As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, the $FAMOUS_COMPANY backend has historically been developed in $UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE and architected on top of
$PRACTICAL_OPEN_SOURCE_FRAMEWORK. To suit our unique needs, we designed and open-sourced $AN_ENGINEER_TOOK_A_MYTHOLOGY_CLASS, a highly-available, just-in-time compiler for
$UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE.
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Saagar Jha tells the now-familiar story of how a bunch of techbros solved their scaling problems by reinventing the wheel. And then, when that didn’t work out, moved the goalposts of
success. It’s a story as old as time; or at least as old as the modern Web.
(Should’a strangled the code. Or better yet, just refactored what they had.)
The lockdown’s having an obvious huge impact on strippers, whose work is typically in-person, up close, and classed as non-essential. And their work isn’t eligible for US programmes to
support furloughed workers. So Lucky Devil Lounge in Portland decided to adapt their services into one that is classed as essential by providing a drive-through food service.
With strippers.
This is Erika Moen’s comic about the experience of visiting the drive-through. Her comics are awesome and I’ve shared them with you a fewtimesbefore (I even paid for the product she recommended
in the last of those), of course.
Jay Foreman’s back with a long-awaited tenth episode of Unfinished London. This one follows up on Why does London have
32 boroughs? and looks deeper into the complexities of the partially-devolved local government of London.
Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency for Great Britain, is set to publish revised maps for the whole of the British isles in the wake of social distancing measures. The
new 1:50,000 scale maps are simply a revision of the older 1:25,000 scale map but all geographical features have been moved further apart.
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Gareth’s providing a daily briefing including all the important things that the government wants you to know about the coronavirus crisis… and a few things that they didn’t think to
tell you, but perhaps they should’ve. Significantly more light-hearted than wherever you’re getting your news from right now.
This is the best diplomatic report I’ve read in a long time. A real gem. Recounts the story of the horses
gifted by Saparmurat Niyazov (Turkmenbashi) to the British government. A fantastic snapshot of life in the FSU in the early 1990s. Posting the whole thing – enjoy the read.
The performance tradeoff isn’t about where the bottleneck is. It’s about who has to carry the burden. It’s one thing for a developer to push the burden onto a
server they control. It’s another thing entirely to expect visitors to carry that load when connectivity and device performance isn’t a constant.
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This is another great take on the kind of thing I was talking about the other day: some developers who favour heavy frameworks (e.g.
React) argue for the performance benefits, both in development velocity and TTFB. But TTFB alone is not a valid metric of a user’s perception of an application’s performance: if you’re sending a fast payload that then requires extensive
execution and/or additional calls to the server-side, it stands to reason that you’re not solving a performance bottleneck, you’re just moving it.
I, for one, generally disfavour solutions that move a Web application’s bottleneck to the user’s device (unless there are other compelling reasons that it should be there, for example
as part of an Offline First implementation, and even then it should be done with care). Moving the burden of the bottleneck to the user’s device disadvantages those on slower or older
devices and limits your ability to scale performance improvements through carefully-engineered precaching e.g. static compilation. It also produces a tendency towards a thick-client
solution, which is sometimes exactly what you need but more-often just means a larger initial payload and more power consumption on the (probably mobile) user’s device.
Next time you improve performance, ask yourself where the time saved has gone. Some performance gains are genuine; others are just moving the problem around.
New rules for old games! The Board Game Remix Kit is a collection of tips, tweaks, reimaginings and completely new games that you can play with the board and
pieces from games you might already own: Monopoly, Cluedo, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit.
The 26 rule tweaks and new games include:
Full Houses: poker, but played with Monopoly properties
Citygrid: a single-player city-building game
Use Your Words: Scrabble with storytelling
Them’s Fightin’ Words: a game of making anagrams, and arguing about which one would win in a fight
Hunt the Lead Piping: hiding and searching for the Cluedo pieces in your actual house
Guess Who Done It: A series of yes/no questions to identify the murderer (contributed by Meg Pickard)
Zombie Mansion: use the lead piping to defend the Cluedo mansion
Judy Garland on the Moon with a Bassoon: a drawing game that uses the answers to trivia questions as prompts
The Board Game Remix Kit was originally released in 2010 by the company Hide&Seek (which closed in 2014). We are releasing it here as a pdf (for
phones/computers) and an epub (for ereaders) under a CC-BY-SA license.
If you enjoy the Kit and can afford it, please consider a donation to the World Health Organisation’s COVID-19
Response Fund.
Confined to your house? What a great opportunity to play board games with your fellow confinees.
Only got old family classics like Monopoly, Cluedo and Scrabble? Here’s a guide to mixing-them-up into new, fun, and highly-playable alternatives. Monopoly certainly needs it.
How manymoredevelopers have to point out how bloated we’ve made the web with our frameworks, tracking scripts, and other
3rd party solutions before we take things seriously? We’ve been banging on about this for ages. It’s like a plague!
And as Bridget goes on to say, it’s especially important at this unusual time, with many people confined to home and using the Internet to try to get accurate and up-to-date
information and resources (and sometimes overwhelming major websites), that performance, accessibility, and availability matters most.
There’ll be many lessons to learn from the coronavirus crisis. But these lessons aren’t just related to healthcare, or work, or supermarket logistics. No field will be left untouched.
And one of the things that I hope my field learns, when this is over, is the importance of things working even when things get tough. Test the sad paths, test your site under
heavy load, test your site with the CDNs simulated “down”, and develop accordingly. Because this isn’t the worst kind of
crisis we could face, and we have to be ready for the worse ones that could come.
I started at Automattic on November 20, 2019, and it’s an incredible place to work. I’m constantly impressed by my coworkers kindness, intelligence, and compassion. If you’re
looking for a rewarding remote job that you can work from anywhere in the world, definitely apply.
I’m still overjoyed and amazed I was hired. While going through the hiring process, I devoured the blog posts from people describing their journeys. Here’s my contribution to the
catalog. I hope it helps someone.
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I’ve written about my own experience of Automattic’s hiring process and how awesome it is, but if you’re looking for a more-concise summary of
what to expect from applying to and interviewing for a position, this is pretty great.
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!
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.
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?
