Journal tags: words

I posted 1057 times on adactio in 2022.

That’s a bit more than in 2021.

November was the busiest month with 137 posts.

February was the quietest with 65 posts.

• I blogged 91 times during the year.
• I shared 382 links.
• I posted 583 notes.

That included about 237 notes with photos and 214 replies.

I published one article, the transcript of my talk, In And Out Of Style.

I watched an awful lot of television but managed to read 25 books.

Elsewhere, I huffduffed 130 audio files and added 55 tune settings on The Session in 2022.

I spoke at ten events.

I travelled within Europe and the USA to a total of 18 destinations.

Here’s a highlight reel of some of my blog posts from 2022:

• Today, the distant future — 2022 was once unimaginable to some web folks.
• Installing progressive web apps — How I’m letting people know they can install The Session to their home screens.
• Starting and finishing — Some advice for public speaking.
• Declarative design — Defining the inputs instead of trying to control the outputs.
• Re-evaluating technology — The importance of revisiting past decisions. Especially when it comes to the web.
• Democratising dev — How do we share the means of the web’s production?
• Work ethics — Don’t work hard.
• Accessibility is systemic — The difference between inclusive design and accessibility.
• That fediverse feeling — Mastodon is a vibe shift in the best possible way.

I also published the transcript of my conference talk, In And Out Of Style, a journey through the history of CSS.

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder is a very short book. Most of the time, this is a feature, not a bug.

There are plenty of non-fiction books I’ve read that definitely could’ve been much, much shorter. Books that have a good sensible idea, but one that could’ve been written on the back of a napkin instead of being expanded into an arbitrarily long form.

In the world of fiction, there’s the short story. I guess the equivelent in the non-fiction world is the essay. But On Tyranny isn’t an essay. It’s got chapters. They’re just really, really short.

Sometimes that brevity means that nuance goes out the window. What might’ve been a subtle argument that required paragraphs of pros and cons in another book gets reduced to a single sentence here. Mostly that’s okay.

The premise of the book is that Trump’s America is comparable to Europe in the 1930s:

We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

But in making the comparison, Synder goes all in. There’s very little accounting for the differences between the world of the early 20th century and the world of the early 21st century.

This becomes really apparent when it comes to technology. One piece of advice offered is:

Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

Wait. He’s not actually saying that words on screens are in some way inherently worse than words on paper, is he? Surely that’s just the nuance getting lost in the brevity, right?

Alas, no:

Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. … So get screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.

I mean, I’m all for reading books. But books are about what’s in them, not what they’re made of. To value words on a page more than the same words on a screen is like judging a book by its cover; its judging a book by its atoms.

For a book that’s about defending liberty and progress, On Tyranny is puzzingly conservative at times.

I posted to adactio.com 968 times in 2021.

That’s considerably less than 2020 or 2019. Not sure why.

March was the busiest month with 118 posts.

I published:

• 4 articles,
• 99 blog posts,
• 397 links, and
• 468 notes.

Those notes include 170 photos and 162 replies.

Elsewhere in 2021 I published two seasons of the Clearleft podcast (12 episodes), and I wrote the 15 modules that comprise a course on responsive design on web.dev.

Most of my speaking engagements in 2021 were online though I did manage a little bit of travel in between COVID waves.

My travel map for the year includes one transatlantic trip: Christmas in Arizona, where I’m writing this end-of-year wrap-up before getting back on a plane to England tomorrow, Omicron willing.

The French have a wonderful phrase, lesprit de l’escalier. It describes that feeling when you’ve stormed out of the room after an argument and you’re already halfway down the stairs when you think of the perfect quip that you wish you had said.

I had a similar feeling last week but instead of wishing I had said something, I was wishing I had kept my mouth shut.

I have an annoying tendency to want to get the last word in. I don’t have a problem coming up with a barbed quip. My problem is wishing I could take them back.

This happened while I was hosting the conference portion of UX Fest last week. On the hand, I don’t want the discussions to be dull so I try to come up with thought-provoking points to bring up. But take that too far and it gets ugly. There’s a fine line between asking probing questions and just being mean (I’m reminded of headline in The Onion, “Devil’s Advocate Turns Out To Be Just An Asshole”).

Towards the end of the conference, there was a really good robust discussion underway. But I couldn’t resist getting in the last word. In the attempt to make myself look clever I ended up saying something hurtful and clumsy.

Fucking idiot.

I apologised, and it all worked out well in the end, but damn if I haven’t spent the last week on the staircase wishing I could turn back time and say …nothing.

I work with words. Sometimes they’re my words. Sometimes they’re words that my colleagues have written:

One of my roles at Clearleft is “content buddy.” If anyone is writing a talk, or a blog post, or a proposal and they want an extra pair of eyes on it, I’m there to help.

I also work with web technologies, usually front-of-the-front-end stuff. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The technologies that users experience directly in web browsers.

I think a lot about design principles for the web. The two principles I keep coming back to are the robustness principle and the principle of least power.

When it comes to words, the guide that I return to again and again is George Orwell, specifically his short essay, Politics and the English Language.

Towards the end, he offers some rules for writing.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These look a lot like design principles. Not only that, but some of them look like specific design principles. Take the robustness principle:

Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.

That first part applies to Orwell’s third rule:

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Be conservative in what words you send.

Then there’s the principle of least power:

Choose the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

Compare that to Orwell’s second rule:

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

That could be rephrased as:

Choose the shortest word suitable for a given purpose.

Or, going in the other direction, the principle of least power could be rephrased in Orwell’s terms as:

Never use a powerful language where a simple language will do.

Oh, I like that! I like that a lot.

One of my roles at Clearleft is “content buddy.” If anyone is writing a talk, or a blog post, or a proposal and they want an extra pair of eyes on it, I’m there to help.

Sometimes a colleague will send a link to a Google Doc where they’ve written an article. I can then go through it and suggest changes. Using the “suggest” mode rather than the “edit” mode in Google Docs means that they can accept or reject each suggestion later.

But what works better—and is far more fun—is if we arrange to have a video call while we both have the Google Doc open in our browsers. That way, instead of just getting the suggestions, we can talk through the reasoning behind each one. It feels more like teaching them to fish instead of giving them a grammatically correct fish.

Some of the suggestions are very minor; punctuation, capitalisation, stuff like that. Where it gets really interesting is trying to figure out and explain why some sentence constructions feel better than others.

A fairly straightforward example is long sentences. Not all long sentences are bad, but the longer a sentence gets, the more it runs the risk of overwhelming the reader. So if there’s an opportunity to split one long sentence into two shorter sentences, I’ll usually recommend that.

Here’s an example from Chris’s post, Delivering training remotely – the same yet different. The original sentence read:

I recently had the privilege of running some training sessions on product design and research techniques with the design team at Duck Duck Go.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But maybe this is a little easier to digest:

I recently had the privilege of running some training sessions with the design team at Duck Duck Go. We covered product design and research techniques.

Perhaps this is kind of like the single responsibility principle in programming. Whereas the initial version was one sentence that conveyed two pieces of information (who the training was with and what the training covered), the final version has a separate sentence for each piece of information.

I wouldn’t take that idea too far though. Otherwise you’d end up with something quite stilted and robotic.

Speaking of sounding robotic, I’ve noticed that people sometimes avoid using contractions when they’re writing online: “there is” instead of “there’s” or “I am” instead of “I’m.” Avoiding contractions seems to be more professional, but actually it makes the writing a bit too formal. There’s a danger of sounding like a legal contract. Or a Vulcan.

Sometimes a long sentence can’t be broken down into shorter sentences. In that case, I watch out for how much cognitive load the sentence is doling out to the reader.

Here’s an example from Maite’s post, How to engage the right people when recruiting in house for research. One sentence initially read:

The relevance of the people you invite to participate in a study and the information they provide have a great impact on the quality of the insights that you get.

The verb comes quite late there. As a reader, until I get to “have a great impact”, I have to keep track of everything up to that point. Here’s a rephrased version:

The quality of the insights that you get depends on the relevance of the people you invite to participate in a study and the information they provide.

Okay, there are two changes there. First of all, the verb is now “depends on” instead of “have a great impact on.” I think that’s a bit clearer. Secondly, the verb comes sooner. Now I only have to keep track of the words up until “depends on”. After that, I can flush my memory buffer.

Here’s another changed sentence from the same article. The initial sentence read:

You will have to communicate at different times and for different reasons with your research participants.

I suggested changing that to:

You will have to communicate with your research participants at different times and for different reasons.

To be honest, I find it hard to explain why that second version flows better. I think it’s related to the idea of reducing dependencies. The subject “your research participants” is dependent on the verb “to communicate with.” So it makes more sense to keep them together instead of putting a subclause between them. The subclause can go afterwards instead: “at different times and for different reasons.”

Here’s one final example from Katie’s post, Service Designers don’t design services, we all do. One sentence initially read:

Understanding the relationships between these moments, digital and non-digital, and designing across and between these moments is key to creating a compelling user experience.

That sentence could be broken into shorter sentences, but it might lose some impact. Still, it can be rephrased so the reader doesn’t have to do as much work. As it stands, until the reader gets to “is key to creating”, they have to keep track of everything before that. It’s like the feeling of copying and pasting. If you copy something to the clipboard, you want to paste it as soon as possible. The longer you have to hold onto it, the more uncomfortable it feels.

So here’s the reworked version:

The key to creating a compelling user experience is understanding the relationships between these moments, digital and non-digital, and designing across and between these moments.

As a reader, I can digest and discard each of these pieces in turn:

1. The key to creating a compelling user experience is…
2. understanding the relationships between these moments…
3. digital and non-digital…
4. and…
5. designing across and between these moments.

Maybe I should’ve suggested “between these digital and non-digital moments” instead of “between these moments, digital and non-digital”. But then I worry that I’m intruding on the author’s style too much. With the finished sentence, it still feels like a rousing rallying cry in Katie’s voice, but slightly adjusted to flow a little easier.

I must say, I really, really enjoy being a content buddy. I know the word “editor” would be the usual descriptor, but I like how unintimidating “content buddy” sounds.

I am almost certainly a terrible content buddy to myself. Just as I ignore my own advice about preparing conference talks, I’m sure I go against my own editorial advice every time I blurt out a blog post here. But there’s one piece I’ve given to others that I try to stick to: write like you speak.

Two-factor authentication is generally considered A Good Thing™️ when you’re logging in to some online service.

The word “factor” here basically means “kind” so you’re doing two kinds of authentication. Typical factors are:

• Something you know (like a password),
• Something you have (like a phone or a USB key),
• Something you are (biometric Black Mirror shit).

Asking for a password and an email address isn’t two-factor authentication. They’re two pieces of identification, but they’re the same kind (something you know). Same goes for supplying your fingerprint and your face: two pieces of information, but of the same kind (something you are).

None of these kinds of authentication are foolproof. All of them can change. All of them can be spoofed. But when you combine factors, it gets a lot harder for an attacker to breach both kinds of authentication.

The most common kind of authentication on the web is password-based (something you know). When a second factor is added, it’s often connected to your phone (something you have).

Every security bod I’ve talked to recommends using an authenticator app for this if that option is available. Otherwise there’s SMS—short message service, or text message to most folks—but SMS has a weakness. Because it’s tied to a phone number, technically you’re only proving that you have access to a SIM (subscriber identity module), not a specific phone. In the US in particular, it’s all too easy for an attacker to use social engineering to get a number transferred to a different SIM card.

Still, authenticating with SMS is an option as a second factor of authentication. When you first sign up to a service, as well as providing the first-factor details (a password and a username or email address), you also verify your phone number. Then when you subsequently attempt to log in, you input your password and on the next screen you’re told to input a string that’s been sent by text message to your phone number (I say “string” but it’s usually a string of numbers).

There’s an inevitable friction for the user here. But then, there’s a fundamental tension between security and user experience.

In the world of security, vigilance is the watchword. Users need to be aware of their surroundings. Is this web page being served from the right domain? Is this email coming from the right address? Friction is an ally.

But in the world of user experience, the opposite is true. “Don’t make me think” is the rallying cry. Friction is an enemy.

With SMS authentication, the user has to manually copy the numbers from the text message (received in a messaging app) into a form on a website (in a different app—a web browser). But if the messaging app and the browser are on the same device, it’s possible to improve the user experience without sacrificing security.

If you’re building a form that accepts a passcode sent via SMS, you can use the autocomplete attribute with a value of “one-time-code”. For a six-digit passcode, your input element might look something like this:

<input type="text" maxlength="6" inputmode="numeric" autocomplete="one-time-code">

With one small addition to one HTML element, you’ve saved users some tedious drudgery.

There’s one more thing you can do to improve security, but it’s not something you add to the HTML. It’s something you add to the text message itself.

Let’s say your website is example.com and the text message you send reads:

Your one-time passcode is 123456.

Add this to the end of the text message:

@example.com #123456

So the full message reads:

Your one-time passcode is 123456.

@example.com #123456

The first line is for humans. The second line is for machines. Using the @ symbol, you’re telling the device to only pre-fill the passcode for URLs on the domain example.com. Using the # symbol, you’re telling the device the value of the passcode. Combine this with autocomplete="one-time-code" in your form and the user shouldn’t have to lift a finger.

I’m fascinated by these kind of emergent conventions in text messages. Remember that the @ symbol and # symbol in Twitter messages weren’t ideas from Twitter—they were conventions that users started and the service then adopted.

It’s a bit different with the one-time code convention as there is a specification brewing from representatives of both Google and Apple.

Tess is leading from the Apple side and she’s got another iron in the fire to make security and user experience play nicely together using the convention of the /.well-known directory on web servers.

You can add a URL for /.well-known/change-password which redirects to the form a user would use to update their password. Browsers and password managers can then use this information if they need to prompt a user to update their password after a breach. I’ve added this to The Session.

Oh, and on that page where users can update their password, the autocomplete attribute is your friend again:

<input type="password" autocomplete="new-password">

If you want them to enter their current password first, use this:

<input type="password" autocomplete="current-password">

All of the things I’ve mentioned—the autocomplete attribute, origin-bound one-time codes in text messages, and a well-known URL for changing passwords—have good browser support. But even if they were only supported in one browser, they’d still be worth adding. These additions do absolutely no harm to browsers that don’t yet support them. That’s progressive enhancement.

I think my co-workers are getting annoyed with me. Any time they use an acronym or initialism—either in a video call or Slack—I ask them what it stands for. I’m sure they think I’m being contrarian.

The truth is that most of the time I genuinely don’t know what the letters stand for. And I’ve got to that age where I don’t feel any inhibition about asking “stupid” questions.

But it’s also true that I really, really dislike acronyms, initialisms, and other kinds of jargon. They’re manifestations of gatekeeping. They demarcate in-groups from outsiders.

Of course if you’re in a conversation with an in-group that has the same background and context as you, then sure, you can use acronyms and initialisms with the confidence that there’s a shared understanding. But how often can you be that sure? The more likely situation—and this scales exponentially with group size—is that people have differing levels of inside knowledge and experience.

I feel sorry for anyone trying to get into the field of web performance. Not only are there complex browser behaviours to understand, there’s also a veritable alphabet soup of initialisms to memorise. Here’s a really good post on web performance by Harry, but notice how the initialisms multiply like tribbles as the post progresses until we’re talking about using CWV metrics like LCP, FID, and CLS—alongside TTFB and SI—to look at PLPs, PDPs, and SRPs. And fair play to Harry; he expands each initialism the first time he introduces it.

But are we really saving any time by saying FID instead of first input delay? I suspect that the only reason why the word “cumulative” precedes “layout shift” is just to make it into the three-letter initialism CLS.

Still, I get why initialisms run rampant in technical discussions. You can be sure that most discussions of particle physics would be incomprehensible to outsiders, not necessarily because of the concepts, but because of the terminology.

Again, if you’re certain that you’re speaking to peers, that’s fine. But if you’re trying to communicate even a little more widely, then initialisms and abbreviations are obstacles to overcome. And once you’re in the habit of using the short forms, it gets harder and harder to apply context-shifting in your language. So the safest habit to form is to generally avoid using acronyms and initialisms.

Unnecessary initialisms are exclusionary.

Think about on-boarding someone new to your organisation. They’ve already got a lot to wrap their heads around without making them figure out what a TAM is. That’s a real example from Clearleft. We have a regular Thursday afternoon meeting. I call it the Thursday afternoon meeting. Other people …don’t.

I’m trying—as gently as possible—to ensure we’re not being exclusionary in our language. My co-workers indulge me, even it’s just to shut me up.

But here’s the thing. I remember many years back when a job ad went out on the Clearleft website that included the phrase “culture fit”. I winced and explained why I thought that was a really bad phrase to use—one that is used as code for “more people like us”. At the time my concerns were met with eye-rolls and chuckles. Now, as knowledge about diversity and inclusion has become more widespread, everyone understands that using a phrase like “culture fit” can be exclusionary.

But when I ask people to expand their acronyms and initialisms today, I get the same kind of chuckles. My aversion to abbreviations is an eccentric foible to be tolerated.

But this isn’t about me.

I posted to adactio.com 1442 times in 2020.

March was the busiest month with 184 posts.

This month, December, was the quietest with 68 posts.

Overall I published:

• 2 articles,
• 110 blog posts,
• 518 links,
• 812 notes.

In amongst those notes are 128 photos. But the number I’m happiest with is 200. From to March 18th to October 3rd, I posted a tune a day for 200 days straight.

Elsewhere in 2020:

• I huffduffed 187 pieces of audio,
• made 1,139 contributions on Github, and
• published 6 episodes of the Clearleft podcast.

For obvious reasons, in 2020 I had far fewer check ins, did far less speaking and almost no travel.

Once again I wrote over a hundred blog posts this year. While lots of other activities dropped off significantly while my main focus was to just keep on keepin’ on, I still found solace and reward in writing and publishing. Like I said early on in The Situation, my website is an outlet for me:

While you’re stuck inside, your website is not just a place you can go to, it’s a place you can control, a place you can maintain, a place you can tidy up, a place you can expand. Most of all, it’s a place you can lose yourself in, even if it’s just for a little while.

Here are some blog posts that turned out alright:

• Architects, gardeners, and design systems. Citing Frank Chimero, Debbie Chachra, and Lisa O’Neill.
• Hydration. Progressive enhancement. I do not think it means what you think it means.
• Living Through The Future. William Gibson, Arthur C.Clarke, Daniel Dafoe, Stephen King, Emily St. John Mandel, John Wyndham, Martin Cruz-Smith, Marina Koren and H.G. Wells.
• Principles and priorities. Using design principles to embody your priorities.
• Hard to break. Brittleness is the opposite of resilience. But they both share something in common.
• Intent. Black lives matter.
• Accessibility. Making the moral argument.
• T E N Ǝ T. A spoiler-filled look at the new Christopher Nolan film.
• Portals and giant carousels. Trying to understand why people think they need to make single page apps.
• Clean advertising. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising.

I find it strangely comforting that even in a year as shitty as 2020, I can look back and see that there were some decent blog posts in there. Whatever 2021 may bring, I hope to keep writing and publishing through it all. I hope you will too.

I posted to adactio.com 1,600 times in 2019:

• 3 articles (2 conference talk transcripts and 1 interview),
• 103 blog posts,
• 617 links,
• 877 notes.

In amongst those notes were:

• 137 check ins,
• 26 books,
• 31 destinations (in 13 countries),
• 363 photos.

If you like, you can watch all that activity plotted on a map.

Away from this website in 2019:

• I made 1,054 contributions on Github,
• I huffduffed 231 pieces of audio,
• I sent out 26 Clearleft newsletters,
• I spoke at 23 events, and
• I organised 1 conference.

I wrote just over one hundred blog posts in 2019. That’s even more than I wrote in 2018, which I’m very happy with.

Here are eight posts from during the year that I think are a good representative sample. I like how these turned out.

• Timelines of the web. The World Wide Web is a mashup.
• Dev perception. The perceived state of front-end development tools and technologies might be quite different from the reality.
• Split. Materials and tools; client and server; declarative and imperative; inclusion and privilege.
• A song of AIs and fire. Game of Thrones spoilers ahoy.
• Trad time. From the west coast of Clare to the World Wide Web.
• Passenger’s log, Queen Mary 2, August 2019. The inaugural Dance The Atlantic crossing from Southampton to New York.
• Mental models. Back-end development isn’t the same as front-end development.
• Rams. A most unusual encounter in Frankfurt.

I hope that I’ll write as many blog posts in 2020.

I’m pretty sure that I will also continue to refer to them as blog posts, not blogs. I may be the last holdout of this nomenclature in 2020. I never planned to die on this hill, but here we are.

Actually, seeing as this is technically my journal rather than my blog, I’ll just call them journal entries.

Here’s to another year of journal entries.

One evening last month, during An Event Apart Seattle, a bunch of the speakers were gathered in the bar in the hotel lobby, shooting the breeze and having a nightcap before the next day’s activities. In a quasi-philosophical mode, the topic of goals came up. Not the sporting variety, but life and career goals.

As I everyone related (confessed?) their goals, I had to really think hard. I don’t think I have any goals. I find it hard enough to think past the next few months, much less form ideas about what I might want to be doing in a decade. But then I remembered that I did once have a goal.

Back in the ’90s, when I was living in Germany and first starting to make websites, there was a website I would check every day for inspiration: Project Cool’s Cool Site Of The Day. I resolved that my life’s goal was to one day have a website I made be the cool site of the day.

About a year later, to my great shock and surprise, I achieved my goal. An early iteration of Jessica’s site—complete with whizzy DHTML animations—was the featured site of the day on Project Cool. I was overjoyed!

I never bothered to come up with a new goal to supercede that one. Maybe I should’ve just retired there and then—I had peaked.

Megan Sapnar Ankerson wrote an article a few years back about How coolness defined the World Wide Web of the 1990s:

The early web was simply teeming with declarations of cool: Cool Sites of the Day, the Night, the Week, the Year; Cool Surf Spots; Cool Picks; Way Cool Websites; Project Cool Sightings. Coolness awards once besieged the web’s virtual landscape like an overgrown trophy collection.

It’s a terrific piece that ponders the changing nature of the web, and the changing nature of that word: cool.

Perhaps the word will continue to fall out of favour. Tim Berners-Lee may have demonstrated excellent foresight when he added this footnote to his classic document, Cool URIs don’t change—still available at its original URL, of course:

Historical note: At the end of the 20th century when this was written, “cool” was an epithet of approval particularly among young, indicating trendiness, quality, or appropriateness.

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 wrote 78 blog posts in 2017. That works out at an average of six and a half blog posts per month. I’ll take it.

Here are some pieces of writing from 2017 that I’m relatively happy with:

Going Rogue. A look at the ethical questions raised by Rogue One

In AMP we trust. My unease with Google’s AMP format was growing by the day.

A minority report on artificial intelligence. Revisiting two of Spielberg’s films after a decade and a half.

Progressing the web. I really don’t want progressive web apps to just try to imitate native apps. They can be so much more.

CSS. Simple, yes, but not easy.

Intolerable. A screed. I still get very, very angry when I think about how that manifestbro duped people.

Акула. Recounting a story told by a taxi driver.

Hooked and booked. Does A/B testing lead to dark patterns?

Ubiquity and consistency. Different approaches to building on the web.

I hope there’s something in there that you like. It always a nice bonus when other people like something I’ve written, but I write for myself first and foremost. Writing is how I figure out what I think. I will, of course, continue to write and publish on my website in 2018. I’d really like it if you did the same.

I like words. I like the way they can be tethered together to produce a satisfying sentence.

Jessica likes words even more than I do (that’s why her website is called “wordridden”). She studied linguistics and she’s a translator by trade—German into English. Have a read of her post about translating Victor Klemperer to get an inkling of how much thought and care she puts into it.

Given the depth of enquiry required for a good translation, I was particularly pleased to read this remark by John Le Carré:

No wonder then that the most conscientious editors of my novels are not those for whom English is their first language, but the foreign translators who bring their relentless eye to the tautological phrase or factual inaccuracy – of which there are far too many. My German translator is particularly infuriating.

That’s from an article called Why we should learn German, but it’s really about why we should strive for clarity in our use of language:

Clear language — lucid, rational language — to a man at war with both truth and reason, is an existential threat. Clear language to such a man is a direct assault on his obfuscations, contradictions and lies. To him, it is the voice of the enemy. To him, it is fake news. Because he knows, if only intuitively, what we know to our cost: that without clear language, there is no standard of truth.

It reminds me of one of my favourite Orwell essays, Politics and the English Language:

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

But however much I agree with Le Carré’s reprise of Orwell’s call for clarity, I was brought up short by this:

Every time I hear a British politician utter the fatal words, “Let me be very clear”, these days I reach for my revolver.

Le Carré’s text was part of a speech given in Berlin, where everyone would get the reference to the infamous Nazi quote—Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning—and I’m sure it was meant with a sly wink. But words matter.

Words are powerful. Words can be love and comfort — and words can be weapons.

When I wrote a few words about progressive enhancement recently, I linked to Karolina’s great article The Web Isn’t Uniform. I was a little reluctant to link to it, not because of the content—which is great—but because of its location on Ev’s blog. I much prefer to link directly to people’s own websites (I have a hunch that those resources tend to last longer too) but I understand that Medium offers a nice low barrier to publishing.

That low barrier comes at a price. It means you have to put up with anyone and everyone weighing in with their own hot takes. The way the site works is that anyone who writes a comment on your article is effectively writing their own article—you don’t get to have any editorial control over what kind of stuff appears together with your words. There is very little in the way of community management once a piece is published.

Karolina’s piece attracted some particularly unsavoury snark—tech bros disagreeing in their brash bullying way. I linked to a few comments, leaving out the worst of the snark, but I couldn’t resist editorialising:

Ah, Medium! Where the opinions of self-entitled dudes flow like rain from the tech heavens.

I knew even when I was writing it that it was unproductive, itself a snarky remark. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But I wanted to acknowledge that not only was bad behaviour happening, but that I was seeing it, and I wasn’t ignoring it. I guess it was mostly intended for Karolina—I wanted to extend some kind of acknowledgment that the cumulative weight of those sneering drive-by reckons is a burden that no one should have to put up with.

Tempted to @-mention orgs who’s employees abuse me in comments under my posts. Then I remember about million more interesting things to do.

— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 29, 2016

“Everyday, a dude goes out of their way to tell you you’re wrong. Women’s life on the Internet.” A novel.

— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 29, 2016

I’m literally done reading the comments for my article. It saddens me that even high-profile Web folk fails to see what I meant…

— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 26, 2016

…and only wishes to argue about their favourite and beloved JavaScript. See here and my reply below: https://t.co/2pA3RZZHKk

— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 26, 2016

№1 rule of posting controversial content: NEVER read the comments*

*of random dudes who misunderstood the point and are trying to mock you.

— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 25, 2016

I literally wrote JS is great but the point is understanding who you build for and be empathetic. Still people call me a hater.

— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 24, 2016

Funny enough it was 98% men trying to tell me I don’t understand how the web works.

Guess what? Stop reading in between the lines.

— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 24, 2016

So many people decided to snarkily disagree with me without trying to grasp I’m advocating for the users, not saying JavaScript is bad.

— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 23, 2016

Probably going to have white male dudes tweeting at me how much they disagree for eternity.

— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 23, 2016

I knew that when I wrote about Medium being “where the opinions of self-entitled dudes flow like rain from the tech heavens” that I would (rightly) get pushback, and sure enough, I did …on Medium. Not on Twitter or anywhere else, just Medium.

I syndicate my posts to Ev’s blog, so the free-for-all approach to commenting doesn’t bother me that much. The canonical URL for my words remains on my site under my control. But for people posting directly to Medium and then having to put up with other people casually shitting all over their words, it must feel quite disempowering.

I have a similar feeling with Twitter. I syndicate my notes there and if the service disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t shed any tears. There’s something very comforting in knowing that any snarky nasty responses to my words are only being thrown at copies. I know a lot of my friends are disheartened about the way that Twitter has changed in recent years. I wish I could articulate how much better it feels to only use Twitter (or Medium or Facebook) as a syndication tool, like RSS.

There is an equal and opposite reaction too. I think it’s easier to fling off some thoughtless remarks when you’re doing it on someone else’s site. I bet you that the discourse on Ev’s blog would be of a much higher quality if you could only respond from your own site. I find I’m more careful with my words when I publish here on adactio.com. I’m taking ownership of what I say.

And when I do lapse and write snarky words like “Ah, Medium! Where the opinions of self-entitled dudes flow like rain from the tech heavens.”, at least I’m owning my own snark. Still, I will endeavour to keep my snark levels down …but that doesn’t mean I’m going to turn a blind eye to bad behaviour.

For a while now, The Session has had some little on-boarding touches to make sure that new members are eased into the culture of this traditional Irish music community.

First off, new members are encouraged to add a little bit about themselves so that there’s some context when they start making contributions.

Secondly, new members can’t kick off a brand new discussion straight away.

Likewise, they can’t post a comment straight away. They need to wait an hour between signing up and posting their first comment. Instead of seeing a comment form, they see a countdown.

Finally, when they do make their first submission—whether it’s a discussion, an event, a session, or a tune—the interface displays a few extra messages of encouragement and care.

But I realised that all of these custom messages were very one-sided. They were always displayed to the new member. It’s equally important that existing members treat any newcomers with respect.

Now on some discussions, an extra message is displayed to existing members right before the comment form. The logic is straightforward:

1. If this is a discussion added by a new member,
2. who hasn’t yet added any comments anywhere,
3. and this discussion has no responses so far,
4. and anyone other than that member is viewing the page,
5. then display a message asking for help making this new member feel welcome.

It’s a small addition, but it makes a difference.

No intricate JavaScript; no smooth animations; just some words on a screen encouraging a human connection.