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The BEST THING I’ve seen on Twitter this week (month?) is Justin Alexander’s thread documenting “The Dungeon of Drezzar,” Peter Heeringa and Troy Wilhelmson’s spectacular multilevel dungeon built into a series of dresser drawers.
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Well now I feel like my DM isn’t trying hard enough. Move aside, Roll20!
Ironically, the web page promoting the “Digital Climate Strike” is among the dirtiest on the Internet, based on the CO2 footprint of visiting it.
Going to that page results in about 14 Mb of data being transmitted from their server to your device (which you’ll pay for if you’re on a metered connection). For comparison, reading my recent post about pronouns results in about 356 Kb of data. In other words, their page is forty times more bandwidth-consuming, despite the fact that my page has about four times the word count. The page you’re reading right now, thanks to its images, weighs in at about 650 Kb: you could still download it more than twenty times while you were waiting for theirs.
Worse still, the most-heavyweight of the content they deliver is stuff that’s arguably strictly optional and doesn’t add to the message:
And because the site sets virtually no caching headers, even if you’ve visited the website before you’re likely to have to download the whole thing again. Every single time.
It’s not just about bandwidth: all of those fonts, that JavaScript, their 60 Kb of CSS (this page sent you 13 Kb) all has to be parsed and interpreted by your device. If you’re on a mobile device or a laptop, that means you’re burning through lithium (a non-renewable resource whose extraction and disposal is highly polluting) and
regardless of your device you’re using you’re using more electricity to visit their site than you need to. Coding antipatterns like document.write() and active event
listeners that execute every time you scroll the page keep your processor working hard, turning electricity into waste heat. It took me over 12 seconds on a high-end smartphone and a
good 4G connection to load this page to the point of usability. That’s 12 seconds of a bright screen, a processor running full tilt,a data connection working its hardest, and a
battery ticking away. And I assume I’m not the only person visiting the website today.
This isn’t really about this particular website, of course (and I certainly don’t want to discourage anybody from the important cause of saving the planet!). It’s about the bigger picture: there’s a widespread and long-standing trend in web development towards bigger, heavier, more power-hungry websites, built on top of heavyweight frameworks that push the hard work onto the user’s device and which favour developer happiness over user experience. This is pretty terrible: it makes the Web slow, and brittle, and it increases the digital divide as people on slower connections and older devices get left behind.
(Bonus reading: luckily there’s a counterculture of lean web developers…)
But this trend is also bad for the environment, and when your website exists to try to save it, that’s more than a little bit sad.
For the benefit of my South African colleagues on Slack, I give you the #maskchallenge #emoji:
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I walked the dog, bought myself a wax jacket from a local garden centre – so I could feel more ‘Country’ – and in the late afternoon my boss called me to say… you’re fired.
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So begins Robin‘s latest blog (you may remember I’ve shared, talked about, and contributed to the success of his previous blogging adventure, 52 Reflect). This time around, it sort-of reads like a contemporaneously-written “what I did on my holidays” report, except that it’s pretty-much about the opposite of a holiday: it chronicles Robin’s adventures in the North of England during these strange times.
I’ve no doubt that this represents the start of another riotous series of posts and perhaps exactly what you need to lift your spirits in these trying times. A second chapter is already online.
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I’ve seen a fair share of tutorial links floating around in newsletters and Twitter and the like recently. They all promise the same thing, namely how to use React to create a résumé.
I mean, I get it. It’s important to have something to build towards when learning a new skill, especially with development.
At first blush a résumé seems like a good thing to build towards: They are relatively small in terms of complexity and can probably use content that already exists on your LinkedIn profile. If you’re looking for a job, it’s also a handy way to double-dip on a skill that is in high demand.
I checked out a few of these tutorials, and after noticing some patterns, I’d like to mention a few things you could do to your résumé instead. I’m not going to link to the ones I tested because I don’t want to give bad advice more exposure than it is already getting.
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I can’t even begin to conceive of the kind of mind that, when faced with the question of how to put their résumé/CV online, start by installing a Javascript framework. My CV‘s online (and hey, it got me my current job so that’s awesome) and I think it’s perfectly fabulous. Simple, human-readable, semantic HTML with microformats support. Perfectly readable on anything from lynx upwards and you’d probably get by in telnet. Total size including all images, fonts, style and script is under 140kb, and can all be inlined with a quick command so I can have a single-file version that looks just as great (I use this version to email to people, but I’m thinking I ought to just inline everything, all the time). Under 1kb of my payload is JavaScript, and it’s all progressive enhancement: using an IntersectionObserver (which I’ve written about before) to highlight the current “section” of the document in the menu. Print CSS so it looks right when you put it onto dead trees. Etc. etc.
My entire CV requires a quarter of the bandwidth of just the JavaScript of any of the handful of React-based ones I looked
up. The mind boggles. I tried disabling JavaScript on a few of them (even if you believe “nobody uses the Web without JavaScript” – and you’re wrong – then you have to admit that
sometimes JavaScript fails) and they did horrific things like not loading images or links not working, as if <img> and <a> tags were
something that requires you to npm install html@0.9 before they work..
A simpler, faster, more-accessible, more-secure Web is possible. It’s not even particularly hard. It just requires a little thought. Don’t take a sledgehammer to a walnut: the best developers are the ones who choose the right tool for the job. Your résumé/CV is not a real-time backendless application on a post-relational-backed microservices architecture, or whatever’s “hip” this week. It’s a page that you want to be as easy as possible to read by the widest number of people. Why make life harder for you, and for them?
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Andrew provides an excellent summary of the current status of the coronavirus crisis with a focus on the endgame goals. As I watched this, his latest video, I kept writing half-finished comments about the deeper caveats of say vaccine development and the limitations of herd immunity if reinfection is possible… and right before I finished each, he answered them anyway. Sooo… I guess I have no comments. You should just go watch this.
This checkin to GC4CEXE CowSlip reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Like many others, I came at this cache from the wrong side of the ditch/fence and had to make my way East a little way to find a suitable crossing point. Cache was easy to find, but it’s definitely in bad condition and not watertight. TFTC.
This checkin to GC61RDN Beside the Seaside, Beside the . . . . Cherwell reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found the clue object immediately and the cache a couple of minutes later while out on my coronavirus-crisis-compatible daily exercise walk. TFTC.
I had a bit of a realisation, this week. I’ve long sometimes found it especially challenging to maintain a mental map of the preferred personal pronouns of people who don’t use “he”, “she”, or “they”. Further than that, it seemed to me that personal pronouns beyond these three ought to be mostly redundant in English. “Them” has been well-established for over six centuries as not just a plural but a singular pronoun, I thought: we don’t need to invent more words.
Over time – even within my lifetime – it’s become noticeably more-commonplace to hear the singular “they”/”them” in place of “he or she”/”him or her”, or single binary pronouns (e.g. when talking about professions which have long been dominated by a particular gender). So you might hear somebody say:
“I will make an appointment to see a doctor and ask them about my persistent cough.”
It seemed to me that “they” was a perfect general-purpose stand in for everybody who was well-served by neither “he” nor “she”.
I’ll stress, of course, that I’ve always been fully supportive of people’s preferred pronouns, tried to use them consistently, ensured they can be represented in software I’ve implemented (and pressured others over their implementations, although that’s as-often related to my individual identity), etc. I’ve just struggled to see the need for new singular third-person pronouns like ze, ey, sie, ve, or – heaven forbid – the linguistically-cumbersome thon, co, or peh.
I’d put it down to one of those things that I just don’t “get”, but about which I can still respect and support anyway. I don’t have to totally grok something in order to understand that it’s important to others.
But very recently, I was suddenly struck by a comprehension of one of the reported problems with the use of the singular “they” to refer to people for whom the traditional binary pronouns are not suitable. I’ve tried to capture in the illustration above the moment of understanding when I made the leap.
The essence of this particular problem is: the singular “they” already has a meaning that is necessarily incompatible with the singular “they” used of a nonbinary subject! By way of example, let’s revisit my earlier example sentence:
“I will make an appointment to see a doctor and ask them about my persistent cough.”
Here, I’m saying one of two things, and it’s fundamentally unclear which of the two I mean:
The more widespread the adoption of “they” as the third person singular for nonbinary people becomes, the more long-winded it is to clarify specifically which of the above interpretations is correct! The tendency to assume the former leads to nonbinary invisibility, and the (less-likely in most social circles) tendency to assume the latter leads to misgendering.
The difference is one of specificity. Because the singular “they” is routinely used non-specifically, where the subject’s preferred pronouns are unknown (as with the doctor, above), unknowable (“somebody wrote this anonymous message; they said…”), or a placeholder (“when I meet somebody, I shake their hand”), it quickly produces semantic ambiguities when it’s used to refer to specific nonbinary individuals. And that makes me think: we can do better.
That said: I don’t feel able to suggest which pronoun(s) ought to replace the question mark in the diagram above. But for the first time, I’m not convinced that it ought to be “they”.
Ultimately, this changes nothing. I regularly use a diversity of different singular pronouns (he”, “she”, and “they”, mostly) based on the individual subject and I’ll continue to acknowledge and respect their preferences. If you’ve you’ve told me that you like to be referred to by the singular “they”, I’ll continue to do so and you’re welcome and encouraged to correct me if I get it wrong!
But perhaps this new appreciation of the limitations of the singular “they” when referring to specific individuals will help me to empathise with those for whom it doesn’t feel right, and who might benefit from more-widespread understanding of other, newer personal pronouns.
(and on the off chance anybody’s found their way to this page looking for my pronouns: I’m not particularly fussy, so long as you’re consistent and don’t confuse your audience, but most people refer to me with traditional masculine pronouns he/him/his)
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While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.
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What will “normal” look like after the coronavirus crisis has passed? Will it be the same normal as we’re used to? Or could we actually learn some lessons from this and progress towards something better?
I love Ted Chiang’s writing; enough to reshare this interview even though I’m only lukewarm about it!
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Earlier this week, I wrote about why you should still use vanilla JS when so many amazing third-party libraries exist.
A few folks wrote to me to mention something I missed: security.
When you use code you didn’t author, you’re taking a risk. You’re trusting that the third-party code does not have security issues, that the author has good intent.
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Chris makes a very good point, especially for those developers of the npm install every-damn-thing persuasion: getting an enormous framework that you don’t completely
understand just because you need a small portion of its features is bad security practice. And the target is a juicy one: a bad actor who finds (or introduces) a vulnerability in
a big and widely-used library has a whole lot of power. Security concerns are a major part of why I go vanilla/stdlib where possible.
But as always with security the answer isn’t so clear-cut and simple, and I’d argue that it’s dangerous to encourage people to write their own solutions as a matter of course, for security reasons. For a start, you should never roll your own cryptographic libraries because you’re almost certainly going to fuck it up: an undetectable and easy-to-make mistake in your crypto implementation can lead to a catastrophic cascade and completely undermine the value of your cryptography. If you’re smart enough about crypto to implement crypto properly, you should contribute towards one of the major libraries. And if you’re not smart enough about crypto (and if you’re not sure, then you’re not), you should use one of those libraries. And even then you should take care to integrate and use it properly: people have been tripped over before by badly initialised keys or the use of the wrong kind of cipher for their use-case. Crypto is hard enough that even experts fuck it up and important enough that you can’t afford to get it wrong.
The same rule applies to a much lesser extent to other parts of your application, and especially for beginner developers. Implementing an authentication/authorisation system isn’t hard, but it’s another thing where getting it wrong can have disastrous consequences. Beginner (and even intermediate) developers routinely make mistakes with this kind of feature: unhashed, reversibly-encrypted, or incorrectly-hashed (wrong algorithm, no salt, etc.) passwords, badly-thought-out password reset strategies, incompletely applied access controls, etc. I’m confident that Chris and I would be in agreement that the best approach is for a developer to learn to implement these things properly and then do so. But if having to learn to implement them properly is a barrier to getting started, I’d rather than a beginner developer instead use a tried-and-tested off-the-shelf like Devise/Warden.
Other examples of things that beginner/intermediate developers sometimes get wrong might be XSS protection and SQL parameter escaping. And again, for languages that don’t have safety features built in, a framework can fill the gap. Rolling your own DOM whitelisting code for a social application is possible, but using a solution like DOMPurify is almost-certainly going to be more-secure for most developers because, you guessed it, this is another area where it’s easy to make a mess of things.
My inclination is to adapt Chris’s advice on this issue, to instead say that for the best security:
Just my tuppence worth.
StackOverflow‘s one of the most-popular and widely-used resources for software developers. It dominates the search results when you’re looking for answers to techy questions. If you know how to read it, it can be invaluable.
But… I’m not sure what it is about the platform or the culture surrounding it that creates a certain… pattern to the answers that you can expect to receive on StackOverflow. To illustrate, let’s suppose we have a question:
Here are the answers you might see:
The top answer is often somebody answering not the question you asked, but the question they’d like to think you asked.
Never mind that you specifically said that you were using a campfire, the answer suggests that you use a toaster. Look back a few years and you’ll see countless examples of people asking for solutions using “vanilla” JavaScript and being told to use some heavyweight, everything-but-the-kitchen sink jQuery plugin. Now we’re in a more enlightened time, those same people are being told to use some heavyweight, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink npm module. How far we’ve come.
Far often than you might expect, a perfectly reasonable “how do I do this?” question is met with an aggressive response of “why would you want to do that?”
These are particularly infuriating to read when you come to a closed thread and you know that you do want to be doing the “forbidden” thing. You’ve considered the other options, you’ve assessed the situation… and now some arrogant bugger’s telling you that you’re wrong!
This kind of response is among the most annoying, second only to…
You’re getting a strange and inexplicable error message. You search for it and get exactly one result. Reading the thread, after hours of tearing your hair out, you suddenly feel a sense of relief: you’ve found another soul in this crazy world that’s suffering in precisely the same way as you are. Every word you read reconfirms for you that you and they have the same issue. At last, a solution is in reach!
Nope.
Not only have you not got a solution, but the saviour you thought you’d found? They do have a solution, but they were thinking only about themselves when they got it, so they didn’t share it.
I get it: when you’re deep in focus on a problem you forget that the forum you’re on will receive search traffic indefinitely. But “NM, I’ve worked it out” is the most infuriating sentence on the Internet. When you solve a tough problem that you’d talked about online, for the love of God put the solution online too.
There’s always somebody who answers the question but in a way you’d need a PhD to comprehend.
StackOverflow is often used by beginners. Make your answer beginner-friendly if possible.
Like the Golden Hammer, the Hero We Don’t Need answers the question that they know the answer to rather than the question you actually asked. Unlike the Golden Hammer, the question they answer isn’t even remotely related to the question you asked.
Perhaps some future site visitor who chose their search terms badly might benefit from this out-of-the-box look at a completely different problem. But I wouldn’t count on it.
Eventually, if you’re lucky, somebody will provide the actual answer to the question. You’ll often have to scroll about this far down the page to find it.
Still, at least there’s an answer. And it only took four hours between posting the question and it appearing. Sometimes that’s what it takes, and at least
the answer will be there for the next person, assuming that they, too, scroll down far enough.
Unfortunately hundreds of novice developers will have no way to tell that this alone is the correct answer amongst the endless stream of bullshit in which it resides.
And finally, there’s always some idiot who repeats one of the same (useless) answers from before. Just to keep the noise-to-signal ratio up, I guess.
StackOverflow’s given me so many useful answers to so many questions, over the years. But it’s also been a great source of frustration for me at the hands of six of these seven archetypes. Did I miss any?
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Jane Eyre
There was every possibility of taking a walk that day, as long as we kept six feet between us and the others on the path.…
I’m 100% behind the #covid19 strategy @BorisJohnson proposes in his latest letter. But then, I’ve already had my birthday this year…
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Back in 2011, some folks cross-compiled Doom (the original, not the reboot, obviously) to JavaScript, leveraging the capabilities of the then-relatively-young
<canvas> element and APIs. I was really impressed to see that JavaScript had come so far and that
performance on desktop devices was so slick. Sure, this was an 18-year-old video game, but it was playable in a browser, which was a long way from the environment for which it
was originally developed.
Now Doom 3‘s playable in a browser, and my mind’s blown all over again. This follows almost the same curve – Doom 3’s 16 years old – but it still goes to show that there’s little limit to the power of client-side browser programming. They’ve done this magic with WebAssembly; while WebAssembly goes slightly against my ideas about the open-source nature of the Web, I still respect the power it commands to do heavyweight crunching tasks like this one.
How long until AAA developers start developing with the Web as an additional platform?
