Links

The CSS Cascade

This is a wonderful interactive explanation of the way CSS hierarchy works—beautiful!

28c3: The Science of Insecurity - YouTube

I understand less than half of this great talk by Meredith L. Patterson, but it ticks all my boxes: Leibniz, Turing, Borges, and Postel’s Law.

(via Tim Berners-Lee)

Living in Alan Turing’s Future | The New Yorker

Portrait of the genius as a young man.

It is fortifying to remember that the very idea of artificial intelligence was conceived by one of the more unquantifiably original minds of the twentieth century. It is hard to imagine a computer being able to do what Alan Turing did.

Kinopio

I’m finding this tool to be very useful for the kind of chaotic mind-mapping I do when I’m preparing a conference talk.

Software disenchantment @ tonsky.me

I want to deliver working, stable things. To do that, we need to understand what we are building, in and out, and that’s impossible to do in bloated, over-engineered systems.

This pairs nicely with Craig’s post on fast software.

Everyone is busy building stuff for right now, today, rarely for tomorrow. But it would be nice to also have stuff that lasts a little longer than that.

I just got a new laptop and I decided to go with fresh installs rather than a migration. This really resonates:

It just seems that nobody is interested in building quality, fast, efficient, lasting, foundational stuff anymore. Even when efficient solutions have been known for ages, we still struggle with the same problems: package management, build systems, compilers, language design, IDEs.

Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

A Cataloged Archive of Information Relating to the Now Closed Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

Redesigning in public ･ Robin Rendle

I feel like my problem with design in general today is that folks want to burn everything to the ground and start again all the time. Whether that’s with a website, or a new web standard, or a political policy. They don’t want to fix what’s wrong with things bit by bit, everyone wants Thing 2.0 whilst jumping over all the small improvements that are required to get there.

Demos, Prototypes, and MVPs | Jacob Kaplan-Moss

I’m usually building one of three things: a demo, a prototype, or a minimum viable product (MVP).

I’ve seen some confusion over these terms — some people seem to use them somewhat interchangeable. But they’re not the same thing, and building one when you need another can cause problems.

This is a very useful distinction!

The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com - Signal v. Noise

Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh.

👏

In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder.

Thinking about the past, present, and future of web development – Baldur Bjarnason

The divide between what you read in developer social media and what you see on web dev websites, blogs, and actual practice has never in my recollection been this wide. I’ve never before seen web dev social media and forum discourse so dominated by the US west coast enterprise tech company bubble, and I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades now.

Baldur is really feeling the dev perception.

Web dev driven by npm packages, frameworks, and bundling is to the field of web design what Java and C# in 2010s was to web servers. If you work in enterprise software it’s all you can see. Web developers working on CMS themes (or on Rails-based projects) using jQuery and plain old JS—maybe with a couple of libraries imported directly via a script tag—are the unseen dark matter of the web dev community.

Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent string - Google Groups

Excellent news! All the major browsers have agreed to freeze their user-agent strings, effectively making them a relic (which they kinda always were).

For many (most?) uses of UA sniffing today, a better tool for the job would be to use feature detection.

Smaller HTML Payloads with Service Workers — Philip Walton

This is a great progressive enhancement for performance that uses a service worker to combine reusable bits of a page with fresh content. The numbers are very convincing!

Alas, the code is using the Workbox library, but figuring out the vanilla code to write shouldn’t be too tricky seeing as Philip talks through his logic step by step.

Listen To Me And Not Google: HeydonWorks

We have to stop confusing the excesses of capitalism with the hallmarks of quality. Sometimes Google aren’t better, they’re just more pervasive.

cough AMP cough

On Design Fiction: Close, But No Cigar - Near Future Laboratory

If you end up with a draft of a short story or a few paragraphs of a typical UX interaction scenario, or a storyboard, or a little film of someone swiping on a screen to show how your App idea would work — you have not done Design Fiction.

What you’ve done is write a short story, which can only possibly be read as a short story.

What you should ideally produce is something a casual observer may mistake for a contemporary artefact, but which only reveals itself as a fiction on closer inspection. It should be very much “as if..” this thing really existed. It should feel real, normal, not some fantasy.

Performance Budgets, Pragmatically – CSS Wizardry

Smart advice from Harry on setting performance budgets:

They shouldn’t be aspirational, they should be preventative … my suggestion for setting a budget for any trackable metric is to take the worst data point in the past two weeks and use that as your limit

Adding Response Metadata to Cache API Explainer by Aaron Gustafson and Jungkee Song

This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.

This is Not my Beautiful House: Examining the Desktop Metaphor, 1980-1995 | continent.

From Xerox PARC to the World Wide Web:

The internet did not use a visual spatial metaphor. Despite being accessed through and often encompassed by the desktop environment, the internet felt well and truly placeless (or perhaps everywhere). Hyperlinks were wormholes through the spatial metaphor, allowing a user to skip laterally across directories stored on disparate servers, as well as horizontally, deep into a file system without having to access the intermediate steps. Multiple windows could be open to the same website at once, shattering the illusion of a “single file” that functioned as a piece of paper that only one person could hold. The icons that a user could arrange on the desktop didn’t have a parallel in online space at all.

Guide to Internal Communication, the Basecamp Way

Writing solidifies, chat dissolves. Substantial decisions start and end with an exchange of complete thoughts, not one-line-at-a-time jousts. If it’s important, critical, or fundamental, write it up, don’t chat it down.

This one feels like it should be Somebody’s Law:

If your words can be perceived in different ways, they’ll be understood in the way which does the most harm.

The Decade in Cheer - Reasons to be Cheerful

Since 2010

• The developed world used less water, despite population growth
• The (whole) world became less transphobic than it once was
• The ozone layer started healing
• Investment in green energy far, far exceeded investment in fossil fuels
• The world got greener
• Homicide rates fell worldwide
• Weather forecasting became a lot more accurate
• The number of people without electricity fell below one billion
• Universal health care went from privileged ideal to global ambition

Life Under The Ice

Here’s the latest wonderful project from Ariel—explore microscopic specimens from Antarctica:

The collected Antarctic microbes were found living within glaciers, under the sea ice, next to frozen lakes, and in subglacial ponds.

Beautiful!