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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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with an HTML-first, SSR-first, progressively enhanced mindset, using our preferred language/tech stack of choice, was outdated and bad for users.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.
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.
An internet-enabled kettle sounds stupid, but this is a genuinely thoughtful piece of hardware.
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
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.
Create your own free website. Unlimited creativity, zero ads.
Make a website in 5 minutes. Messy encouraged.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These comics by a former Googler give a cumulative insight into the decaying culture there.
What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards your podcast player of choice to be reborn?
Why it’s season two of the Clearleft podcast!
Yes, it’s that time again when you can treat your earholes to six episodes of condensed discussion on design-related topics at a rate of one episode per week.
The first episode of season two is all about design leadership. This was a lot of fun to put together. I was able to mine the rich seam of talks from the past few years of Leading Design conferences. I found some great soundbites from Jane Austin and Hannah Donovan. I was also able to include the audio from a roundtable discussion at Clearleft. These debates are a regular occurrence at the UX laundromat, where we share what we’re working on. I should record them more often. There was some quality ranting from Jon, Andy, and Chris.
Best of all, I interviewed Temi Adeniyi, a brilliant design leader based in Berlin. Hearing her journey was fascinating. She’s going to be speaking at this year’s online Leading Design Festival too.
I think you’ll enjoy this episode if you are:
Actually, the lessons here probably apply regardless of your field. Engineers and lead developers will probably relate to the quandaries raised.
The whole thing clocks in at just over 21 minutes.
Have a listen and see what you think. And if you like what you hear, be sure to share the Clearleft podcast with your friends and co-workers. Go on—drop it in a Slack channel.
If you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, you might want to pop the RSS feed into your podcast player.