Links

Strangest of All: Anthology of Astrobiological Science Fiction [PDF]

Eight sci-fi stories gathered together by the European Astrobiology Institute. This free book is also available as .mobi and .epub.

Why I hate the log graph, and you should too - Geek in Sydney

I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.

Lightning-Fast Web Performance: an online lecture series from Scott Jehl

Scott is brilliant, therefore by the transitive property, his course on web performance must also be brilliant.

An Event Apart Human-Centered Design - Web Design & UX Conference

I’ll be speaking at this online version of An Event Apart on July 20th, giving a brand new talk called Design Principles For The Web—’twould be lovely to see you then!

Designing and developing on the web can feel like a never-ending crusade against the unknown. Design principles are one way of unifying your team to better fight this battle. But as well as the design principles specific to your product or service, there are core principles underpinning the very fabric of the World Wide Web itself. Together, we’ll dive into applying these design principles to build websites that are resilient, performant, accessible, and beautiful.

Five Key Milestones in the Life of a Design System - daverupert.com

Five moments in the lifecycle of a design system. They grow up so fast!

1. Formation of the Design System Team
2. First Page Shipped
3. Consumable Outside the Main Product
4. First Non-System Team Consumer
5. First Breaking Change

Dave makes the observation that design systems are less like open source software and more like enterprise software—software you didn’t choose to use:

Often, in my experience, for an internal Design System to have widespread adoption it requires a literal executive mandate from the top floor of the building.

Also: apparently design systems have achieved personhood now and we’re capitalising them as proper names. First name Design, last name System.

“Please, call me Design. Mr. System was my father.”

Measuring Performance behind consent popups – Simon Hearne

• Opted out experiences are ~35% faster
• Opting in downloads 2.5MB of additional JavaScript
• Opted in repeat views are twice as slow as opted out

Why is this interesting? - The Transmission Edition

Looking at COVID-19 through the lens of pace layers.

…a citizen could actually play a part that was as important as a vaccine, but instead of preventing transmission of the virus into another cell at the ACE receptor level, it’s preventing transmission of the virus at the social network level. So we’re actually adopting a kind of behavioral vaccine policy, by voluntarily or otherwise self-isolating.

Write Libraries, Not Frameworks by Brandon Smith

This is a very clear description of the differences between libraries and frameworks, along with the strengths and weaknesses of both.

A library is a set of building blocks that may share a common theme or work well together, but are largely independent.

A framework is a context in which someone writes their own code.

I very much agree with the conclusion:

If your framework can be a library without losing much, it probably should be.

New PDF Preview, Better Web Publishing, Improved Editing - iA Writer: The Focused Writing App

I think this one single feature is going to get me to switch to iA Writer:

For starters, we added Micropub support. This means you can publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools.

Modern CSS Solutions

…for old CSS problems.

Very handy!

Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY

Ultimately, however, our decision to switch was driven by our difficulty in hiring new talent for $UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE, despite it being taught in dozens of universities across the United States. Our blog posts on $PRACTICAL_OPEN_SOURCE_FRAMEWORK seemed to get fewer upvotes when posted on Reddit as well, cementing our conviction that our technology stack was now legacy code.

This is all just mwah—chef’s kiss!—perfect:

Every metric that matters to us has increased substantially from the rewrite, and we even identified some that were no longer relevant to us, such as number of bugs, user frustration, and maintenance cost.

Why does writing matter in remote work? — Tim Casasola

Some good writing advice in here:

• Spell out your acronyms.
• Use active voice, not passive voice.
• Fewer commas. More periods.

Reef

This micro libarary does DOM diffing in native JavaScript:

Reef is an anti-framework.

It does a lot less than the big guys like React and Vue. It doesn’t have a Virtual DOM. It doesn’t require you to learn a custom templating syntax. It doesn’t provide a bunch of custom methods.

Reef does just one thing: render UI.

as days pass by — Hammer and nails

We don’t give people a website any more: something that already works, just HTML and CSS and JavaScript ready to show them what they want. Instead, we give them the bits from which a website is made and then have them compile it.

Spot-on description of “modern” web development. When did this become tolerable, much less normal?

Web developers: maybe stop insisting that your users compile your apps for you? Or admit that you’ll put them through an experience that you certainly don’t tolerate on your own desktops, where you expect to download an app, not to be forced to compile it every time you run it?

The History of the Future

It me:

Although some communities have listed journalists as “essential workers,” no one claims that status for the keynote speaker. The “work” of being a keynote speaker feels even more ridiculous than usual these days.

Robin Rendle ･ Notes about product design

Some good thought morsels from Robin on product design:

Bad product design is when folks talk more about the UI than what the UI is built on top of.

There’s a lot of talk about how great design is invisible—mostly boring conversations with little substance—but! I think that’s true when it comes to product design.

Bad product design is when your interface looks like your org chart.

Creating an Accessible Range Slider with CSS | a11y with Lindsey

If you want an accessible slider component, the trick isn’t to use a whole load of JavaScript. The trick is to use the native input type="range" and then figure out the CSS you need (which, alas, involves lots of vendor prefixes).

Second-guessing the modern web - macwright.org

I’m at the point where you look at where the field is and what the alternatives are – taking a second look at unloved, unpopular, uncool things like Django, Rails, Laravel – and think what the heck is happening. We’re layering optimizations upon optimizations in order to get the SPA-like pattern to fit every use case, and I’m not sure that it is, well, worth it.

Spot-on analysis of what React is and isn’t good for. And lest you think this is blasphemy, Dan Abramov agrees.

Scunthorpe Sans 🗯🚫 profanity-blocking font

Using ligatures to create a s*** font that f***ing censors bad language automatically.

1loc | Favorite JavaScript single line of code

Pairs nicely with HTML DOM.