Tags: car

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Monday, September 11th, 2023

Performative performance

Web Summer Camp in Croatia finished with an interesting discussion. It was labelled a town-hall meeting, but it was more like an Oxford debating club.

Two speakers had two minutes each to speak for or against a particular statement. Their stances were assigned to them so they didn’t necessarily believe what they said.

One of the propositions was something like:

In the future, sustainable design will be as important as UX or performance.

That’s a tough one to argue against! But that’s what Sophia had to do.

She actually made a fairly compelling argument. She said that real impact isn’t going to come from individual websites changing their colour schemes. Real impact is going to come from making server farms run on renewable energy. She advocated for political action to change the system rather than having the responsibility heaped on the shoulders of the individuals making websites.

It’s a fair point. Much like the concept of a personal carbon footprint started life at BP to distract from corporate responsibility, perhaps we’re going to end up navel-gazing into our individual websites when we should be collectively lobbying for real change.

It’s akin to clicktivism—thinking you’re taking action by sharing something on social media, when real action requires hassling your political representative.

I’ve definitely seen some examples of performative sustainability on websites.

For example, at the start of this particular debate at Web Summer Camp we were shown a screenshot of a municipal website that has a toggle. The toggle supposedly enables a low-carbon mode. High resolution images are removed and for some reason the colour scheme goes grayscale. But even if those measures genuinely reduced energy consumption, it’s a bit late to enact them only after the toggle has been activated. Those hi-res images have already been downloaded by then.

Defaults matter. To be truly effective, the toggle needs to work the other way. Start in low-carbon mode, and only download the hi-res images when someone specifically requests them. (Hopefully browsers will implement prefers-reduced-data soon so that we can have our sustainable cake and eat it.)

Likewise I’ve seen statistics bandied about around the energy-savings that could be made if we used dark colour schemes. I’m sure the statistics are correct, but I’d like to see them presented side-by-side with, say, the energy impact of Google Tag Manager or React or any other wasteful dependencies that impact performance invisibly.

That’s the crux. Most of the important work around energy usage on websites is invisible. It’s the work done to not add more images, more JavaScript or more web fonts.

And it’s not just performance. I feel like the more important the work, the more likely it is to be invisible: privacy, security, accessibility …those matter enormously but you can’t see when a website is secure, or accessible, or not tracking you.

I suspect this is why those areas are all frustratingly under-resourced. Why pour time and effort into something you can’t point at?

Now that I think about it, this could explain the rise of web accessibility overlays. If you do the real work of actually making a website accessible, your work will be invisible. But if you slap an overlay on your website, it looks like you’re making a statement about how much you care about accessibility (even though the overlay is total shit and does more harm than good).

I suspect there might be a similar mindset at work when it comes to interface toggles for low-carbon mode. It might make you feel good. It might make you look good. But it’s a poor substitute for making your website carbon-neutral by default.

Wednesday, May 24th, 2023

Generative AI: What You Need To Know

Generative AI: What You Need To Know is a free resource that will help you develop an AI-bullshit detector.

You can read all the cards on one page, print them out, or print to PDF.

Wednesday, March 15th, 2023

How slimmed-down websites can cut their carbon emissions - BBC News

Interesting to see an article on web performance on the BBC. Perhaps we should be emphasising green over speed?

Behind the scenes, animation and interaction effects were added using HTML and CSS, two fundamental web languages. That meant there was no need to download large JavaScript files often used to do this on other sites.

Tuesday, March 14th, 2023

The climate cost of the AI revolution • Wim Vanderbauwhede

As a society we need to treat AI resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. We need frugal AI.

Thursday, March 2nd, 2023

Remote Synthesis | The Price Developers Pay for Loving Their Tools Too Much

  • Don’t wrap too much of your identity in a tool.
  • Every tool will eventually fade.
  • Flexibility is a valuable skill
  • Changing tools does not mean starting over.

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.

Redefining Developer Experience — Begin Blog

Perhaps most problematic of all is the effect that contemporary developer experience has on educational programs (be they traditional classes, bootcamps, workshops, or anything in between). Such a rapidly expanding and ever changing technological ecosystem necessarily means that curricula struggle to keep up, and that the fundamentals of web development (e.g. HTML, CSS, HTTP, browser APIs…) are often glossed over in favor of getting students into the technologies more likely to land them jobs (like React and its many pals). This leads to an outpouring of early career developers who may speak confidently about things like React hooks or Redux state reducers, but who also lack any concept about the nature of HTML semantics or the most basic accessibility considerations. To be clear, I’m not throwing shade at those developers — they have been failed by an industry obsessed with the new and shiny at the expense of foundational practices and end user experiences.

And so, I ask: what exactly are we buying when we are sold ‘developer experience’ today? Who is benefiting from it? And if it is indeed something many of us aren’t too excited about (to put it kindly), how can we change it for the better?

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.

The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era | The Spicy Web

We were told writing apps with an HTML-first, SSR-first, progressively enhanced mindset, using our preferred language/tech stack of choice, was outdated and bad for users.

That was a lie.

We were told writing apps completely using frontend-y JavaScript would make our lives easier.

That also was a lie.

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.

Thursday, February 23rd, 2023

What framework should I use? | Go Make Things

If you’re top priority is paid employment, right now, React is a great choice for that.

True. But…

If your priority is long-term resilience and maintainability, vanilla JS (probably with a light build process on top of it) is the ideal choice.

It will never become obsolete, or suffer from a breaking version change. It’s fast and performant, results in less code sent over the wire, and generally has a smaller footprint of things to break.

Saturday, December 3rd, 2022

Thursday, November 17th, 2022

Russell Davies: The internet of good things

An internet-enabled kettle sounds stupid, but this is a genuinely thoughtful piece of hardware.

Wednesday, October 26th, 2022

Programming Portals

A terrific piece by Maggie Appleton that starts with a comparison of graphical user interfaces and command line tools—which reminds me of the trade-offs between seamless and seamful design—and then moves into a proposed paradigm for declarative design tools:

Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes

Tuesday, August 16th, 2022

No code

When I wrote about democratising dev, I made brief mention of the growing “no code” movement:

Personally, I would love it if the process of making websites could be democratised more. I’ve often said that my nightmare scenario for the World Wide Web would be for its fate to lie in the hands of an elite priesthood of programmers with computer science degrees. So I’m all in favour of no-code tools …in theory.

But I didn’t describe what no-code is, as I understand it.

I’m taking the term at face value to mean a mechanism for creating a website—preferably on a domain you control—without having to write anything in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any back-end programming language.

By that definition, something like WordPress.com (as opposed to WordPress itself) is a no-code tool:

Create any kind of website. No code, no manuals, no limits.

I’d also put Squarespace in the same category:

Start with a flexible template, then customize to fit your style and professional needs with our website builder.

And its competitor, Wix:

Discover the platform that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence exactly the way you want.

Webflow provides the same kind of service, but with a heavy emphasis on marketing websites:

Your website should be a marketing asset, not an engineering challenge.

Bubble is trying to cover a broader base:

Bubble lets you create interactive, multi-user apps for desktop and mobile web browsers, including all the features you need to build a site like Facebook or Airbnb.

Wheras Carrd opts for a minimalist one-page approach:

Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.

All of those tools emphasise that don’t need to need to know how to code in order to have a professional-looking website. But there’s a parallel universe of more niche no-code tools where the emphasis is on creativity and self-expression instead of slickness and professionalism.

neocities.org:

Create your own free website. Unlimited creativity, zero ads.

mmm.page:

Make a website in 5 minutes. Messy encouraged.

hotglue.me:

unique tool for web publishing & internet samizdat

I’m kind of fascinated by these two different approaches: professional vs. expressionist.

I’ve seen people grapple with this question when they decide to have their own website. Should it be a showcase of your achievements, almost like a portfolio? Or should it be a glorious mess of imagery and poetry to reflect your creativity? Could it be both? (Is that even doable? Or desirable?)

Robin Sloan recently published his ideas—and specs—for a new internet protocol called Spring ’83:

Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. Boards invite publishers to use all the richness of modern HTML and CSS. Plain text and blue links are also enthusiastically supported.

It’s not a no-code tool (you need to publish in HTML), although someone could easily provide a no-code tool to sit on top of the protocol. Conceptually though, it feels like it’s an a similar space to the chaotic good of neocities.org, mmm.page, and hotglue.me with maybe a bit of tilde.town thrown in.

It feels like something might be in the air. With Spring ’83, the Block protocol, and other experiments, people are creating some interesting small pieces that could potentially be loosely joined. No code required.

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022

Open sourcing the Product Planning Prompt Pack

This is very generous of Anna! She has a deck of cards with questions she asks in product planning meetings. You can download the pack for free.

Monday, June 20th, 2022

AddyOsmani.com - Software Engineering - The Soft Parts

Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better. Sometimes the gaps in your knowledge only become clear when you try explaining things to others. It’s OK if no one reads what you write. You get a lot out of just doing it for you.

Lots of good advice from Addy:

Saying no is better than overcommitting.

Sunday, May 29th, 2022

Cardigan Sci-fi • Robin Rendle

Cardigans are not entirely necessary for a show or a film to fit within the Cardigan sci-fi subgenre (although they certainly help). It’s the lack of polish in the world, it’s the absence of technological fetishism in the science fiction itself. The science or the tools or the spaceships do not sit at the heart of Cardigan sci-fi — it’s all about the people that wear the cardigans instead.

Sunday, May 15th, 2022

6, 97: Why scorpions?

A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

City of Women London

City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.

I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.

Wednesday, March 30th, 2022

Carousels: No one likes you - Joni Halabi

The only person who wants a carousel on your site is you. That’s it. It’s a self-serving vanity project so that you can showcase all of your babies at the same time without telling the world which one is your favorite.

Sunday, March 20th, 2022

🐠 Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online

Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.

But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

Friday, July 30th, 2021

Notes, links, etc | There’s water in the hedgerows

How do you keep knowledge alive over centuries? Stuff that seems big enough for a group of people to worry about at the time, but not so big it makes world news. Not the information that gets in all the textbooks, but just the stuff that makes the world gently tick over.