Lean Web Club
New from Mr. Vanilla JS himself, Chris Ferdinandi:
A learning space for people who hate the complexity of modern web development.
It’ll be $29 a month or $299 a year (giving you two months worth for free).
New from Mr. Vanilla JS himself, Chris Ferdinandi:
A learning space for people who hate the complexity of modern web development.
It’ll be $29 a month or $299 a year (giving you two months worth for free).
This is a great (free!) course on learning CSS from the basics up. Nicely-pitched explanations with plenty of examples.
Scott is brilliant, therefore by the transitive property, his course on web performance must also be brilliant.
You know that this online course from Scott is going to be excellent—get in there!
Our insular discourse, the way we’ve jealously protected the language and tools of design, the way we’ve focused so much on the “genius designer”… these behaviors have all worked against our own interests.
Khoi on design thinking and the democratisation of design.
Any embrace of design by non-designers is a good thing, and design thinking qualifies here. The reason for this is that when that happens, it means our language, the vocabulary of design, is broadening to the rest of the world.
This JavaScript training course looks like it’s really well planned to take you from zero to hero—there’s a whole module on progressive enhancement.
Here’s a great free curriculum for teaching HTML and CSS.
This is a free online video course recorded by Jake a couple of years back. It’s got a really good step-by-step introduction to service workers, delivered in Jake’s typically witty way. Some of the details are a bit out of date, and I must admit that I bailed when it got to IndexedDB, but I highly recommend giving this a go.
There’s also a free course on web accessibility I’m planning to check out.
A proposed syllabus for critical thinking: Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.
Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences.
Practical tools and case studies are also provided.
Online discourse:
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an x-ray that could peer into the true intention behind words on a screen? Sadly we don’t have that x-ray yet (for most of humanity’s existence, we had body language to enrich our words and enhance understanding, but we live in interesting times where so much, perhaps even the majority, of our communication lacks body language) and so we have to be mindful of how our words might be perceived, and what the ramifications of publishing them might be. That’s not to say we should hold off completely, but it does mean we should be mindful if we’re to be most effective.
When I wrote a few words about progressive enhancement recently, I linked to Karolina’s great article The Web Isn’t Uniform. I was a little reluctant to link to it, not because of the content—which is great—but because of its location on Ev’s blog. I much prefer to link directly to people’s own websites (I have a hunch that those resources tend to last longer too) but I understand that Medium offers a nice low barrier to publishing.
That low barrier comes at a price. It means you have to put up with anyone and everyone weighing in with their own hot takes. The way the site works is that anyone who writes a comment on your article is effectively writing their own article—you don’t get to have any editorial control over what kind of stuff appears together with your words. There is very little in the way of community management once a piece is published.
Karolina’s piece attracted some particularly unsavoury snark—tech bros disagreeing in their brash bullying way. I linked to a few comments, leaving out the worst of the snark, but I couldn’t resist editorialising:
Ah, Medium! Where the opinions of self-entitled dudes flow like rain from the tech heavens.
I knew even when I was writing it that it was unproductive, itself a snarky remark. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But I wanted to acknowledge that not only was bad behaviour happening, but that I was seeing it, and I wasn’t ignoring it. I guess it was mostly intended for Karolina—I wanted to extend some kind of acknowledgment that the cumulative weight of those sneering drive-by reckons is a burden that no one should have to put up with.
Tempted to @-mention orgs who’s employees abuse me in comments under my posts. Then I remember about million more interesting things to do.
— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 29, 2016
“Everyday, a dude goes out of their way to tell you you’re wrong. Women’s life on the Internet.” A novel.
— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 29, 2016
I’m literally done reading the comments for my article. It saddens me that even high-profile Web folk fails to see what I meant…
— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 26, 2016
…and only wishes to argue about their favourite and beloved JavaScript. See here and my reply below: https://t.co/2pA3RZZHKk
— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 26, 2016
№1 rule of posting controversial content: NEVER read the comments*
— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 25, 2016
*of random dudes who misunderstood the point and are trying to mock you.
I literally wrote JS is great but the point is understanding who you build for and be empathetic. Still people call me a hater.
— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 24, 2016
Funny enough it was 98% men trying to tell me I don’t understand how the web works.
— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 24, 2016
Guess what? Stop reading in between the lines.
So many people decided to snarkily disagree with me without trying to grasp I’m advocating for the users, not saying JavaScript is bad.
— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 23, 2016
Probably going to have white male dudes tweeting at me how much they disagree for eternity.
— fantastic ms. (@fox) April 23, 2016
I knew that when I wrote about Medium being “where the opinions of self-entitled dudes flow like rain from the tech heavens” that I would (rightly) get pushback, and sure enough, I did …on Medium. Not on Twitter or anywhere else, just Medium.
I syndicate my posts to Ev’s blog, so the free-for-all approach to commenting doesn’t bother me that much. The canonical URL for my words remains on my site under my control. But for people posting directly to Medium and then having to put up with other people casually shitting all over their words, it must feel quite disempowering.
I have a similar feeling with Twitter. I syndicate my notes there and if the service disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t shed any tears. There’s something very comforting in knowing that any snarky nasty responses to my words are only being thrown at copies. I know a lot of my friends are disheartened about the way that Twitter has changed in recent years. I wish I could articulate how much better it feels to only use Twitter (or Medium or Facebook) as a syndication tool, like RSS.
There is an equal and opposite reaction too. I think it’s easier to fling off some thoughtless remarks when you’re doing it on someone else’s site. I bet you that the discourse on Ev’s blog would be of a much higher quality if you could only respond from your own site. I find I’m more careful with my words when I publish here on adactio.com. I’m taking ownership of what I say.
And when I do lapse and write snarky words like “Ah, Medium! Where the opinions of self-entitled dudes flow like rain from the tech heavens.”, at least I’m owning my own snark. Still, I will endeavour to keep my snark levels down …but that doesn’t mean I’m going to turn a blind eye to bad behaviour.
There’s something quite Kafkaesque about reading through the comments on Jeff Atwood’s request for an alternative to Ember.js …for rendering some text on a screen.
Every now and then someone pipes up with “server-rendered HTML?”, there’s a pause, and then a response of “naahhhhh.”
Surreal.
Whenever I have a difference of opinion with someone, I try to see things from their perspective. But sometimes I’m not very good at it. I need to get better.
Here’s an example: I think that users of small-screen touch-enabled devices should be able to pinch-to-zoom content on the web. That idea was challenged twice in recent times:
meta viewport
element in AMP HTML demanded that pinch-to-zoom be disabled (it has since been relaxed).In both cases, I strongly disagreed with the decision to disable what I believe is a vital accessibility feature. But the strength of my conviction is irrelevant. If anything, it is harmful. The case for maintaining accessibility was so obvious to me, I acted as though it were self-evident to everyone. But other people have different priorities, and that’s okay.
I should have stopped and tried to see things from the perspective of the people implementing these changes. Nobody would deliberately choose to remove an important accessibility feature without good reason, so what would those reasons be? Does removing pinch-to-zoom enhance performance? If so, that’s an understandable reason to mandate the strict meta viewport
element. I still disagree with the decision, but now when I argue against it, I can approach it from that angle. Instead of dramatically blustering about how awful it is to remove pinch-to-zoom, my time would have been better spent calmly saying “I understand why this decision has been made, but here’s why I think the accessibility implications are too severe…”
It’s all too easy—especially online—to polarise just about any topic into a binary black and white issue. But of course the more polarised differences of opinion become, the less chance there is of changing those opinions.
If I really want to change someone’s mind, then I need to make the effort to first understand their mind. That’s going to be far more productive than declaring that my own mind is made up. After all, if I show no willingness to consider alternative viewpoints, why should they?
There’s an old saying that before criticising someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. I’m going to try to put that into practice, and not for the two obvious reasons:
When I wrote about Reddit and Hacker News, criticising their lack of moderation, civility, and basic decency, many people (invariably men) responded in defence of Reddit. Nobody defended Hacker News. Nobody.
Oh, and all of you people (men) defending Reddit? Here’s your party line …I find it abhorrent.
Alex’s response to my post about Web Components, in which he ignores my excitement and dismisses my concerns as “piffle and tosh.”
I gotta say: I think cautious optimism and nervous excitement are healthy attitudes to have about any technology. For Alex to dismiss them so summarily makes me even more worried. Apparently you’re either with Web Components or you’re against them. Heaven forbid that you might voice any doubts or suggest any grey areas.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.