Link tags: language

Russell Davies: Writing for snobs

They came for the writers of car brochures, but I wasn’t a writer of car brochures, so I said nothing.

CSS Vocabulary

This is a nifty visual interactive explainer for the language of CSS—could be very handy for Codebar students.

Easily rename your Git default branch from master to main - Scott Hanselman

Nice and straightforward. Locally:

git branch -m master main git push -u origin main

Then on the server:

git branch -m master main git branch -u origin/main

On github.com, go into the repo’s settings and update the default branch.

Thanks for this, Scott!

P.S. Don’t read the comments.

Is it time for a Web Performance rebrand? – Simon Hearne

I think Simon is onto something here. While the word “performance” means something amongst devs, it’s too vague to be useful when communicating with other disciplines. I like the idea of using the more descriptive “page speed” or “site speed” in those situations.

Web Performance and Web Performance Optimization are still valid and descriptive terms for our industry, but we might benefit from a change to our language when working with others. The language we use could be critical to the success of making the web a faster and more accessible place.

The 3 Laws of Serverless - Burke Holland

“Serverless”, is a buzzword. We can’t seem to agree on what it actaully means, so it ends up meaning nothing at all. Much like “cloud” or “dynamic” or “synergy”. You just wait for the right time in a meeting to drop it, walk to the board and draw a Venn Diagram, and then just sit back and wait for your well-deserved promotion.

That’s very true, and I do not like the term “serverless” for the rather obvious reason that it’s all about servers (someone else’s servers, that is). But these three principles are handy for figuring out if you’re building with in a serverlessy kind of way:

1. You have no knowledge of the underlying system where your code runs.
2. Scaling is an intrinsic attribute of the technology; so much so that it just happens automatically.
3. You only pay for what you use.

Abstraction; scale; consumption.

Selectors Explained

I can see this coming in very handy at Codebar—pop any CSS selector in here and get a plain English explanation of what it’s doing.

Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics - Anab Jain - Medium

It may be the end of the world as we know it, but other worlds are possible.

“Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination – The Public Domain Review

The characteristica universalis and the calculus racionator of Leibniz.

Standards for Writing Accessibly – A List Apart

• Write Chronologically, Not Spatially
• Write Left to Right, Top to Bottom
• Don’t Use Colors and Icons Alone
• Describe the Action, Not the Behavior

The Web is Industrialized and I helped industrialize it - daverupert.com

We’ve industrialized design and are relegated to squeezing efficiencies out of it through our design systems. All CSS changes must now have a business value and user story ticket attached to it.

Dave follows on from my post about design systems and automation.

At the same time, I have seen first hand how design systems can yield improvements in accessibility, performance, and shared knowledge across a willing team. I’ve seen them illuminate problems in design and code. I’ve seen them speed up design and development allowing teams to build, share, and validate prototypes or A/B tests before undergoing costly guesswork in production. There’s value in these tools, these processes.

Open UI

An interesting project that will research and document the language used across different design systems to name similar components.

Mornington Crescent - Esolang

A (possibly) Turing complete language:

As the validity and the semantics of a program depend on the structure of the London underground system, which is administered by London Underground Ltd, a subsidiary of Transport for London, who are likely unaware of the existence of this programming language, its future compatibility is uncertain. Programs may become invalid or subtly wrong as the transport company expands or retires some of the network, reroutes lines or renames stations. Features may be removed with no prior consultation with the programming community. For all we know, Mornington Crescent itself may at some point be closed, at which point this programming language will cease to exist.

Language and the Invention of Writing | Talking Points Memo

Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain. There have been almost countless languages humans have spoken. But they all follow certain rules that grow out of the wiring of the human brain and human cognition. Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us. Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.

Building on Vimeo

Here’s the video of the opening talk I gave at New Adventures earlier this year. I think it’s pretty darn good!

Humanizing Your Documentation - Full Talk - Speaker Deck

The slides from Carolyn’s talk at Beyond Tellerrand. The presentation is ostensibly about writing documentation, but I think it’s packed with good advice for writing in general.

Yet Another JavaScript Framework | CSS-Tricks

This is such a well-written piece! Jay Hoffman—author of the excellent History Of The Web newsletter—talks us through the JavaScript library battles of the late 2000’s …and the consequences that arose just last year.

The closing line is perfect.

Getting help from your worst enemy

Onboarding. Reaching out. In terms of. Synergy. Bandwidth. Headcount. Forward planning. Multichannel. Going forward. We are constantly bombarded and polluted with nonsense speak. These words and phrases snag and attach themselves to our vocabulary like sticky weeds.

Words become walls.

I love this post from Ben on the value of plain language!

We’re not dumbing things down by using simple terms. We’re being smarter.

Read on for the story of the one exception that Ben makes—it’s a good one.

The CSS mental model - QuirksBlog

PPK looks at the different mental models behind CSS and JavaScript. One is declarative and one is imperative.

There’s a lot here that ties in with what I was talking about at New Adventures around the rule of least power in technology choice.

I’m not sure if I agree with describing CSS as being state-based. The example that illustrates this—a :hover style—feels like an exception rather than a typical example of CSS.

Programming as translation – Increment: Internationalization

Programming lessons from Umberto Eco and Emily Wilson.

Converting the analog into the digital requires discretization, leaving things out. What we filter out—or what we focus on—depends on our biases. How do conventional translators handle issues of bias? What can programmers learn from them?

“It turns out” « the jsomers.net blog

It turns out that “it turns out” is a handy linguistic shortcut for making an unsubstaniated assertion.