Link archive: February 20th, 2016

Frontend Design | Brad Frost

Well, this pretty much sums up the front-end team at Clearleft:

Frontend design involves creating the HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code that makes up a user interface.

I’ve often said that at Clearleft, development is always in the service of design. And like Brad, I often find myself defining that work by what it isn’t:

They understand UX principles and best practices, but may not spend their time conducting research, creating flows, and planning scenarios

They have a keen eye for aesthetics, but may not spend their time pouring over font pairings, comparing color palettes, or creating illustrations and icons.

They can write JavaScript, but may not spend their time writing application-level code, wiring up middleware, or debugging.

They understand the importance of backend development, but may not spend their time writing backend logic, spinning up servers, load testing, etc.

Eternal 5D data storage could record the history of humankind

360 terabytes of data stored for over 13 billion years:

Coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.

The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens | New Republic

A fascinating insight into some of Tumblr’s most popular accounts:

Some posts get more than a million notes—imagine a joke whispered in biology class getting a laugh from a city the size of San Francisco.

It’ll be a real shame when Tumblr disappears.

That’s “when”, not “if”. Remember:

In 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr.

Keeping a smart home guest-friendly — Sensors and sensibility

In web development, we have this concept of progressive enhancement, which means that you start by building websites with the very most basic blocks - HTML elements. Then you enhance those basic elements with CSS to make them look better, then you add JavaScript to make them whizzy - the benefit being that if the JS or the CSS fail to load, you’ve still go the basic usable blocks underneath. I’m following this same principle in the house.

Related: this great chat between Jen Simmons and Stephanie Rieger.