death of the internet, film at 11

 

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? - first off - I LOVE the instantly recognizable Windows 95 art:

The TLDR: AI conversations and Google AI summaries are further removing people clicking through the root articles, and so people making that content have no chance at seeing ad revenue.

The article probably pushes a little too hard going all the way back to "1989" - the fundamental idea of the web - an addressing and protocol setup such that anyone can put up stuff that anyone else can get to - is still alive and well.

Discoverabilty - at its height in the early Google era - is back to being a problem, of course, and the AI status quo threatens anyone trying to make a living via content, so I don't want to underestimate the threat AI makes (And I mean there's this sense of overharvesting; at some point information services are cutting off their seed corn.)

Still proud to be part of the "indie web". It's great to be able to hang a shingle off of the information superhighway, to mix a metaphor or two.

React by Default is a Bad Default

React Won by Default – And It's Killing Frontend Innovation. 

when combined with reports of the security attacks on the npm chain... I still think steps backward might be steps forward.

Improving DX with small AI-produced tools

For my current project at work, we have a set of staging servers, test data, and supporting info, such that our test URLs are complicated conglomerations. 

After 6 months or so of relying on a notes file with common starting URLs and manually hacking variants together, a sometimes fraught process, I realized I could have CoPilot generate a very simple start page url builder:

You can see the sanitized version of it in action here.

It's just funny - obviously not hard to pull off, like 5 minutes of LLM work, but no one on my team thought to do it, and it definitely improves all of our "quality of life"s.

LLMs like ChatGPT synergize really well with some of my graybeard tendencies from Web 1.0; the idea that simple programming feats can still be useful - you don't need to stand up a whole little server, static HTML and in browser JS can meet a bunch of tasks. I haven't yet messed with Claude or other specialty bots more geared at larger projects, but as a companion / second pair of eyes / Jr dev who might lose the thread but has a great memory for a lot of the details, ChatGPT and even the CoPilot I have at work are huge benefits.

Also it synergizes with how I can trivially deploy to my cheap rented VPS  it doesn't matter in this case, it's just a local static .html file, but I wouldn't have to put down a credit card when I want to make something available to any browser.

advice from a successful UX Engineer Job Seeker

 

It's not perfect but I'm thankful I found something so quickly. If you are currently unemployed or maybe find yourself unemployed soon here are some things that helped me find a new role so quickly:

1. You WILL be taking a pay cut. The market is flooded right now. Companies know this and are taking advantage. The faster you accept this the faster you can move on and apply for roles with a lower salary. The way I looked at it was taking a pay cut is still more than collecting unemployment.

2. You may have to go back into the office (at least a couple days a week). I was very very lucky to find another completely remote role. This was NOT the norm out there. Every other company I was working with was hybrid, some of those were in Boston. I was prepared to do it but thankful I don't have to.

3. Look outside your role. Again I'm super lucky I found something directly within my current niche. I'll even be working with a design system but I was entertaining taking a QA role which is related but not a direct match to what I used to do.

4. You need to be sending at least 10-20 applications daily. Many of these jobs I don't believe were even real because I would get a rejection email within minutes of applying. I think some places are just collecting a pool of candidates. But you don't know which ones are real and which aren't.

5. Branch out from LinkedIn. I did use LinkedIn but I also used builtin, indeed and dice. I also looked up practically everyone I ever worked with to see where they were and if their company was hiring.

6. Lastly remind yourself it's not forever. I took a less than perfect role, but I don't have to stay here forever. The economy will get better and things will eventually go back to normal.

(Misuse of) Javascript broke the web

Wow - JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress).

What a well-written, thoughtful analysis of things that have been making my developer life less fun for a decade. 

Some quotes:

The tragedy is, none of this is necessary. Once upon a time, we had a fast, stable, resilient web. But we replaced it with a JavaScript cargo cult.

Now it takes four engineers, three frameworks, and a CI/CD pipeline just to change a heading. It’s inordinately complex to simply publish a webpage.

[...]

Around 2010, something shifted. The iPhone was ascendant. Native apps were sleek, fast, fluid. Angular, the first mainstream JavaScript framework for the web, had just emerged. And suddenly, every CMO started saying the same thing in website briefs: “Can we make it feel like an app?”

Developers, armed with new frameworks and good intentions, said yes. JavaScript could, in theory, do seamless transitions and slick UI. So we built towards that promise. Or tried to.

Spoiler alert: we didn’t get app-like performance. We didn’t get better user experiences. What we got was an arms race of complexity.

[...] 

 And so, we rewrote the rules of web development around entirely different needs, almost overnight. Not content, not speed, not interoperability, not discoverability. Just code.

[...]

Fast forward to today. Ironically, after years of chasing abstraction and complexity, the JavaScript ecosystem is now scrambling to reintroduce the things we lost.

Server-side rendering? Back in fashion. Routing? Carefully managed. URL structures, metadata, even HTML output – all being rebuilt, one plugin at a time.

 If I disagreed with anything, it's this:

Today, we optimise for “DX” – developer experience. Not user experience. Not performance. Not outcomes.
 

For a certain subset of developers... not true. At all. It's a mess and everything is harder than it seems like it should be - complexity is not counted as a cost and "ability to follow it in your head" is not prioritized at all. 

If you are old enough to remember the old 8bit home computers - they used BASIC even though it was slow and interpreted - on machines that were already slow - because the run-eval loops is SO powerful. And for me, there's a through line to that technology, some early scripting in like Perl and what not, and the Evergreen/Buildless stack I prefer now - everything is transparent, everything shows its work. Ever since the rise of Angular my day job has been about building blackboxes, as if everything was a standalone binary app. 

copy and paste images right into messages...

 I had to switch to a Windows machine at work. Its default screenshot-maker is launched via win-shift-s, and it copies the shot to the clipboard. What I was surprised to learn is how many communication programs now support "copy and paste an image into a message" - I thought maybe it was a Teams flex, but Gmail and FB Messenger also support it.

It's interesting because, programming wise, that's a pretty complicated thing to support. I think they are quietly taking the raw/base64 data, quickly uploading it, getting a file reference, and then putting a tag with the image in the WYSIWYG content.

I have to put it on my Startling Technology list - stuff that really impressed me when it came out, like Google Maps slidey tiles, youtube letting anyone upload video, ChatGPT+Dall-E... not quite as exciting as those but still.)

fun with href

A Few Things About the Anchor Element’s href You Might Not Have Known