Notes

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.

Code that runs on the client, by contrast, is running on The Devil's Computer.2 Almost nothing about the latency, client resources, or even API availability are under the developer's control.

Client-side web development is perhaps best conceived of as influence-oriented programming. Once code has left the datacenter, all a web developer can do is send thoughts and prayers.

Too many people, including me sometimes, assume everyone has a computer with nearly unlimited computing power.

Frameworkism insists that all problems will be solved if teams just framework hard enough. This is non-sequitur, if not entirely backwards. In practice, the only thing that makes web experiences good is caring about the user experience — specifically, the experience of folks at the margins. Technologies come and go, but what always makes the difference is giving a toss about the user.

I still use React at work, and while I don’t hate it, it’s definitely not the first tool I reach for anymore.

In short, nobody should start a new project in the 2020s based on React. Full stop.

So my advice is two-fold. First, make art. Join a choir or pottery class. Start painting, make weird novelty websites.

And second: enjoy art. Get out to your local theaters, museums, music venues… they are the best thing to spend your money on.

I’d highly recommend reading all the slides, they’re fantastic.

But the plan to use hardware from previous space programs is a bit cobbled together. The Space Launch System, for instance, was originally designed for the Constellation program, a strategy set up under the George W. Bush administration to finish building the International Space Station and to reestablish a human presence on the moon. Congress mandated that the rocket reuse technology from the then defunct space shuttle program. But Obama canceled Constellation in 2010, and in 2017 Trump anointed the Artemis program, with the goal of finally sending people back to the moon and paving the way for exploring Mars. Again, the new plan required that NASA use some of the technology that had been developed for Constellation, which in turn entailed repurposing old space shuttle technology. These mandates were pushed by congresspeople representing regions that housed manufacturing centers for shuttle parts. But the carryover and conversion of those technologies have proved difficult. According to a report from the NASA inspector general, bringing the rocket parts into the modern era—for instance, replacing asbestos parts—and retrofitting them for a new rocket system has cost much more than anticipated.

Leave it to congress to throw a wrench in things.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism, giving more rights to a creative worker who has no bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much lunch money you give that kid, the bullies will take it and your kid will remain hungry. To get your kid lunch, you have to clear the bullies away from the gate. You need to make a structural change:

Or, put another way: people with power can claim rights. But giving powerless people more rights doesn't make them powerful – it just transfers those rights to the people they bargain against.

Or, put a third way: "just because you're on their side, it doesn't follow that they're on your side"