Hamilton.

(The site is made by Draper, the company founded by Doc Draper, father of inertial navigation.)

Using Hamburger Menus? Try Sausage Links · Bradley Taunt

Another take on the scrolling navigation pattern. However you feel about the implementation details, it’s got to better than the “teenage tidying” method of shoving everything behind a hamburger icon.

Oh Hello Ana - Six talks later

I really admire Ana’s honesty here in confronting her inner critic (who she calls “side B Ana”).

Automate your outgoing webmentions

I’ve been kicking the tyres on this great new tool from Remy. Give it a URL and it’ll find all the links in its h-entrys and automatically send webmentions to them. Very cool!

The documentation on the site is excellent, guiding you to the right solution for your particular needs. Read Remy’s announcement:

I’ve also tried very hard to get the documentation to be as welcoming as I can. I’ve tried to think about my dear visitor and what they want to do with the software, rather than type my typical developer approach to documentation - listing all the features and options.

How to Section Your HTML | CSS-Tricks

A deep dive with good advice on using—and labelling—sectioning content in HTML: nav, aside, section, and article.

The New Wilderness (Idle Words)

An excellent piece by Maciej on the crucial difference between individual privacy and ambient privacy (and what that means for regulation):

Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us. Just like you can’t drop out of the oil economy by refusing to drive a car, you can’t opt out of the surveillance economy by forswearing technology (and for many people, that choice is not an option). While there may be worthy reasons to take your life off the grid, the infrastructure will go up around you whether you use it or not.

Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society. Congress has remained silent on the matter, with both parties content to watch Silicon Valley make up its own rules. The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.

That is not consent.

For more detail, I highly recommend reading his testimony to the senate hearing on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy.

Kicks Condor: The Web Finally Feels New Again

For me, I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web. Webmentions are just so versatile—you can use them to commment, you an form ad-hoc directories with them, you can identify yourself to a wider community. I really feel like they are a useful modernization.

A wonky barter (Phil Gyford’s website)

I don’t know how we got to a point where chatting and sharing with friends means having to pick through adverts, and agreeing to being tracked and marketed at, and risk being exposed to, or abused by, terrible people. Our conversations and holiday snaps have become darkly marketed events. You could say this is a fair exchange but it feels wrong to me. The things being exchanged are too different, a kind of category error. It’s a wonky kind of barter in which I feel powerless and used. It’s not why I came here, to the internet.

Drop caps & design systems - Vox Product Blog

Sit down and listen to a story from uncle Ethan.

First You Make the Maps

How cartography made early modern global trade possible.

Maps and legends. Beautiful!

How to land on the Moon

Take a tour of the Lunar Module.

The LM (or “LEM”, as it’s pronounced) has the appearance of an aeronautical joke, with not a trace of streamlining. Instead, it’s an insect-like asymmetrical collection of legs, angles, bulges, and surfaces that’s very hard to visualize. Frankly, it looks like it was thrown together on a Friday afternoon by someone in a hurry to go fishing.

A Complete Beginner’s Guide to React by Ali Spittel

This really is a most excellent introduction to React. Complete with cheat sheet!

The Problem With “Content”   – On my Om

My website has my words, my interviews, my photos, and my identity — what it doesn’t have, as far as I’m concerned, is “content.” Looking at it from the other side, for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, everything is “content” regardless of its provenance. Each creation is merely an object, only valuable for its ability to increase our time spent on their platforms, allowing them to sell more advertising.

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?

The CSS Mindset | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

This post absolutely nails what’s special about CSS …and why supersmart programmers might have trouble wrapping their head around it:

Other programming languages often work in controlled environments, like servers. They expect certain conditions to be true at all times, and can therefore be understood as concrete instructions as to how a program should execute.

CSS on the other hand works in a place that can never be fully controlled, so it has to be flexible by default.

Max goes on to encapsulate years of valuable CSS learnings into some short and snappy pieces of advices:

• Everything is a rectangle
• The Cascade is your Friend
• As much as necessary, as little as possible
• Shorthands have long effects
• Always Be Flexible
• Context is Key
• Content will change
• Find Patterns and re-use them
• Use consistent Names

No matter what your level of CSS knowledge, this post has something for you—highly recommended!

(Open) source of anxiety – Increment: Open Source

If we continue as we are, who will maintain the maintainers?

In the world of open source, we tend to give plaudits and respect to makers …but maintainers really need our support and understanding.

Users and new contributors often don’t see, much less think about, the nontechnical issues—like mental health, or work-life balance, or project governance—that maintainers face. And without adequate support, our digital infrastructure, as well as the people who make it run, suffer.

Making QR codes with cloud functions • tommorris.org

Tom makes an endpoint for generating QR codes so you don’t have to rely on the Google Charts API.

He also provides a good definition of “serverless”:

Now, serverless is a very silly buzzword dreamed up by someone from the consultant class who love coming up with terrible names, so I promise I won’t use it any further. Your code obviously run on a server. It just means it runs on a server someone else manages.

Amazon call it a ‘Lambda Function’. Google call it a ‘Cloud Function’. Microsoft Azure call it simply a ‘Function’. But none of those are very descriptive, because, well, anyone who writes any kind of programming language generally writes functions pretty much all the time in much the same way as anyone who writes English writes paragraphs, and we don’t call our blogging software “Cloud Paragraphs”. (Someone will now, I’m guessing.)

Render Snarky Comments in Comic Sans—zachleat.com

Sounds like Zach had a great time at Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf:

I can’t really express how meaningful this experience was to me. An antithesis to the rat race of social media, IndieWebCamp was a roomful of kindred spirits that care about the web and their own websites and hosting their own content. It felt like the Google Reader days again, when everyone was blogging and writing on their own sites. I dunno if you can tell but I loved it.

He also made a neat little plug-in that renders negative comments in Comic Sans with mixed cased writing:

This isn’t intended to be a hot-take on Comic Sans. Instead it’s meant to change the tone of the negativity to make it sound like a clown is yelling at a kid’s birthday party.

VOCAL

Each typeface highlights a piece of history from a specific underrepresented race, ethnicity, or gender—from the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Argentina to the Civil Rights Movement in America.

German Naming Convention

Don’t write fopen when you can write openFile. Write throwValidationError and not throwVE. Call that name function and not fct. That’s German naming convention. Do this and your readers will appreciate it.

Language and the Invention of Writing | Talking Points Memo

Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain. There have been almost countless languages humans have spoken. But they all follow certain rules that grow out of the wiring of the human brain and human cognition. Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us. Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.

An Introduction to ARIA States | a11y with Lindsey

A very useful explanation of the ARIA attributes relating to state:

1. aria-expanded,
2. hidden,
3. aria-hidden, and
4. aria-current.

mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes

Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.

Jeremy Keith: Going offline - YouTube

Here’s the opening keynote I gave at Frontend United in Utrecht a few weeks back.

Building on Vimeo

Here’s the video of the opening talk I gave at New Adventures earlier this year. I think it’s pretty darn good!

Khoi Vinh on How His Blog Amplified His Work and Career – Own Your Content

It’s hard to overstate how important my blog has been, but if I were to try to distill it down into one word, it would be: “amplifier.”

Khoi talks about writing on his own website.

I personally can’t imagine handing over all of my labor to a centralized platform where it’s chopped up and shuffled together with content from countless other sources, only to be exploited at the current whims of the platform owners’ volatile business models.

An oral history of the hamburger icon (from the people who were there)

From the days of Xerox PARC:

In your garage organization, there’s always a bucket for miscellaneous. You’ve got nuts and bolts and screws and nails, and then, stuff, miscellaneous stuff. That’s kind of what the hamburger menu button was.

Same as it ever was.

Have we reached Peak Data?

Matt’s publishing a newsletter on the past, present, and future of tracking:

The last 100 years have been a journey to see how to measure ghosts - how to measure the invisible audiences at the end of technological distribution networks. With every decade, these ghosts have come more and more into focus, ending with a the last ten years of social media and digital advertising that has created unimaginable amounts of data about everything we see, read, click and like.

He sees the pendulum swinging the other way now …for those who can afford it:

If there’s one constant in the economics of audience data over the last 100 years, is that we only get free services if we pay for them with our attention. This has been true for commercial radio and television, free newspapers, mobile games and digital content. If we want privacy, we have to pay for it, and not everyone can afford this. Will the right to become a ghost only be for the people with money to buy premium products?

SOTB2018 - Jeremy Keith - The Web Is Agreement - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave at State Of The Browser last year. The audio is a bit out of sync with the video.

The talk is called The Web Is Agreement. It’s ostensibly about web standards, but I used that as a jumping off point for talking about life, the universe, and everything.

I enjoyed giving this talk, but I’ve only ever given it this one time. If you know of any events where this talk would be a good fit, let me know.

Patterns for Promoting PWA Installation (mobile)  |  Web Fundamentals  |  Google Developers

Some ideas for interface elements that prompt progressive web app users to add the website to their home screen.

Designing for actual performance by Adam Silver

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The justification for single page apps feels like circular thinking to me. A JavaScript framework is needed to avoid full page refreshes because full page refreshes are expensive because that means assets will be reloaded …assets like the JavaScript framework that only exists to avoid the full page refresh.

This is how it goes. We put a load of shit into a single web page. This makes the page slow. Slow to load, slow to render. Slow.

Instead of getting rid of the shit, we blame the page refresh.

JAMstack? More like SHAMstack. | CSS-Tricks

Chris makes the very good point that the J in JAMstack isn’t nearly as important as the static hosting part.

I also pointed out to Phil recently that the M (markup) is far more important than the J (JavaScript), which is there to enhance the M. So I suggested that the acronym be updated accordingly:

MAJstack!

This is my maj.

Let’s Clarify some Misunderstandings around Sign In with Apple • Aaron Parecki

Aaron knows what he’s talking about when it comes to authentication, and Apple’s latest move with sign-in for native apps gets the thumbs up.

Sign In with Apple is a good thing for users! This means apps will no longer be able to force you to log in with your Facebook account to use them.

This does not mean that Apple is requiring every app to use Sign in with Apple.

Self-Host Your Static Assets – CSS Wizardry

Trust no one! Harry enumerates the reason why you should be self-hosting your assets (and busts some myths along the way).

There really is very little reason to leave your static assets on anyone else’s infrastructure. The perceived benefits are often a myth, and even if they weren’t, the trade-offs simply aren’t worth it. Loading assets from multiple origins is demonstrably slower.

Resilient Management | A book for new managers in tech

I got a preview copy of this book and, my oh my, it is superb!

If your job involves dealing with humans (or if it might involve dealing with humans in the future), you’ll definitely want to read this.