Tags: sharing

We have a saying at Clearleft:

Everything is a tiny lesson.

I bet you learn something new every day, even if it’s something small. These small tips and techniques can easily get lost. They seem almost not worth sharing. But it’s the small stuff that takes the least effort to share, and often provides the most reward for someone else out there. Take for example, this great tip for getting assets out of Sketch that Cassie shared with me.

Cassie was working on a piece of JavaScript yesterday when we spotted a tiny lesson that tripped up both of us. The script was a fairly straightforward piece of DOM scripting. As a general rule, we do a sort of feature detection near the start of the script. Let’s say you’re using querySelector to get a reference to an element in the DOM:

var someElement = document.querySelector('.someClass');

Before going any further, check to make sure that the reference isn’t falsey (in other words, make sure that DOM node actually exists):

if (!someElement) return;

That will exit the script if there’s no element with a class of someClass on the page.

The situation that tripped us up was like this:

var myLinks = document.querySelectorAll('a.someClass');

if (!myLinks) return;

That should exit the script if there are no A elements with a class of someClass, right?

As it turns out, querySelectorAll is subtly different to querySelector. If you give querySelector a reference to non-existent element, it will return a value of null (I think). But querySelectorAll always returns an array (well, technically it’s a NodeList but same difference mostly). So if the selector you pass to querySelectorAll doesn’t match anything, it still returns an array, but the array is empty. That means instead of just testing for its existence, you need to test that it’s not empty by checking its length property:

if (!myLinks.length) return;

That’s a tiny lesson.

I posted to adactio.com 1,387 times in 2018:

• 4 articles (two conference talks, a book chapter, and an article for 24 ways),
• 97 blog posts,
• 763 links,
• 523 notes.

In amongst those notes were:

• 10 quotations,
• 20 books,
• 24 destinations (in 15 countries),
• 108 check ins,
• 356 photos.

In my blog posts, the top tags were:

1. frontend and development (42 posts),
2. serviceworkers (27 posts),
3. design (20 posts),
4. writing and publishing (19 posts),
5. javascript (18 posts).

In my links, the top tags were:

1. development (305 links),
2. frontend (289 links),
3. design (178 links),
4. css (110 links),
5. javascript (106 links).

When I wasn’t updating this site:

• I made 1,542 Github contributions,
• I sent out 24 Clearleft email newsletters,
• I spoke at 19 events (in 11 countries), and
• I wrote 1 book.

But these are just numbers. To get some real end-of-year thoughts, read posts by Remy, Andy, Ana, or Bill Gates.

I wrote just shy of a hundred blog posts in 2018. That’s an increase from 2017. I’m happy about that.

Here are some posts that turned out okay…

• Ends and means. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
• Thanos. Avengers are wizards; Thanos is a prophet.
• Frustration. Applying the principle of least power to tools and technologies.
• The Gęsiówka Story. Republishing a forgotten piece of history.
• Robustness and least power. A tale of two principles.
• Preparing a conference talk. The four steps I took in putting together a presentation.
• Prototypes and production. Don’t build prototypes with a production mindset. Don’t release prototype code into production.

A lot of my writing in 2018 was on technical topics—front-end development, service workers, and so on—but I should really make more of an effort to write about a wider range of topics. I always like when Zeldman writes about his glamourous life. Maybe in 2019 I’ll spend more time letting you know what I had for lunch.

I really enjoy writing words on this website. If I go too long between blog posts, I start to feel antsy. The only relief is to move my fingers up and down on the keyboard and publish something. Sounds like a bit of an addiction, doesn’t it? Well, as habits go, this is probably one of my healthier ones.

Thanks for reading my words in 2018. I didn’t write them for you—I wrote them for me—but it’s always nice when they resonate with others. I’ll keep on writing my brains out in 2019.

Alright, so I’ve already talked about some gotchas when debugging service worker issues. But what if you don’t even realise the problem has anything to do with your service worker?

This is not a hypothetical situation. I encountered this very thing myself. Gather ‘round the campfire, children…

One of the latest case studies on the Clearleft site is a nice write-up by Luke of designing a mobile app for Virgin Holidays. The case study includes a lovely video that demonstrates the log-in flow. I implemented that using a video element (with a poster image). Nice and straightforward. Super easy. All good.

But I hadn’t done my due diligence in browser testing (I guess I didn’t even think of it in this case). Hana informed me that the video wasn’t working at all in Safari. The poster image appeared just fine, but when you clicked on it, the video didn’t load.

I ducked, ducked, and went, uncovering what appeared to be the root of the problem. It seems that Safari is fussy about having servers support something called “byte-range requests”.

I had put the video in question on an Amazon S3 server. I came to the conclusion that S3 mustn’t support these kinds of headers correctly, or something.

Now I had a diagnosis. The next step was figuring out a solution. I thought I might have to move the video off of S3 and onto a server that I could configure a bit more.

Luckily, I never got ‘round to even starting that process. That’s good. Because it turns out that my diagnosis was completely wrong.

I came across a recent post by Phil Nash called Service workers: beware Safari’s range request. The title immediately grabbed my attention. Safari: yes! Video: yes! But service workers …wait a minute!

There’s a section in Phil’s post entitled “Diagnosing the problem”, in which he says:

I first thought it could have something to do with the CDN I’m using. There were some false positives regarding streaming video through a CDN that resulted in some extra research that was ultimately fruitless.

That described my situation exactly. Except Phil went further and nailed down the real cause of the problem:

Nginx was serving correct responses to Range requests. So was the CDN. The only other problem? The service worker. And this broke the video in Safari.

Doh! I hadn’t even thought about service workers!

Phil came up with a solution, and he has kindly shared his code.

I decided to go for a dumber solution:

if ( request.url.match(/\.(mp4)$/) ) {
  return;
}

That tells the service worker to just step out of the way when it comes to video requests. Now the video plays just fine in Safari. It’s a bit of a shame, because I’m kind of penalising all browsers for Safari’s bug, but the Clearleft site isn’t using much video at all, and in any case, it might be good not to fill up the cache with large video files.

But what’s more important than any particular solution is correctly identifying the problem. I’m quite sure I never would’ve been able to fix this issue if Phil hadn’t gone to the trouble of sharing his experience. I’m very, very grateful that he did.

That’s the bigger lesson here: if you solve a problem—even if you think it’s hardly worth mentioning—please, please share your solution. It could make all the difference for someone out there.

Anne Gibson writes:

It sounds easy to make writing a habit, but like every other habit that doesn’t involve addictive substances like nicotine or dopamine it’s hard to start and easy to quit.

Alice Bartlett writes:

Anyway, here we are, on my blog, or in your RSS reader. I think I’ll do weaknotes. Some collections of notes. Sometimes. Not very well written probably. Generally written with the urgency of someone who is waiting for a baby wake up.

Patrick Rhone writes:

Bottom line; please place any idea worth more than 280 characters and the value Twitter places on them (which is zero) on a blog that you own and/or can easily take your important/valuable/life-changing ideas with you and make them easy for others to read and share.

Sara Soueidan writes:

What you write might help someone understand a concept that you may think has been covered enough before. We each have our own unique perspectives and writing styles. One writing style might be more approachable to some, and can therefore help and benefit a large (or even small) number of people in ways you might not expect.

Just write.

Even if only one person learns something from your article, you’ll feel great, and that you’ve contributed — even if just a little bit — to this amazing community that we’re all constantly learning from. And if no one reads your article, then that’s also okay. That voice telling you that people are just sitting somewhere watching our every step and judging us based on the popularity of our writing is a big fat pathetic attention-needing liar.

Laura Kalbag writes:

The web can be used to find common connections with folks you find interesting, and who don’t make you feel like so much of a weirdo. It’d be nice to be able to do this in a safe space that is not being surveilled.

Owning your own content, and publishing to a space you own can break through some of these barriers. Sharing your own weird scraps on your own site makes you easier to find by like-minded folks.

Brendan Dawes writes:

At times I think “will anyone reads this, does anyone care?”, but I always publish it anyway — and that’s for two reasons. First it’s a place for me to find stuff I may have forgotten how to do. Secondly, whilst some of this stuff is seemingly super-niche, if one person finds it helpful out there on the web, then that’s good enough for me. After all I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read similar posts that have helped me out.

Robin Rendle writes:

My advice after learning from so many helpful people this weekend is this: if you’re thinking of writing something that explains a weird thing you struggled with on the Internet, do it! Don’t worry about the views and likes and Internet hugs. If you’ve struggled with figuring out this thing then be sure to jot it down, even if it’s unedited and it uses too many commas and you don’t like the tone of it.

Khoi Vinh writes:

Maybe you feel more comfortable writing in short, concise bullets than at protracted, grandiose length. Or maybe you feel more at ease with sarcasm and dry wit than with sober, exhaustive argumentation. Or perhaps you prefer to knock out a solitary first draft and never look back rather than polishing and tweaking endlessly. Whatever the approach, if you can do the work to find a genuine passion for writing, what a powerful tool you’ll have.

Amber Wilson writes:

I want to finally begin writing about psychology. A friend of mine shared his opinion that writing about this is probably best left to experts. I tried to tell him I think that people should write about whatever they want. He argued that whatever he could write about psychology has probably already been written about a thousand times. I told him that I’m going to be writer number 1001, and I’m going to write something great that nobody has written before.

Austin Kleon writes:

Maybe I’m weird, but it just feels good. It feels good to reclaim my turf. It feels good to have a spot to think out loud in public where people aren’t spitting and shitting all over the place.

Tim Kadlec writes:

I write to understand and remember. Sometimes that will be interesting to others, often it won’t be.

But it’s going to happen. Here, on my own site.

You write…