Build It Yourself | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings

We’re at a point in the most ecosystems where pulling in libraries is not just the default action, it’s seen positively: “Look how modular and composable my code is!” Actually, it might just be a symptom of never wanting to type out more than a few lines.

It always amazes me when people don’t view dependencies as liabilities. To me it feels like the coding equivalent of going to a loan shark. You are asking for technical debt.

There are entire companies who are making a living of supplying you with the tools needed to deal with your dependency mess. In the name of security, we’re pushed to having dependencies and keeping them up to date, despite most of those dependencies being the primary source of security problems.

But there is a simpler path. You write code yourself. Sure, it’s more work up front, but once it’s written, it’s done.

The web was always about redistribution of power. Let’s bring that back.

Many of us got excited about technology because of the web, and are discovering, latterly, that it was always the web itself — rather than technology as a whole — that we were excited about. The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard.

How Indie Devs and Small Teams Can Win in a Tech Downturn - The New Stack

In which Rich nails Clearleft’s superpower:

“Clearleft is a relatively small team, but we can achieve big results because we are nimble and extremely experienced. As strategic design partners, we have a privileged position where we can work around a large company’s politics,” Rutter said. “We need to understand those politics — and help the client staff navigate them — but we don’t need to be bound by them. We bring a thoroughly user-centered approach to our design partnership, and that can be something novel to companies. By showing them what good design looks like (not so much the interface, as the actual process of getting to really well-designed products and services), we can be disruptive within the organization and leave them in a much better place.”

Dark Patterns Detective

Deceptive design meets gamification in this explanatory puzzle game (though I wish it weren’t using the problematic label “dark patterns”).

I created this interactive experience to explore the intersection of design ethics and human psychology, helping us all make more informed choices while browsing the web.

HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me | WIRED

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a desktop browser or an e-reader screen to a mobile app or a screen reader for the blind (so long as that device is built to present hypertext).

Hell, yeah!

Ultimately, even as HTML has become the province of professionals, it cannot be gatekept. This is what makes so many programmers so anxious about the web, and sometimes pathetically desperate to maintain the all-too-real walls they’ve erected between software engineers and web developers.

Hell, yeeeeaaaaahhh!!!

What other programmers might say dismissively is something HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we’re using complex frameworks or very simple tools, HTML’s promise is that we can build, make, code, and do anything we want.

Lived experience

I hold this truth to be self-evident: the larger the abstraction layer a web developer uses on top of web standards, the shorter the shelf life of their codebase becomes, and the more they will feel the churn.

How Undersea Cables Connect the Global Internet

Cables!

Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Also, developers:

Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Designers, the same advice applies to you: write first, come up with that perfect design later.

Report: Thinking about using AI? - Green Web Foundation

A solid detailed in-depth report.

The sheer amount of resources needed to support the current and forecast demand from AI is colossal and unprecedented.

POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world

This rhymes nicely with Mandy’s recent piece on POSSE:

Despite its challenges, POSSE is extremely empowering for those of us who wish to cultivate our own corners of the web outside of the walled gardens of the major tech platforms, without necessarily eschewing them entirely. I can maintain a presence on the platforms I enjoy and the connections I value with the people there, while still retaining primary control over the things that I write and freedom from those platforms’ limitations.

Coming home | A Working Library

While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.

Mandy’s writing positively soars and sings in this beautiful piece!

The web we want: A beginner’s guide to the IndieWeb · Paul Robert Lloyd

This is a terrific presentation from Paul. He gives a history lesson and then focuses on what makes the indie web such a powerful idea (hint: it’s not about specific technologies).

Nic Chan

What an excellent personal website!

The State of ES5 on the Web

This is grim:

If you look at the data below on how popular websites today are actually transpiling and deploying their code to production, it turns out that most sites on the internet ship code that is transpiled to ES5, yet still doesn’t work in IE 11—meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.

Indieweb Vs Indie Web - fyr.io

So the human web, the people net, the your-net. Whatever it is called, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it is yours, if you want it. If you’re tired of the conglomerate-net, disgusted by the commercialised web, sick of being the product, allergic to The Algorithm, then you can have something else. Something of your own.

You want to upload your artwork? Write fanfic? World build? Document your developing Sistrum-playing skills? Discuss your experiences slice-of-life style? Experiment with poetry?

Do it.

Use wordpress if you want. Use Blogger. Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want. Or learn some HTML And CSS and type it all up in notepad.exe. Or just HTML, don’t even bother with the CSS. Just make it yours.

Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape - Infrequently Noted

I want to be a part of a frontend culture that accepts and promotes our responsibilities to others, rather than wallowing in self-centred “DX” puffery. In the hierarchy of priorities, users must come first.

Alex doesn’t pull his punches in this four-part truth-telling:

1. The Landscape
2. Object Lesson
3. Caprock
4. The Way Out

The React anti-pattern of hugely bloated single-page apps has to stop. And we can stop it.

Success or failure is in your hands, literally. Others in the equation may have authority, but you have power.

Begin to use that power to make noise. Refuse to go along with plans to build YAJSD (Yet Another JavaScript Disaster). Engineering leaders look to their senior engineers for trusted guidance about what technologies to adopt. When someone inevitably proposes the React rewrite, do not be silent. Do not let the bullshit arguments and nonsense justifications pass unchallenged. Make it clear to engineering leadership that this stuff is expensive and is absolutely not “standard”.

The next decade of the web | James’ Coffee Blog

After the last decade, where platforms have emerged as a core constituent of the web on which many rely, it may feel like things cannot change. That the giants are so big that there is no other way. Yet, to give into this feeling – that things can’t change – is not necessary. It is the way it is is not true on the web. We can make change. It’s your web.

Ladybird

We are building a brand-new browser from scratch, backed by a non-profit.

Not just a new browser, but a new browser engine.

Update: Turns out this project is being made by asshats. Ignore and avoid.

Popover API Sliding Nav

Here’s a nifty demo of popover but it’s not for what we’d traditionally consider a modal dialog.

“Just” One Line - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

There’s a big difference between the interface to a thing being one line of code, and the cost of a thing being one line of code.

A more acute rendering of this sales pitch is probaly: “It’s just one line of code to add many more lines of code.”

And as Chris puts it:

Every dependency is a potential vulnerability