I like Chris’s list of criteria for the nebulous role of senior developer:
- A senior front end developer has experience.
- A senior front-end developer has a track record of good judgment.
- A senior developer has positive impact beyond the code.
- A senior developer is helpful, not all-knowing.
- A senior front-end developer is a force multiplier.
An organisation has formed here in the UK as a response to the increasing threats to the web:
We are called to come together in response to growing political and social uncertainty, direct threats to the profession, and a lack of vocal and proactive representation to organise as a representative, independent, and politically responsible industry body.
The inaugural AGM is happening in Edinburgh tomorrow. Get along to that if you can. Otherwise, there’s always Slack.
I like their manifesto; let’s put it to the test-o.
This blog post saved my ass—the Huffduffer server was b0rked and after much Duck-Duck-Going I found the answer here.
I’m filing this away for my future self because, as per Murphy’s Law, I’m pretty sure I’ll be needing this again at some point
A Mozilla-backed project for journalists, publishers, and online communities. The Talk part of it is aiming to fix online comments. The Washington Post is going to try it out.
Along the lines of John’s recent post, Henrik makes the business case for progressive web apps.
He also points out how they can be much better than native apps for controlling hardware.
They can be up and running in a fraction of the time whether or not they were already “installed” and unlike “apps” can be saved as an app on the device at the user’s discretion!
Essentially they’re really great for creating “ad hoc” experiences that can be “cold started” on a whim nearly as fast as if it were already installed.
From Designing Products with Sound by Amber Case and Aaron Day:
Sound eases cognitive burdens.
Sound is also a powerful brand differentiator.
Sound is emotional.
Finally, sound impacts productivity.
But also:
Not every product needs sound design.
Most technologies are overestimated in the short term. They are the shiny new thing. Artificial Intelligence has the distinction of having been the shiny new thing and being overestimated again and again, in the 1960’s, in the 1980’s, and I believe again now.
Rodney Brooks is not bullish on the current “marketing” of Artificial Intelligence. Riffing on Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, he points out that AI—as currently described—is indistinguishable from magic in all the wrong ways.
This is a problem we all have with imagined future technology. If it is far enough away from the technology we have and understand today, then we do not know its limitations. It becomes indistinguishable from magic.
Watch out for arguments about future technology which is magical. It can never be refuted. It is a faith-based argument, not a scientific argument.
Here’s a snowclone I can get behind: X is too important to be left to men.
I am convinced that it is not the girls that must change, but rather society’s view of “computing” and the whole culture of the computing industry.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, this is about to get really serious. There are worrying signs that the world of big data and machine learning is even more dominated by men than computing in general. This means that the people writing the algorithms for software that will control many automated aspects of our daily lives in the future are mainly young, white men.