Link archive: July, 2017

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Monday, July 31st, 2017

Hello codebar Sydney! | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

People of Sydney, you’re in luck. Charlotte is starting up a Sydney chapter of Codebar. If you know someone there who is under-represented in the tech industry, and they’re looking to learn how to code, please tell them about this.

Some want to become full-time developers, whereas others want to learn the basics of coding to enhance their current jobs. Some want to learn programming as a hobby. Whatever the reason, we’d love to see you there!

Also, if you’re a developer in Sydney, please consider becoming a tutor at Codebar.

I promise that tutoring is not scary! We ask that you let us know which areas you feel comfortable tutoring when you sign up, so you choose what you teach. It’s absolutely okay to not know answers during sessions, but knowing how to look for them is helpful.

Oh, and if you’ve got a space in Sydney that can accommodate a class, please, please consider become a Codebar sponsor.

Saturday, July 29th, 2017

Friday, July 28th, 2017

Distributed and syndicated content: what’s wrong with this picture? | Technical Architecture Group

Hadley points to the serious security concerns with AMP:

Fundamentally, we think that it’s crucial to the web ecosystem for you to understand where content comes from and for the browser to protect you from harm. We are seriously concerned about publication strategies that undermine them.

Andrew goes into more detail:

The anchor element is designed to allow one website to refer visitors to content on another website, whilst retaining all the features of the web platform. We encourage distribution platforms to use this mechanism where appropriate. We encourage the loading of pages from original source origins, rather than re-hosted, non-canonical locations.

That last sentence there? That’s what I’m talking about!

Thursday, July 27th, 2017

Testing the accessibility of pattern libraries

Riffing on Rachel’s talk at Patterns Day:

At the Patterns Day conference last month, Rachel Andrew mentioned something interesting about patterns. She said that working with reusable interface components, where each one has its own page, made her realise that those work quite well as isolated test cases. I feel this also goes for some accessibility tests: there is a number of criteria where isolation aids testing.

Hidde specifically singles out these patterns:

  • Collapsible (“Show/hide”)
  • Form field
  • Video player

Wednesday, July 26th, 2017

Web Publications for the Open Web Platform: Vision And Technical Challenges

Given my experience publishing Resilient Web Design as a web book, I think I should take a good look at this nascent spec.

What we envision for Packaged Web Publications is similar to the goals and techniques of Progressive Web Apps: breaking the boundaries between web sites and mobile apps, an emphasis on “offline” paradigms, and so on. The time is right to broaden the scope and power of the web to include publications.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Eulogy for Flash

Web developers aren’t going to shed many tears for Flash, but as Bruce rightly points out, it led the way for many standards that followed. Flash was the kick up the arse that the web needed.

He also brings up this very important question:

I’m also nervous; one of the central tenets of HTML is to be backwards-compatible and not to break the web. It would be a huge loss if millions of Flash movies become unplayable. How can we preserve this part of our digital heritage?

This is true of the extinction of any format. Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to tackle this problem head on.

Tuesday, July 25th, 2017

Progressively Enhancing CSS Layout: From Floats To Flexbox To Grid – Smashing Magazine

A great example of progressive enhancement in action.

You can perfectly use CSS grid layout today if you don’t expect exactly the same appearance in every single browser, which isn’t possible to achieve nowadays anyway. I’m well aware that this decision isn’t always up to us developers, but I believe that our clients are willing to accept those differences if they understand the benefits (future-proof design, better accessibility and better performance). On top of that, I believe that our clients and users have — thanks to responsive design — already learned that websites don’t look the same in every device and browser.

Sunday, July 23rd, 2017

What I’ve learned about motor impairment

James gives—if you’ll pardon the pun— hands-on advice on making sites that consider motor impairment:

  • Don’t assume keyboard access is all you need
    • Auto complete/Autofill
    • Show me my password
  • Allow for fine motor control issues
    • Don’t autoplay videos
    • Avoid hover-only controls
    • Infinite scrolling considerations
  • Be mindful of touch
    • Avoid small hit targets
    • Provide alternate controls for touch gestures

Far from being a niche concern, visitors with some form of motor impairment likely make up a significant percentage of your users. I would encourage you to test your website or application with your less dominant hand. Is it still easy to use?

Against the grain | susan jean robertson

I’m looking for work. I’d prefer to work remotely with a product team and to work in the areas I love: accessibility, CSS, and HTML. But it turns out those three things are considered “easy” in the industry right now. Which is fascinating because if you talk to anyone who uses assistive technology to surf the web or who doesn’t use a mouse, or who is accessing content in a different manner, you’ll find out it isn’t so easy.

Somebody hire Susan already!

Saturday, July 22nd, 2017

Friday, July 21st, 2017

Thursday, July 20th, 2017

Wednesday, July 19th, 2017

Writing Hacks: The Adafruit Guide to Being Excellent to Each Other in Emails « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

Language is a technology. It’s a particularly strange one that’s made of squiggles and sounds and maps of meaning, but like any other technology, it’s hackable.

Good advice on reducing unintended stress via email.

Negativity bias is a tendency for negatives to have a greater effect than positives on our emotional state.

For email this can have radical effects: positive emails seem neutral, neutral emails seem negative, and even slightly negative emails can lead to actual, measurable pain.

Even with the best of intentions we can come off distant — or just plain mean.

Tuesday, July 18th, 2017

ARP Observatory (@ArpObservatory) | Twitter

In July we started receiving audio signals from outside the solar system, and we’ve been studying them since.

Tweets contain sound samples on Soundcloud, data visualisations, and notes about life at the observatory …all generated by code.

ARP is a fictional radio telescope observatory, it’s a Twitter & SoundCloud bot which procedurally generates audio, data-visualisations, and the tweets (and occasionally long-exposure photography) of an astronomer/research scientist who works at ARP, who is obsessive over the audio messages, and who runs the observatory’s Twitter account.

Reflections on Two Years of Indieweb

Alex Kearney looks back on two years of owning her own data.

With a fully functional site up and running, I focused on my own needs and developed features to support how I wanted to use my site. In hind-sight, that’s probably the most indie thing I could’ve done, and how I should’ve started my indieweb adventure.

This really resonates with me.

One of the motivating features for joining the indieweb was the ability to keep and curate the content I create over time.

Terrific post!

Here’s to two more years.

Monday, July 17th, 2017

Empathy Prompts

A series of small suggestions that anyone can try so that they can better empathise with people who experience digital products differently.

These prompts are intended to help build empathy, not describe any one person’s experience. These prompts are not intended to tokenize the experience of the individuals experiencing these conditions.

Friday, July 14th, 2017

Introducing the Made by Many professional development programme – Made by Many

This resonates a lot—we’ve been working on something similar at Clearleft, for very similar reasons:

We rode the folk knowledge train until it became clear that it was totally unscaleable and we struggled to effectively commute know-how to the incoming brains.

At Made By Many, they’ve sliced it into three categories: Design, Technology, and Product Management & Strategy. At Clearleft, we’re trying to create a skills matrix for each of these disciplines: UX, UI, Dev, Research, Content Strategy, and Project Management. I’m working on the Dev matrix. I’ll share it once we’ve hammered it into something presentable. In the meantime, it’s good to see exactly the same drivers are at work at Made By Many:

The levels give people a scaffold onto which they can project their personalised career path, reflecting their progression, and facilitating professional development at every stage.

A Design System Grammar | Daniel T. Eden, Designer

Once again, we can learn from Christoper Alexander’s A Pattern Language when it comes to create digital design systems, especially this part (which reminds me of one of the panes you can view in Fractal’s default interface):

  • Each pattern’s documentation is preceded with a list of other patterns that employ the upcoming pattern
  • Each pattern’s documentation is followed by a list of other patterns that are required for this pattern

Thursday, July 13th, 2017

How to turn your website into a PWA | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

This primer on progressive web apps starts by dispelling some myths:

  1. Your thing does not have to be an “Application” to be a PWA.
  2. Your thing does not have to be a Javascript-powered single page app.
  3. PWAs are not specifically made for Google or Android.
  4. PWAs are ready and safe to use today.

Then it describes the three-step programme for turning your thing into a progressive web app:

  1. The Manifest.
  2. Go HTTPS.
  3. The Service Worker.

Wednesday, July 12th, 2017

Tuesday, July 11th, 2017

IndieWeb is on Open Collective

You can help support the indie web community with their fairly modest costs: about $200 each month for hosting, domain names, and the like. Also:

We want IndieWeb events to be as accessible as possible, regardless of personal barriers. Because of this, we have offered a travel scholarship fund in the past to underrepresented groups thanks to our generous sponsors. Your support will allow us to continue to offer and expand this scholarship fund, helping make sure that IndieWebCamps represent everyone.

Monday, July 10th, 2017

Off the Beaten Track · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

I love the way Matthias sums up his experience of the Beyond Tellerrand conference. He focuses on three themes:

  • Rediscovering originality,
  • Storytelling with code, and
  • Adopting new technologies.

I heartily agree with his reasons for attending the conference:

There are many ways to broaden your horizons if you are looking for inspiration: You could do some research, read a book or an article, or visit a new city. But one of the best ways surely is the experience of a conference, because it provides you with many new concepts and ideas. Moreover, ideas that were floating around in your head for a while are affirmed.

Sunday, July 9th, 2017

Friday, July 7th, 2017

Thursday, July 6th, 2017

Seat 14C

Here’s a fun premise for a collection of sci-fi short stories:

Flight 008 through a temporary wrinkle in the local region of space-time. What these passengers will soon find out as they descend into SFO is that the wrinkle has transported them 20 years in the future, and the year is now 2037.

Read the stories of the passengers from Flight 008, imagined by the world’s top science fiction storytellers, as they discover a future transformed by exponential technologies.

Authors include Bruce Sterling, Madeline Ashby, Paulo Bacigalupi, and Gregory Benford.

Wednesday, July 5th, 2017

prettydiff/wisdom: Building better developers by specifying criteria of success

I frequently see web developers struggling to become better, but without a path or any indication of clear direction. This repository is an attempt to sharing my experiences, and any contributions, that can help provide such a direction.

It’s broken down into four parts:

I don’t necessarily agree with everything here (and I really don’t like the “rockstar” labelling), but that’s okay:

Anything written here is open to debate and challenges are encouraged.

Is it really safe to start using CSS Grid Layout?

Rachel uncovers a great phrase for dealing with older browsers:

It isn’t your fault, but it is your problem.

She points to multiple ways of using CSS Grid today while still providing a decent experience for older browsers.

Crucially, there’s one message that hasn’t changed in fifteen years:

Websites do not need to look the same in every browser.

It’s crazy that there are still designers and developers who haven’t internalised this. And before anyone starts claiming that the problem is with the clients and the bosses, Rachel has plenty of advice for talking with them too.

Your job is to learn about new things, and advise your client or your boss in the best way to achieve their business goals through your use of the available technology. You can only do that if you have learned about the new things. You can then advise them which compromises are worth making.

Tuesday, July 4th, 2017

Jekyll Includes are Cool - daverupert.com

Dave explains how Jekyll Includes are starting to convert him to web components. The encapsulation is nice and neat. And he answers the inevitable “but why not use React?” question:

Writing HTML that contains JavaScript, not JavaScript that contains HTML, feels good to me.

The key feature for me is that this approach doesn’t have to depend on JavaScript in the browser:

I like that Web Components are an entirely client-side technology but can be rendered server-side in existing tech stacks whether it’s Jekyll, Rails, or even some Enterprise Java system.

Monday, July 3rd, 2017

Fantasies of the Future / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul has published the slides and transcript of his knock-out talk at Patterns Day. This a must-read: superb stuff!

Design systems are an attempt to add a layer of logic and reasoning over a series decisions made by complex, irrational, emotional human beings. As such, they are subject to individual perspectives, biases, and aspirations.

How does the culture in which they are made effect the resulting design?

Social Cooling

If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior. Big Data is supercharging this effect.

Some interesting ideas, but the tone is so alarming as to render the message meaningless.

As our weaknesses are mapped, we are becoming too transparent. This is breeding a society where self-censorship and risk-aversion are the new normal.

I stopped reading at the point where the danger was compared to climate change.

Fidget Spinners — Real Life

A look at our relationship with waiting, and how that is manifested in the loading icons in our interfaces.

For me, in my moments of boredom, as I turn to my phone and refresh my social media feed, I imagine that what’s on the other side of the buffering icon might be the content that will rid me of boredom and produce a satisfying social connection. The buffering icon here represents my hopes for the many ways that my social media feeds can satisfy my longings at any given moment. They rarely do, though I believe that we are half in love with the buffering icon here because it represents the promise of intimacy or excitement across the distances that separate us.

Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.) - The New York Times

Steven Johnson dives deep into the METI project, starting with the Arecibo message and covering Lincos, the Drake equation, and the Fermi paradox.

He also wrote about what he left out of the article and mentions that he’s writing a book on long-term decision making.

In a sense, the METI debate runs parallel to other existential decisions that we will be confronting in the coming decades, as our technological and scientific powers increase. Should we create superintelligent machines that exceed our own intellectual capabilities by such a wide margin that we cease to understand how their intelligence works? Should we ‘‘cure’’ death, as many technologists are proposing? Like METI, these are potentially among the most momentous decisions human beings will ever make, and yet the number of people actively participating in those decisions — or even aware such decisions are being made — is minuscule.

Fixing fieldsets — That Emil is Emil Björklund

This is an excellent proposal from Emil. If we can apply display: contents to fieldsets, then we would finally have a way of undoing the byzantine browser styles that have hindered adoption of this element. This proposal also ensures backwards compatibility so there’d be no breakage of older sites:

The legacy appearance of fieldsets probably needs to be preserved for compatibility reasons. But display: contents is not supported in any old browsers, and is most likely used on exactly zero sites using the legacy look of fieldsets.

Whaddya say, browser makers?

Sunday, July 2nd, 2017

Starting a React-Powered Comment Form | CSS-Tricks

This is a really great screencast on getting started with React. I think it works well for a few reasons:

  • Sarah and Chris aren’t necessarily experts yet in React—that’s good; it means they know from experience what “gotchas” people will encounter.
  • They use a practical use-case (a comment form) that’s suited to the technology.
  • By doing it all in CodePen, they avoid the disheartening slog of installation and build tools—compare it to this introduction to React.
  • They make mistakes. There’s so much to be learned from people sharing “Oh, I thought it would work like that, but it actually works like this.”

There’s a little bit of “here’s one I prepared earlier” but, on the whole, it’s a great step-by-step approach, and one I’ll be returning to if and when I dip my toes into React.