Jens Oliver Meiert

“2017”

On Meeting and Leaving People

Humans are social. Cooperation got us where we are. There are several ways to get to know new people, and, in relationships, to leave them. A few thoughts.

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What We Know

On some days, if you asked me about what we know, with absolute certainty, I’d respond with “only that something exists.” And if you asked me what that meant, then I’d add “to appreciate and work with what exists.”

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On Writing 1,000 Poems

A story of venturing into an entirely different genre.

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Privacy Experiments: How to Auto-Generate Random Web Traffic

I believe that privacy, which has never been about “hiding something,” is a fundamental civil right, one that is but must not be infringed on; so I once more played with randomizing personal web traffic.

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Expert Web Development: A 3rd Key Differentiator

As web developers we have decisions to make and our decisions depend on a few variables. Two that have become much more important over the years are the one of code for research or production, and the one of web site or app…

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An Ode to Smashing Magazine

Excitement about a success story.

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Performance of CSS Selectors Is Still Irrelevant

From my upcoming book on CSS optimization: Selector performance is not something to optimize for as the price we pay for it is terrible: We micro-manage our work for gains that aren’t noticeable.

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On Big Picture Thinking in Web Development

Thoughts on thinking outside the box, in tech, with examples ranging from selector performance to a general development vision, to illustrate how very different issues can all reach beyond their perimeter.

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CSS: The Reason Why Selectors Should Be Ordered, Too

We’ve talked a lot about declarations as declarations are at the heart of our work with direct consequences for the quality of our style sheets. We’ve not talked much about selectors, though, and that may be a mistake.

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Static Site Generation With Grow: How to Set Up Syndication Feeds

Grow is a static site generator that I’ve slowly been switching to on my own projects. Here I wish to lay out how to do something with Grow that’s not overly difficult, but also not well-documented—to set up syndication feeds.

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The Scientific Irony

There’s no proof that life has meaning; therefore, life is meaningless. Wait, what?

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DRY CSS: How to Use Declarations Just Once, Effectively

Using declarations just once is one way to control repetition in style sheets. It’s not a silver bullet, as we’ve seen with recent data, but it’s so powerful as to make for a key style sheet optimization method.

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5 Reasons Against Resets, Normalizers, Reboots

A word about one of CSS’s horsemen of the apocalypse.

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The 3 Levels of Code Consistency

Consistency is a factor for code quality and one of the key reasons why we need coding guidelines. Interestingly enough there are three levels of consistency: individual, collective, and institutional.

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Understandable-Simple vs. Minimal-Simple Code

Code simplicity seems to be a goal quite worthwhile, contributing to better understanding, greater robustness, and higher quality. That’s at least what comes to my mind when looking at the matter…

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On Enforcing Coding Guidelines

Surprisingly a snippet from The Little Book of Website Quality Control, not the one of HTML/CSS coding guidelines, a few thoughts on enforcing coding standards.

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What Happens When You Email the Companies That Are Responsible for 71% of All Greenhouse Gas Emissions

A few months ago I ran into an article referring to data from the Carbon Disclosure Project. I realized that the data may have been inaccurate and incomplete but also that it presented an avenue for us to actually do, a little.

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What Happens When You Email Each of the 1,380 Members of the German and European Parliaments

Over the last couple of months I have emailed, each individually, all the 631 members of the (departing) German Bundestag as well as 749 members of the European Parliament (I was short two MEPs).

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Freedom = ƒ(Money)?

No, this question is not new. However it’s one I want to ponder with you because it much seems like something truly terrible has happened over the centuries.

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Why It Would Be Bad if Jesus Was Here

Arguing is something we have to learn. I observed this particularly in recent years when I started studying philosophy and went through courses for logic and argumentation theory. These courses…

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The Cost of Frameworks, Illustrated

A visual attempt to show how for everything built for the long run, external frameworks are a pricey crutch that has to be avoided or be thrown away at the earliest time. The reasons: quality—and cost.

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CSS @-Rules, an Overview

From @charset to @viewport. Or from @bottom-center to @top-right-corner.

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In Defense of Bad Luck

There seems to be something to luck, and bad luck.

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What We Should Teach Up-and-Coming Developers

Evidently, learning is important, and learning strategies are, too, and how to generally work on ourselves, absolutely, but what else to aim for apart from understanding computer science fundamentals, reading the specs, and—coding?

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What Kills and What Saves Content Management Systems

Imagine you just moved into a new place, and realize that you lack a screwdriver to put up some of your furniture (it’s not from IKEA). You ring at your neighbors’, find one who’s home, and she…

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10 Photos V

The next part of the x-monthly series.

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On Being a Philosopher

I call myself a philosopher even though some people would disagree with me being one. Why would I be a philosopher? What makes a philosopher?

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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 control, and ends with content checks…

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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…

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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.

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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…

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Frameworks, Libraries, and the Modern Web Developer: Web Development, Overdone

We are raising tool-dependent rather than self-reliant developers. Aren’t we.

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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.

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Boyscout Code

Of course, always leave code better than you found it.

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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.”

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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.’”

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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.”

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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…

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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.

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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.

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The Simple Answer to 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 proposes to violate a human right.

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Regarding the Fermi Paradox

When not finding signs of extraterrestrial intelligence says more about us than them.

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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.

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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.

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On Work

On work, retirement, definitions, and mixing things up.

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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?”

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Highlights From Wattles’s “The Science of Getting Rich”

“Man is a thinking center, and can originate thought. All the forms that man fashions with his hands must first exist in his thought; he cannot shape a thing until he has thought that thing.”

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My Top 10 Android Apps

Years ago, in 2009, I wrote an enthusiastic post about my then-favorite apps for Android. More for fun than anything I decided to write a follow-up.

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Foreigners Are Heroes

Foreigners to our countries—expats, immigrants, refugees—are heroes. Foreigners, people like you and I, add to our lives and our cultures. Foreigners deserve our respect and our support.

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On Socialization

Several months back, to myself, I noted how we may have all already been what we’ve later wished to be: for example, authentically curious, open, unbiased, worry-free, joyful, happy, confident, loving. Then, I thought, came socialization.

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