Links

My Struggle with Testing Code - daverupert.com

It me.

The Tarot Cards Of Tech

A useful set of questions to ask on any project, shuffled and dealt to you.

They’ll not only help you foresee unintended consequences—they can also reveal opportunities for positive change.

All of the content in images. Not a single image has alternative text. If only they had asked themselves:

When you picture your user base, who is excluded? If they used your product, what would their experience be like?

Easy Toggle State

I think about 90% of the JavaScript I’ve ever written was some DOM scripting to handle the situation of “when the user triggers an event on this element, do something to this other element.” Toggles, lightboxes, accordions, tabs, tooltips …they’re all basically following the same underlying pattern. So it makes sense to me to see this pattern abstracted into a little library.

The Official NoPhone Store

Like a nicotine patch for your phone hand.

Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future

It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as “walled gardens.” But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell. Some of these factories (Twitter, Tumblr, and more recently Instagram) have transparent walls, by which I mean that you need an account to post anything but can view what has been posted on the open Web; others (Facebook, Snapchat) keep their walls mostly or wholly opaque. But they all exercise the same disciplinary control over those who create or share content on their domain.

Professor Alan Jacobs makes the case for the indie web:

We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls.

What do I mean by “the open Web”? I mean the World Wide Web as created by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by later coders. The open Web is effectively a set of protocols that allows the creating, sharing, and experiencing of text, sounds, and images on any computer that is connected to the Internet and has installed on it a browser that can interpret information encoded in conformity with these protocols.

This resonated strongly with me:

To teach children how to own their own domains and make their own websites might seem a small thing. In many cases it will be a small thing. Yet it serves as a reminder that the online world does not merely exist, but is built, and built to meet the desires of certain very powerful people—but could be built differently.

Identifying, Auditing, and Discussing Third Parties – CSS Wizardry

Harry describes the process he uses for auditing the effects of third-party scripts. He uses the excellent Request Map which was mentioned multiple times at the Delta V conference.

The focus here is on performance, but these tools are equally useful for shining a light on just how bad the situation is with online surveillance and tracking.

I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

I started a Twitter account, and fell into a world of good, dumb, weird jokes, links to new sites and interesting ideas. It was such an excellent place to waste time that I almost didn’t notice that the blogs and link-sharing sites I’d once spent hours on had become less and less viable. Where once we’d had a rich ecosystem of extremely stupid and funny sites on which we might procrastinate, we now had only Twitter and Facebook.

And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore. And worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down. Twitter, one agent of their death, became completely worthless: a water-drop-torture feed of performative outrage, self-promotion, and discussion of Twitter itself. Facebook had become, well … you’ve been on Facebook.

Google Duplex and the canny rise: a UX pattern – UX Collective

Chris weighs up the ethical implications of Google Duplex:

The social hacking that could be accomplished is mind-boggling. For this reason, I expect that having human-sounding narrow AI will be illegal someday. The Duplex demo is a moment of cultural clarity, where it first dawned on us that we can do it, but with only a few exceptions, we shouldn’t.

But he also offers alternatives for designing systems like this:

1. Provide disclosure, and
2. Design a hot signal:

…design the interface so that it is unmistakeable that it is synthetic. This way, even if the listener missed or misunderstood the disclosure, there is an ongoing signal that reinforces the idea. As designer Ben Sauer puts it, make it “Humane, not human.”

Designing for Inclusion with Media Queries

The slides and notes from a great presentation by Eric Bailey that takes a really thoughtful deep dive into media types, media queries, and inclusive design.

Pi-hole®: A black hole for Internet advertisements

This looks like a terrific use of a Raspberry Pi—blocking adtech surveillance at the network level.

Wouldn’t it be great if the clichéd going-home-for-Christmas/Thanksgiving to fix the printer/wifi included setting up one of these?

There’s an article about Pi-hole in Business Week where the creators offer some advice for those who equate any kind of online advertising with ubiquitous surveillance:

For publishers struggling to survive even with maximum ad surveillance, the Pi-hole team recommends a renewed focus on subscriptions, affiliate links, and curated endorsements for products and services that might truly interest users, similar to the way podcast hosts may talk about how much they personally enjoy a sponsor’s products. There’s nothing wrong with pitching people stuff they might enjoy, the team says. It’s just the constant, ever-intensifying surveillance that needs to stop.

Architecting the uncertain - Getting started with Agile Software Architecture

Some ideas on the best of use of time in sprint zero of an agile project.

• Understand your context
• Identify risks
• Understand the business process
• Get testing infrastructure
• Understand quality attributes
• Get to know the people
• Prepare an initial product backlog
• Build a walking skeleton/spike
• Build a learning backlog

Meet swup

This looks like a handy library for managing page transitions on sites that are not single page apps.

Here’s the code.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but I really think that this handles 80% of the justification for using a single page app architecture.

Design systems and technological disruption – The Man in Blue

Almost every technological innovation over the last 300 years has had side effects which actually increase the number of opportunities for employment. The general trend is that the easier something is to do, the more demand there is for it.

Cameron looks at the historical effects of automation and applies that to design systems. The future he sees is one of increased design democratisation and participation.

This is actually something that designers have been championing for decades – inclusive design at all levels of the company, and an increase in design thinking at all stages of product development. Now that we finally have a chance of achieving that it’s not a time to be scared. It’s a time to be celebrated.

Acephalic Agile—worse than Waterfall? - Oliver Wyman Labs: Technical

Agile itself provides us with the ability and opportunity to correct course, it allows us to steer, but it does nothing as such to help us steer correctly.

This observation about (some) agile projects is worryingly familiar:

I was suddenly seized by a horrible thought: what if this new-found agility was used, not teleologically to approach the right outcome over the course of a project, but simply to enshrine the right of middle management to change their minds, to provide a methodological license for arbitrary management? At least under a Waterfall regime they had to apologise when they departed from the plan. With Agile they are allowed, in principle, to make as many changes of direction as they like. But what if Agile was used merely as a license to justify keeping the team in the office night after night in a never-ending saga of rapidly accumulating requirements and dizzying changes of direction? And what if the talk of developer ‘agility’ was just a way of softening up developers for a life of methodologically sanctioned pliability? In short, what if Agile turned out to be worse than Waterfall?

The Slow Death of Internet Explorer and the Future of Progressive Enhancement · An A List Apart Article

Oliver Williams makes the case—and shows the code—for delivering only HTML to old versions of Internet Explorer, sparing them from the kind of CSS and JavaScript that they can’t deal with it. Seems like a sensible approach to me (assuming you’re correctly building in a layered way so that your core content is delivered in markup).

Rather than transpiling and polyfilling and hoping for the best, we can deliver what the person came for, in the most resilient, performant, and robust form possible: unadulterated HTML. No company has the resources to actively test their site on every old version of every browser. Malfunctioning JavaScript can ruin a web experience and make a simple page unusable. Rather than leaving users to a mass of polyfills and potential JavaScript errors, we give them a basic but functional experience.

Super-powered layouts with CSS Variables + CSS Grid by Michelle Barker on CodePen

This article is about using custom properties and CSS grid together, but I think my favourite part is this description of how custom properties differ from the kind of variables you get from a preprocessor:

If you’re familiar with Javascript, I like to think of the difference between preprocessor variables and CSS Variables as similar to the difference between const and let - they both serve different purposes.

Building and maintaining a design system | susan jean robertson

Susan writes about the challenges when trying to get widespread adoption of a design system. Spoiler: the challenges aren’t technical.

Change is hard. Communication and collaboration are absolutely necessary to make a system work. And the more people you can get involved from various disciplines the better chance you have of maintaining your system.

What History’s Female Internet Pioneers can Teach us about Tomorrow on Vimeo

The terrific talk from Beyond Tellerrand by Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band.

As we face issues of privacy, identity, and society in a networked world, we have much to learn from these women, who anticipated the Internet’s greatest problems, faced them, and discovered solutions we can still use today.

How to display a “new version available” of your Progressive Web App

This is a good walkthrough of the flow you’d need to implement if you want to notify users of an updated service worker.

A Lonely Isle - A six-episode spoken work essay about Rockall » A Lonely Isle

A lovely bit of audio work from Matthew Sherrett—six short spoken word pieces about the island of Rockall.