2018

A retrospective.

Published on December 31, 2018, filed under Everything Else.

Survival of the Primitive

Is ours a highly evolved culture?

Published on December 16, 2018, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

On Visions for Performance, or: Performance Optimization Is a Process

It’s smart to have a vision for what one wishes to achieve for the performance of a site or app. Yet even the soundest approaches to performance visions have their problems, and in them we recognize that performance, or performance optimization, is indeed a process.

Published on December 4, 2018, filed under Development.

Should Designers Code

Arguments for a “no” to a recurring question: Why we may want to give designers all freedom in the world, not to be limited in what they’re trained to do best.

Published on November 23, 2018, filed under Development and Design.

Highlights From “Flatland” (Edwin Abbott Abbott)

“Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.”

Published on November 19, 2018, filed under Philosophy and Design.

Performance Rule #1: Do What You Need to Do—But Not More

Web Performance has over the age of the Web not only turned into a discipline by itself, but also a complex one at that. While important much less so for revenue but for user experience and accessibility reasons, there’s a particular angle at performance that makes the matter very simple: the pragmatic angle.

Published on November 13, 2018, filed under Development.

How to Configure Lighthouse for Balanced Quality Websites

Google’s Lighthouse is a great tool even though it has some issues. Fortunately, it’s possible to configure Lighthouse to one’s own views on what matters. Here’s the config that I like to use.

Published on October 15, 2018, filed under Development.

The One Thing We May Really Want to Research

My back-burner philosophical work revolves around one idea: that what creates and makes for our reality, in quite practical terms, is what we believe. That idea is profound and requires more: research.

Published on October 4, 2018, filed under Philosophy.

Highlights From “The Communist Manifesto” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)

“This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.”

Published on October 1, 2018, filed under Philosophy.

A Short Guide to Minimal Web Development

There’s an art and even a bit of magic around simple frontend code. Writing such code comes with a few preconditions: perhaps a firm understanding of core technologies, a lot of practice, public scrutiny, and then some. Thoughts.

Published on September 25, 2018, filed under Development.

Web Development and the GDPR

Who shares or presents code has a special responsibility, because for both the uninitiated and the quality-minded such code should be of a considerable standard. European privacy legislation ups the ante.

Published on August 31, 2018, filed under Development.

37 Theses on CSS and Web Development

CSS Optimization Basics ends with a list of key ideas. From acknowledging that we don’t always write perfectly efficient and maintainable and understandable code to leading by example.

Published on August 16, 2018, filed under Development.

AMP, a Strategy

There are problems with AMP. My recommendations: Avoid AMP; or use it, exclusively, on the most relevant pages; or go all-in, for AMP-only.

Published on July 5, 2018, filed under Development.

The Craft of CSS

When we type down CSS like we’ve done 20 years ago, and when we work with ever more abstractions, what does that mean for our craft?

Published on June 27, 2018, filed under Development.

Why Being a Digital Nomad Sucks (to Me)

For countless years has it been a thing to romanticize the lifestyle of digital and global nomads, of people who live and work remotely. I believe there’s also much to question.

Published on June 19, 2018, filed under Adventure and Everything Else.

The Dangers of Being a Web Developer

Video, slides, and resources for my talk at beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf.

Published on May 10, 2018, filed under Development.

CSS Optimization Basics

My latest little book, covering mindsets needed for writing effective style sheets, optimization options during operation and for production, and useful resources to aid and inform the work with CSS.

Published on April 12, 2018, filed under Development.

User-Centered Web Development

When we think of user focus we easily think of usability tests, following a usually strong wish to produce something that’s actually useful. For us as web developers, focus on the user has a tendency to appear distant though…

Published on March 14, 2018, filed under Development.

HTML, CSS, and Dependency Direction

Adam Wathan wrote one of the most interesting web development articles I’ve read in the last few months: CSS Utility Classes and “Separation of Concerns.” At least until “Phase 3” there’s much to learn about current web development…

Published on February 14, 2018, filed under Development.

How Declaration Repetition Developed Over Time, a Statistically Insignificant Sample

We know that there’s excessive declaration repetition in the Web’s style sheets, that each declaration is on average repeated 2–3 times, often needlessly. We know that this repetition is a little less bad on tech sites…

Published on February 7, 2018, filed under Development.

Highlights From “Advice to Young Men” (William Cobbett)

“The first thing to be required of a man is, that he understand well his own calling, or profession; and, be you in what state of life you may, to acquire this knowledge ought to be your first and greatest care.”

Published on February 1, 2018, filed under Everything Else.

On Loyalty

We should be protective of our greatest possession—our values.

Published on January 27, 2018, filed under Everything Else.

The Compact Guide to Web Maintainability: 200 Tips and Resources

The result of reviewing, normalizing, rephrasing, sorting, and testing 134 responses to a maintainability survey that yielded more than 500 data points, to form a new guide, a new and more definite guide to web maintainability.

Published on January 24, 2018, filed under Development.

Oh WTF My Tone, or: On Germans Speaking English

Anecdote. When I was working at Google, shortly after I had made one of my first bigger contributions, I experienced one of my more memorable performance reviews. You’ll never guess what happened next.

Published on January 17, 2018, filed under Everything Else.

Highlights From “The Elements of Style” (William Strunk Jr.)

“Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is.”

Published on January 15, 2018, filed under Design and Everything Else.