Blog
Jens Oliver Meiert on web development and philosophy (and sometimes art and adventure). Writing about quality code and world views since 1999.
Living Websites, Living Books
To me, websites are living objects. They require regular care and maintenance. Such care starts with monitoring, from uptime control to visual site tests, demands technical quality controls, and ends with content checks…
Website Optimization Measures, Part VIII
Eight years. Eight years has it been since the last episode of this series, “Website Optimization Measures.” In October of 2009, I last talked about more or less random things I did on my own websites…
On Adventure
While I’m not nearly as adventurous these days as in past years, the idea that adventure is about being open and curious and easily ready to try activities and localities seems sound to me. On what adventure can mean to us.
Web Development: How Making Our Own Lives Difficult Is More Important Than We Think
Many moons ago I wrote that web developers wouldn’t need debugging tools. I was half joking and half serious. We were just coming out of the dark ages of web development, so to speak, undernourished of useful tools, frameworks, libraries…
Frameworks, Libraries, and the Modern Web Developer: Web Development, Overdone
We are raising tool-dependent rather than self-reliant developers. Aren’t we.
What I Learned Building Google’s Web Frameworks
On building Google’s Go and Maia HTML/CSS frameworks, and succeeding and failing as a tech lead.
Boyscout Code
Of course, always leave code better than you found it.
Stop Using Resets: Visual Examples of the Practical Nonsense of Resets and Normalizers
Or, when Jens found out that he could just collect websites that use reset style sheets and the like, disable those style sheets, document the results and write a post with the diffs for visual evidence. All because “we ran after this mirage for more than a decade.”
Highlights from Martin’s The Behavior of Crowds
“When most of our neighbors are motivated by certain ideas, those ideas become part of the social environment to which we must adjust ourselves. In this sense they are ‘real,’ however ‘crazy.’”
Highlights from Dewey’s How We Think
“The very importance of thought for life makes necessary its control by education because of its natural tendency to go astray, and because social influences exist that tend to form habits of thought leading to inadequate and erroneous beliefs.”
Two Paradigms of Web Development
On a sunny Tuesday in Düsseldorf a few weeks back, at Beyond Tellerrand, I had a pleasant recorded conversation with the team of Working Draft. In our discussion we briefly touched on the idea of web development paradigms…
The Great Web Maintainability Survey Results
Four weeks ago I started a survey about good and bad practices when it comes to the maintenance and maintainability of websites. Participation was amazing, and here are the first results.
Why I’m Suspending Interviews with U.S. Companies
Over the last few quarters I was in conversations to move back to the United States. Over the last few weeks I noticed that that would feel like endorsing U.S. policy, and contradict my principles and values.
The Simple Answer to All Our Terrorism Problems
How about we stop invading countries and murdering people. How about we allow those who are too afraid to live in freedom to live in supermax prisons (for free). And how about we finally remove from office who ever propose to violate a human right.
Regarding the Fermi Paradox
When not finding signs of extraterrestrial intelligence says more about us than them.
70% Repetition in Style Sheets: Data on How We Fail at CSS Optimization
Looking at data for some of the most popular websites, we repeat ourselves too much in CSS; using declarations just once is often one solid avenue to avoid repetition; together, we need to put more focus on style sheet optimization.
The Great Web Maintainability Survey
The maintenance and economics of websites is a much-neglected topic in the web development community. Here are three questions for developers, to gather practices as well as resources.
Web Development and Philosophy
When “eh?” is just a natural reaction.
On Work
On work, retirement, definitions, and mixing things up.
Highlights from Lippmann’s Public Opinion
“Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted to see?”
Notification on updates: RSS feed.
Biography
Jens Oliver Meiert is a developer (O’Reilly, W3C, ex-Google) and philosopher. He experiments with art and adventure.
As a developer Jens is specialized in high quality code for complex international websites (Google), works on standards (W3C), and writes for technical publishers (O’Reilly: Webdesign mit CSS, The Little Book of HTML/CSS Frameworks, Coding Guidelines, and Website Quality Control; cf. On Web Development).
As a philosopher, Jens studies academically and researches non-academically; his focus is on metaphysics. He emphasizes self-responsibility (How to Work on Oneself).
As an artist Jens plays with (moving) photography and sensationalism; as an adventurer Jens explores activities (100 Things I Learned as an Everyday Adventurer) and localities (Journey of J.).
