Link tags: data

‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth | WIRED

The title says it all, really. This is another great piece of writing from Paul Ford.

I’ve noticed that when software lets nonprogrammers do programmer things, it makes the programmers nervous. Suddenly they stop smiling indulgently and start talking about what “real programming” is. This has been the history of the World Wide Web, for example. Go ahead and tweet “HTML is real programming,” and watch programmers show up in your mentions to go, “As if.” Except when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser. This is what programming is.

Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate

This is a handy tool if you’re messing around with Twitter cards and other metacrap.

British & Exotic Mineralogy

A really lovely unmonetisable enthusiasm:

All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.

You can dive in and explore or read more about the project and how it was made.

It reminds me of Paul’s project, Bradshaw’s Guide: the both take a beloved artifact of the past and bring it online with care, love, and respect.

Is my host fast yet?

This is an interesting project to try to rank web hosts by performance:

Real-world server response (Time to First Byte) latencies, as experienced by real-world users navigating the web.

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.

SofaConf 2020 - a technical write-up | Trys Mudford

Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).

I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.

I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.

The Cost of Javascript Frameworks - Web Performance Consulting | TimKadlec.com

Excellent in-depth research by Tim on how the major frameworks affect performance. There are some surprising (and some unsurprising) findings in here.

I wish with all my heart that this data would have some effect but I fear there’s an entire culture of “modern” web development that stick its fingers in its ears and say “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.”

Limiting input type=”color” to a certain palette (from an image) | Christian Heilmann

I never thought of combining the datalist element with input type="color"—it’s pretty cool that it just works!

getlon.lat

80 geocoding service plans to choose from.

I’m going to squirrel this one away for later—I’ve had to switch geocoding providers in the past, so I have a feeling that this could come in handy.

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?

We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.

This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.

Emma Willard’s Maps of Time

The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.

Slopes | Tinkersynth

Have fun with this little machine, tweaking the parameters for generating a Joy Division/Jocelyn Bell-Burnell data visualisation.

The interface is quite delightful!

CrUX.RUN

This is so useful! Get instant results from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report without having to wait (or pay) for BigQuery.

Here’s an example of my site’s metrics over the last few months, complete with nice charts.

The Map of Mathematics | Quanta Magazine

An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!

Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.

Draw all roads in a city at once

A lovely little bit of urban cartography.

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.

99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2019

The goal in putting these stories together has never been to create a warm glow, or lull anyone into a false sense of complacency. The challenges facing the human family right now are big and scary and there’s no guarantee we will overcome them.

As millions of people have demonstrated in the past 12 months though, action is possible, better solutions are available and a better future can be built.

The Deep Sea

After showing us the size of space, here’s a fascinating intereactive visualisation of the ocean depths.

2019 Firefox Flashback

Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!

The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before - The New York Times

The design history of the New York subway map.