Notes

Native apps are a pain for everyone involved. Developers pay hefty app store fees, jump through approval hoops, and juggle multiple platform versions. Users? We’re stuck with constant updates, wasted storage space, and apps that don’t even work on all our devices.

Web apps can easily adapt to whatever device you’re on. A single responsive website can run on your desktop, phone, tablet, or even a VR headset. What’s even more, they can be updated on all of them simultaneously. That’s a level of flexibility that native apps can’t match.

Today’s browsers are powerhouses. Notifications? Check. Offline mode? Check. Secure payments? Yep, they’ve got that too. And with technologies like WebAssembly and WebGPU, web games are catching up to native-level performance. In some cases, they’re already there.

Let’s cut through the bullshit: This isn’t just policy disagreement or political maneuvering. It’s the complete collapse of the post-war security architecture that has prevented great power war for three generations. And our political class is responding with all the urgency of someone scheduling a dental cleaning.

The reason for their silence? Fear of mean tweets—many generated by bot networks. Fear of being primaried. Fear of the digital mob that Elon Musk can direct with a few keystrokes—a mob increasingly composed of artificial accounts and coordinated influence operations. These aren’t just personal failures of courage—they represent something far more dangerous: the complete surrender of democratic institutions to manufactured technological intimidation.

I wish I could say I was surprised by their lack of spine, but alas it's what I expect of the Republican party nowadays.

Ryssdal: So here comes the more subjective question, what is the risk for this economy if government economic data becomes unreliable or something short of unreliable, just gets called into question?

Sinclair: Right, That is really, really scary, because that’s something that I think the statistical agencies have worked very hard to get that credibility. It may be the case that the typical American household isn’t looking up what’s going on with inflation from month to month, or GDP from quarter to quarter, but it is the case that it’s affecting them because it’s affecting decisions that are being made on their behalf, by their employers, by their local and state governments, and without that clear information, we’re going to be in the dark making our decisions. Forward-looking decisions are just already hard enough.

It's important for governments, companies, and people to make decisions based on data. Not having reliable data is damning.

As codebases grow and blocks of CSS get unwieldy — making them more complicated — the nesting selector — & — becomes harder and harder to keep track of.

I know I’m not going to convert nesting fans today. What I hope to send you away with is at least a more cautious approach. Consider keeping your nesting shallow

This is generally my approach. Keep it simple for things like hover states and whatnot. Anything much more than 1-2 levels deep and it becomes unwieldy.

The path to becoming a truly great developer is down to more than just coding. It comes down to how you approach everything else, like communication, giving and receiving feedback, finding a pragmatic solution, planning — and even thinking like a web developer.

So much of working in the real world involves trade-offs between the various departments. Being able to communicate well is so important to be able to work with the other teams so you can get the best solution deployed while keeping everyone (mostly) happy.

Boring tech behaves in predictable ways. It’s a well trodden path others have evaluated, optimised, troubleshooted, and understood. Using tech that has been subjected to all those people hours of use means you’re less likely to run into edge cases, unexpected behaviour, or attributes and features that lack documentation or community knowledge. In other words, when something goes wrong, can you turn to someone or something?

There's sometimes something to be said about using technology that's been around for a while. Chances are, someone has run into the same problem you're facing and knows a solution or work-around.

This isn’t to say there isn’t room for innovation, or that staying put is a guaranteed recipe for success. What it does teach is that it pays to make informed decisions, and that often times the understood, reliable, boring tech will get you there over something new, shiny or propped up with marketing spin.

Also true, be mindful of the choices you make. New isn't necessarily bad, but it isn't always better.

But underestimating HTML is a mistake.

HTML is the most significant computing language, programming or otherwise, ever developed. Every other programming language has to grapple with how HTML has redefined computing over the past 30-plus years. So many “pure” programming languages automate the production of more and more HTML.

I remember playing with HTML first with Geocities, I never thought of it as anything other than programming.

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.

This pattern of manufactured outrage points clearly to what’s coming next. I fully expect that we’ll get a functional equivalent of “The Twitter Files.” Just as when Musk took over Twitter, and insisted that the old management was up to all sorts of no good, from being infused with “woke” ideology to government infiltration.

His playbook then was simple: hand-pick credulous journalists, give them selective access to internal documents, and let confirmation bias do the rest.

We reported extensively on what was revealed in “The Twitter Files” and the answer was abso-fucking-lutely nothing. The documents revealed thoughtful policy discussions and principled content moderation approaches, not the scandal Musk promised.

Yet thanks to relentless repetition by right-wing media and congressional allies, many remain absolutely 100% convinced the Twitter Files exposed massive wrongdoing on an epic scale.

Now, we should expect the same with this government takeover. These rumors and nonsense about USAID and other agencies will lead to some of the most absolute bullshit reporting in a long while. Elon will have little trouble finding willing amplifiers for his narratives.

Just as the Twitter Files transformed routine content moderation into imaginary censorship campaigns, mundane government operations will become evidence of sinister plots.

Meanwhile, mainstream media will likely fall into their familiar trap of false equivalence, wrapping obviously false claims in the careful language of “allegedly” and “according to reports,” rather than directly challenging the premise.

This is sadly what I expect as well, Musk promoting his bullshit, and the media just repeating it without any critical thought.

To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning

And the conclusion is what gets me.

And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

Anything less will set us up for yet another Trump and yet another Musk.

The web platform moves slowly, and I understand that can be frustrating for developers who want to innovate, but over a decade of consultancy experience has taught me time and time again that the alternative is much more restrictive in the long run. What’s brand new today starts to show its age much more quickly than something that’s already stood the test of time.

Every layer of abstraction made in the browser moves you further from the platform, ties you further into framework lock-in, and moves you further away from fast.

At work we have to keep a close eye on the dependencies we use and have to regularly update them when vulnerabilities arise. Some libraries are good about fixing vulnerabilities without any breaking changes. Others, not as much. We should probably rip some code out and do when we can, but tech debt can be a real pain in the ass.

It's really amazing how well HTML, CSS, & vanilla JavaScript hold up. Sites built years ago still work and render today.

One of the running jokes and/or discussion I am sick and tired of is people belittling HTML. Yes, HTML is not a programming language. No, HTML should not just be a compilation target. Learning HTML is a solid investment and not hard to do.

No matter how you create things for the web, the end product will be HTML. Either HTML generated on the server or with JavaScript. With AI search bots not rendering JavaScript yet maybe this is a good time to re-learn what HTML can do for you. It has not let me down in over 25 years, whereas lots of other “magical solutions” did.

Google killed Reader before it had the chance to reach its full potential. But the folks who built it saw what it could be and still think it’s what the world needs. It was never just an RSS reader. “If they had invested in it,” says Bilotta, “if they had taken all those millions of dollars they used to build Google Plus and threw them into Reader, I think things would be quite different right now.”

I used Google Reader quite a bit. I loved it and was sad when Google killed it. It had so much potential. That said, while I might be nostalgic towards it, it’s certainly possible Google would’ve enshittified it if they kept it around and built onto it. Who knows what privacy nightmare we would be in. In the end, I use Feedbin and am quite happy with it and its functionality.

At the end of the day, Google Reader might not be around anymore, but its influence still is.