Posts tagged “culture”, page 4

Heydon Pickering:

By assuming the role of the Full Stack Developer (which is, in practice, a computer scientist who also writes HTML and CSS), one takes responsibility for all the code, in spite of its radical variance in syntax and purpose, and becomes the gatekeeper of at least some kinds of code one simply doesn’t care about writing well. This has two adverse effects:

1. Poor quality code
2. A bunch of people who can (and would enjoy!) expertly writing that code, standing unemployed on the sidelines muttering “WTF”

I so very much agree with everything Heydon says here. And that agreement comes from the experience of trying to become a full stack dev myself (though going at it from an HTML/CSS-first perspective).

Justin McElroy resurfaces an old post of his, back from 2013:

Learning to appreciate things you don’t initially enjoy is the power to fill the world with stuff you like.

Those McElroy folks are just so damn good at advice.

Gabrielle Hick, for Artsy:

“Competing pencil makers colored their pencils yellow and gave them Oriental names to suggest that the graphite they contained was equally good,” Petroski said.

And it worked. An oft-repeated bit of pencil lore tells of an experiment conducted by Faber in the middle of the 20th century. The company distributed 1,000 pencils—half yellow, half green—to a test group. While both sets of pencils were identical apart from their color, the green pencils were returned en masse with complaints about their shoddy quality.

Peter Welch, back in April 2014:

Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone.

Every once in a while I feel a need to reread this 2014 gem. Thanks to Jeremy Keith for reminding me.

By sheer coincidence, I came across the Classic Tetris World Championship final stream just as it was happening live. I only caught the final moments, but my interest was piqued. There is clearly something special happening here.

Julia Wolkoff, for Artsy:

Life was cruel to French ballet dancers, and they didn’t have it much easier at the hands of Degas himself.

Eric Stiens:

#5) How I made an art of it. How to figure out how to hurt people that were hurting you. You know what the funny thing is? Sometimes the way you fuck people up is making them hurt you more than they intended.

Max Böck:

Text-only sites like these are usually treated as a MVP of sorts. A slimmed-down version of the real site, specifically for emergencies.

I’d argue though that in some aspects, they are actually better than the original.

This is the web as it was originally designed. Pure information, with zero overhead. Beautiful in a way.

Rachel Andrew:

There is frequently talk about how developers whose main area of expertise is CSS feel that their skills are underrated. I do not think we help our cause by talking about CSS as this whacky, quirky language. CSS is unlike anything else, because it exists to serve an environment that is unlike anything else. However we can start to understand it as a designed language, with much consistency. It has codified rules and we can develop ways to explain and teach it, just as we can teach our teams to use Bootstrap, or the latest JavaScript framework.

Eye-opening and surprisingly poignant.

Brad Frost:

JavaScript is eating the world and the rest of the frontend stack with it. Those server-side languages people used to write in? Node. HTML? JSX. Styling? We do that in JS now too. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are three sturdy, capable languages that each have their own histories, nuances, and best practices. I do worry that as we author more and more in JS we risk losing those hard-won HTML/CSS best practices. Of course, it’s totally possible to preserve those HTML/CSS best practices even as we write everything in JS, which is why I want to make sure libraries like React are accessible to frontend people like me who don’t come from a JavaScript/programming background.

Kevin Ball:

“Real programmers” were antisocial, geeky, and only cared about computing. If you didn’t fit the profile you didn’t belong.

With the growth of the importance of front-end development, we’re seeing the story play out again.

The systematic devaluation of CSS, and more, the people who use CSS.

Cole Henley makes some very astute observations on the value and purpose of web development tools:

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I do worry that the adoption of tools for producing websites often lacks focus and a clear reason for “why.” As a largely self-taught profession, we have often lent on our peers for guidance and direction. But how often is the context of this guidance comparable to our own? As I said earlier, can the efforts to produce code for enterprise website applications across large, distributed teams share some equivalence with the work many of us produce in creating small, brochure sites for small to medium-sized businesses and not-for-profits? Does one shoe fit all? And are we in danger of focusing too much on the “Pencils rather than the drawing”? The Process over the Product?

I found this question particularly hard to grapple with:

But one of the ways CSS Zen Garden was used to persuade people about the merits of a web standards approach was to suggest that we can retain the markup and replace the CSS. However in reality how many projects has this ever happened on? What is the realistic lifespan of a thing we produce? And do we tend to underestimate how disposable our code truly is?

Ben Porter, developer of MoonQuest:

So how can you take 7 years to make your game? Here are some important tips and tricks for taking your sweet time.

Evan Puschak:

If a basic purpose of art is to illuminate human nature, then I think Comedy Central’s Nathan for You deserves a spot in the conversation about the best TV shows of this era.

Revisiting this incredible piece. The man was unique.

I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.