Here’s a thorough blow-by-blow account of the workshop I ran in Nottingham last week:
Jeremy’s workshop was a fascinating insight into resilience and how to approach a web project with ubiquity and consistency in mind from both a design and development point of view.
I saw Daniel give a talk at Async where he compared linguistic rules with code style:
We find the prescriptive rules hard to follow, irrespective of how complex they are, because they are invented, arbitrary, and often go against our intuition. The descriptive rules, on the other hand, are easy to follow because they are instinctive. We learned to follow them as children by listening to, analysing and mimicking speech, armed with an inbuilt concept of the basic building blocks of grammar. We follow them subconsciously, often without even knowing the rules exists.
Thus began some thorough research into trying to uncover a universal grammar for readable code:
I am excited by the possibility of discovering descriptive readability rules, and last autumn I started an online experiment to try and find some. My experiment on howreadable.com compared various coding patterns against each other in an attempt to objectively measure their readability. I haven’t found any strong candidates for prescriptive rules so far, but the results are promising and suggest a potential way forward.
I highly recommend reading through this and watching the video of the Async talk (and conference organisers; get Daniel on your line-up!).
This!
When we talk about HTML and CSS these discussions impact the entry point into this profession. Whether front or backend, many of us without a computer science background are here because of the ease of starting to write HTML and CSS. The magic of seeing our code do stuff on a real live webpage! We have already lost many of the entry points that we had. We don’t have the forums of parents teaching each other HTML and CSS, in order to make a family album. Those people now use Facebook, or perhaps run a blog on wordpress.com or SquareSpace with a standard template. We don’t have people customising their MySpace profile, or learning HTML via Neopets. We don’t have the people, usually women, entering the industry because they needed to learn HTML during that period when an organisation’s website was deemed part of the duties of the administrator.
I agree with every single word Rachel has written.
I care not a whit what tools or frameworks, or languages you use to build something on the web. But I really care deeply when particular tools, frameworks, or languages become mandatory for even getting a foot in the door.
This is for everyone.
I might be the “old guard” but if you think I’m incapable of learning React, or another framework, and am defending my way of working because of this, please get over yourself. However, 22 year old me would have looked at those things and run away. If we make it so that you have to understand programming to even start, then we take something open and enabling, and place it back in the hands of those who are already privileged. I have plenty of fight left in me to stand up against that.
Westley came along to my workshop at New Adventures …and liked it! (phew!)
I have long been a proponent of progressive enhancement on the web, perhaps before I knew the true value of it to the people that use the things we build for the web, but Jeremy has always been able to expand my understanding of its importance in the wider scope of things, how it inherently builds resilience into your products, and how it makes it more widely available to people across the world, in vastly different scenarios. The workshop itself was fluid enough to cater to the topics that the attendees were interested in; from over-arching philosophy to technical detail around service workers and new APIs. It has helped me to understand that learning in this kind of environment doesn’t have to be rigorously structured, and can be shaped as the day progresses.
Read on to discover how I incorporated time travel into the day’s activities.
Chris Ferdinandi is a machine!
A vanilla JS roadmap, along with learning resources and project ideas to help you get started.
One facet of this whole CSS debate involves one side saying, “Just learn CSS” and the other side responding, “That’s what I’ve been trying to do!”
I think it’s high time we the teachers of CSS start discussing how exactly we can teach a correct mental model. How do we, in specific and practical ways, help developers get past this point of frustration. Because we have not figured out how to properly teach a mental model of CSS.
It’s a terribly clickbaity (and negatively phrased) title, but if you turn it around, there’s some good advcie in here for deciding where to focus when it comes to dev technology:
- Programming languages are different, but design smells are alike.
- Frameworks are different, but the same design patterns shine through.
- Developers are different, but rules of dealing with people are uniform.
A personal history of personal publishing from Ana—it’s wonderful!
When I was feeling low and alone I would recall how happy I used to be before I was working in tech. I would remember my silly fan sites, my experiments, my blogs and everything that I loved so much that made me become a developer.
This is the real challenge for service workers:
For 30 years, we taught billions of humans that you need to be connected to the internet to consume the web via a browser! This means web users need to unlearn that web sites can’t be used offline.
Blogging about what you are working on is is really valuable for the writer because it forces you to think logically about what you are doing in order to tell a good story.
It’s also really valuable to blog about what you’ve learned, especially if you’ve made a mistake. It makes sure you’ve learned the lesson and helps others avoid making the same mistakes.
Cassie and I went to a great Async talk last night all about code readability, which was well-timed because it’s been on our minds all week. Cassie explains more in this post.
Tim recently gave an excellent talk at FFConf. He mentioned this variation of Markdown, specifically for writing coding tutorials that update as you scroll. You can see it in action on his Generative Artistry site.
Kind of reminds of some of Bret Viktor’s work.
A profile of Codebar Brighton, with words of wisdom from Alice and Cassie.
A very thoughtful post by Rachel…
There is frequently talk about how developers whose main area of expertise is CSS feel that their skills are underrated. I do not think we help our cause by talking about CSS as this whacky, quirky language. CSS is unlike anything else, because it exists to serve an environment that is unlike anything else. However we can start to understand it as a designed language, with much consistency. It has codified rules and we can develop ways to explain and teach it, just as we can teach our teams to use Bootstrap, or the latest JavaScript framework.
Jon has seven answers:
- Build a culture to learn from mistakes
- Embrace healthy critique
- Fail little and often
- Listen to users
- Design. Learn. Repeat
- Create a shared understanding
- Always be accountable
It’s gratifying to see how much of this was informed by the culture of critique at Clearleft.
This is such a lovely, lovely review from Marc!
Jeremy’s way of writing certainly helps, as a specialised or technical book on a topic like Service Workers, could certainly be one, that bores you to death with dry written explanations. But Jeremy has a friendly, fresh and entertaining way of writing books. Sometimes I caught myself with a grin on my face…
I strongly recommend that you read Going Offline by Jeremy Keith. Before his book, I found the concept of service workers quite daunting and convinced myself that it’s one of those things that I’ll have to set aside a big chunk of time to learn. I got through Jeremy’s book in a few hours and felt confident and inspired. This is because he’s very good at explaining concepts in a friendly, concise manner.
I started writing for myself. The writing was helpful for me and luckily it was helpful for other people as well. But even if you’re the only one that reads your blog it is still helpful as a way to learn.
A very thoughtful post from Stuart, ostensibly about “view source”, but really about empowerment, choice, and respect.
I like that the web is made up of separate bits that you can see if you want to. You can understand how it works by piecing together the parts. It’s not meant to be a sealed unit, an appliance which does what the owner wants it to and restricts everything else. That’s what apps do. The web’s better than that.
A near-future sci-fi short by Hannu Rajaniemi that’s right on the zeitgest money.
The app in her AR glasses showed the car icon crawling along the winding forest road. In a few minutes, it would reach the sharp right turn where the road met the lake. The turn was marked by a road sign she had carefully defaced the previous day, with tiny dabs of white paint. Nearly invisible to a human, they nevertheless fooled image recognition nets into classifying the sign as a tree.