Link tags: learning

Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters: Advances in Derp Learning

A genuinely interesting (and droll) deep dive into derp learning …for typography!

Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science | Opinion | Communications of the ACM

I don’t think I agree with Don Knuth’s argument here from a 2014 lecture, but I do like how he sets out his table:

Why do I, as a scientist, get so much out of reading the history of science? Let me count the ways:

1. To understand the process of discovery—not so much what was discovered, but how it was discovered.
2. To understand the process of failure.
3. To celebrate the contributions of many cultures.
4. Telling historical stories is the best way to teach.
5. To learn how to cope with life.
6. To become more familiar with the world, and to know how science fits into the overall history of mankind.

Here Dragons Abound: The Forever Project

I think that working on your own website can be a good Forever Project.

It’s an open-ended topic that you can explore for a long time without running out of challenges.

Also, this is spot-on:

Compare two different situations where you tell a story at a party. In the first situation, you tell the story in a corner to one or two people, who are totally interested and smiling. In the second situation, you tell the story in the center of the party with a large group of people around you, but they’re almost all bored and uninterested, talking amongst themselves and largely ignoring you. The first situation sounds better, right? Well, that’s the non-obvious benefit of blogging. There are a load of people out there blogging, and almost all of them are better writers and better looking than you. Nobody is going to read your blog about frabulizing widgets unless they really care about frabulizing widgets. So it’s not going to be a big audience, but it should be an interested audience. And I think you’ll find that you get 90% of the benefits of socialization from a handful of readers as you would get from a sea of readers.

Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski

This is a truly wonderful web page! It’s an explanation from first principles of how cameras and lenses work.

At its most basic, it uses words which you can read in any browser. It also uses images so if your browser supports images, you get that enhancement. And it uses interactive JavaScript widgets so that you get that layer of richness if your browser supports the technology.

Then you realise that every post ever published on this personal site is equally in-depth and uses the same content-first progressive enhancement approach.

What Makes CSS Hard To Master - Tim Severien

CSS is simple, but not easy.

If we, as a community, start to appreciate the complexity of writing CSS, perhaps we can ask for help instead of blaming the language when we’re confused or stuck. We might also stop looking down on CSS specialists.

Zonelets Home

Zonelets is a simple HTML blogging engine with scrappy, DIY spirit! I made it because I really want everyone to blog, but I felt that the existing options were generally overcomplicated and commercially-focused in a way that made web creativity feel intimidating and arcane.

I love the philosophy behind this blogging tool, which actively encourages you to learn a little bit of HTML:

Plenty of services can help you to “create a professional-looking website without writing a single line of code.” Now, thanks to Zonelets, you can create an UNPROFESSIONAL-looking website by writing NUMEROUS lines of code!

Copying is the way design works || Matthew Ström: designer & developer

A people’s history of copying, from art to software.

Designers copy. We steal like great artists. But when we see a copy of our work, we’re livid.

CSS Vocabulary

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

Why you should have a blog (and write in it) | Leticia Portella

Having your independent blog is an excellent way to share what you think in a decentralized way, independent of any major company that may add a paywall to it (Medium, I am looking at you).

What is CSS Specificity? Sarah Chima - Front-End Developer

An excellent and clear explanation of specificity in CSS.

HTML Tutorial for Beginners 101 (Including HTML5 Tags) - WebsiteSetup

A really great one-page guide to HTML from Bruce. I like his performance-focused intro:

If your site is based on good HTML, it will load fast. Browsers incrementally render HTML—that is, they will display a partially downloaded web page to the user while the browser awaits the remaining files from the server.

Modern fashionable development techniques, such as React, require a lot of JavaScript to be sent to the user. When it’s all downloaded, the user’s device must parse and execute the JavaScript before it can even start to construct the page. On a slow network, or on a cheaper, low-powered device, this can result in an excruciatingly slow load and is a heavy drain on the battery.

There’s a voice inside your head that prevents you from sharing ideas—punch it in the face. - Airbag Industries

When I challenge the idea of topics—especially when I suggest writing about a design topic—the “I don’t know what to write about” excuse goes to level two: Someone has already written about [design topic]. And that might be true, but by Great Gutenberg’s Ghost, if that was a hard requirement for publishing, we’d have one newspaper, a few magazines, and maybe a thousand books. Hollywood would be a ghost town because we got to the end of all of the movie tropes by 1989. We’d have seventy-five songs with lyrics, but re-recorded in every music style and everyone would still hate Yanni. The point is you can’t let the people who have come before you be the excuse to stop you from writing or, frankly, creating.

The Curse of Knowledge · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

A great explanation of the curse of knowledge …with science!

(This, by the way, is the first of 100 blog posts that Matthias is writing in 100 days.)

S01E04: Cassie Evans - Behind the Source

This is a lovely little interview with Cassie—it really is an honour and a privilege to work with her!

Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective | Lea Verou

This is a damning and all-too typical example of what it’s like for someone to trying to get to grips with the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem:

Note that John is a computer scientist that knows a fair bit about the Web: He had Node & npm installed, he knew what MIME types are, he could start a localhost when needed. What hope do actual novices have?

I think it’s even worse than that. Not only are potential new devs being put off ever getting started, I know plenty of devs with experience who have pushed out by the overwhelming and needless complexity of the modern web’s toolchain. It’s like a constant gaslighting where any expression of unease is summarily dismissed as being the whinings of “the old guard” who just won’t get with the programme.

John gives up. Concludes never to touch Node, npm, or ES6 modules with a barge pole.

The End.

(Just watch as Lea’s post gets written off as an edge case.)

CSS Tips for New Devs | Amber’s Website

Never mind Kevin Kelly’s 68 bits of advice, here’s Amber’s 24 nuggets of CSS lessons for people new to web development.

What is a resilient website? (with Jeremy Keith) | A Question of Code

I really enjoyed having a chat with Ed and Tom on their podcast. It’s aimed at people making a career shift into web development, but that didn’t stop me banging on about my usual hobby horses: progressive enhancement, resilient web design, and all that jazz.

Available for your huffduffing pleasure.

How I’m teaching the kids coding for the web

I love how Remy explains front-end development to his kids:

The bones are the HTML. Each bone has a name, we call them tags (or elements).

…the skin and the paint on the skin, this is CSS.

Finally, the brain and behaviour, the way the website can be interacted with is using the third layer: JavaScript.

Twitter thread as blog post: Thoughts on how we write CSS | Lara Schenck

CSS only truly exists in a browser. As soon as we start writing CSS outside of the browser, we rely on guesses and memorization and an intimate understanding of the rules. A text editor will never be able to provide as much information as a browser can.

Why is CSS frustrating? ･ Robin Rendle

CSS is frustrating because you have to actually think of a website like a website and not an app. That mental model is what everyone finds so viscerally upsetting. And so engineers do what feels best to them; they try to make websites work like apps, like desktop software designed in the early naughts. Something that can be controlled.