the way we were

 Kottke just (re)posted WWW: The Way We Were (just noticed the acronym pun there) talking about how the show "Halt and Catch Fire" had a Don Draper-esque speech about the nascent potential of the earliest Web, and how it could be just anything.

There was a beautiful and egalitarian time shortly after that - even if you didn't want to pay to host your own website on the "Information Superhighway", "Geocities" was a free or cheap option to hang your shingle and put your stuff at a fixed URL.

But then - as the 2016 article mourns - FB came in and offered trivial sharing your stuff with friends and family, and then Twitter and Instagram rolled in to give you a shot at that ephemeral immortality of "going viral" with bon mots and images, respectively. And suddenly becoming a part of the endless stream made more sense than building your own little island

I know I'm biased. My twenty years of blogging (at my site kirk.is ) has given me an incredibly rich archive, even if its value is mostly just for me. (I can generally retrieve any half-remembered quote, anecdote, personal photo or meme) And the technology of my "side hustle" of Porchfest websites carries more in common with those early-web days - before UI work exploded into an impossibly wide and dense forest of libraries and frameworks.

So much was lost. Geeks used to think a good URL could be forever - and while the Wayback Machine is still fighting that war against entropy, I think the stream is this endless deluge encouraging all but the most stalwart to let stuff just get swept away. And maybe I'm foolish to be hoping for earthly immortality and not embracing the transience of all things. Still, I think we could do better.

about my new employer

 Excellent article from CodaMetrix's VP of Product Management + Development Lindsey Reilly, RN, MBA: How AI can change the way healthcare is delivered.

It echoes something I appreciated from an in-house presentation by our President / CEO Hamid Tabatabaie - yes coding (i.e. properly tagging medical diagnosis and treatment) has to be part of the conversation about billing (regardless of  everyone's shared concerns about financial flows of healthcare, increasing accuracy and reducing costs of coding is an important part of that) but also it empowers research - better data gathering and understanding via standardizing and automating.

everybody's free (to write websites)

By Sara Joy: 

Enbies and gentlefolk of the class of ‘24:

Write websites.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, coding would be it. The long term benefits of coding websites remains unproved by scientists, however the rest of my advice has a basis in the joy of the indie web community’s experiences. I will dispense this advice now:

Enjoy the power and beauty of PHP; or never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of PHP until your stack is completely jammed. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at your old sites and recall in a way you can’t grasp now, how much possibility lay before you and how simple and fast they were. JS is not as blazingly fast as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the scaling; or worry, but know that premature scalability is as useful as chewing bubble gum if your project starts cosy and small. The real troubles on the web are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; if your project grows, scale it up on some idle Tuesday.

Code one thing every day that amuses you.

Style.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s data; don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

POSSE.

Don’t waste time on shiny new frameworks; sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they’re a trap. The web platform doesn’t need gigs of node_modules.

Remember the guestbook entries you receive; forget the spam. If you succeed in doing this well, tell me how.

Keep your old site designs. Throw away your old nested <div>s.

Flex.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your site. The most interesting websites don’t even have an introduction, never mind any blog posts. Some of the most interesting web sites I enjoy just are.

Add plenty of semantic HTML.

Be kind to your eyes, your visitors will appreciate a nice theme.

Maybe you’ll blog, maybe you won’t.
Maybe you’ll have users, maybe you won’t.
Maybe you’ll give up that cool domain.
Maybe you’ll sell that little project and hate what the buyers do with it.

Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your code is half spaghetti; so is everybody else’s.

Enjoy your <body>. Style it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of CSS, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest design tool you’ll ever learn.

Animate, even if you only try it out in your local IDE or CodePen.

 Read the documentation, even if you don’t follow it.

Do not read React dev rel articles; they will only make you feel confused.

Get to know the web platform; HTML, CSS and JS are there for good.

Be nice to your community; they are your hyperlinks that keep the web interconnected and the people who will give the web a future.

Understand that frameworks come and go, but for a precious few you should donate to the maintainers.

Work hard to bridge the gaps in accessibility and responsiveness, because the older you get, the more you need the accommodations you didn’t need when you were young.

Host on Netlify once, but leave before it makes you static.

Host on Überspace once, but leave before it makes you dynamic.

Contribute.

Accept certain inalienable truths: connection speeds will rise, techbros will grift, you too will get old— and when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young websites were light-weight, tech founders were noble and fonts used to be bigger.

Respect the W3C.

Ask for help and people will support you.

Maybe you have a patreon, maybe you have venture capital funding; but you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your tabbing order, or by the time you’ve got arthritis, using a keyboard will be useless.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.

The old web is a form of nostalgia. Rebuilding it needs to be more than fishing the past from the disposal, painting over the inaccessible parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the websites.

(It's funny comparing this to another article I ran into today: Why I'm Over GraphQL. I've never used it but it always seemed like a weirdly over (or maybe under-) engineered idea...

free airline wifi! sort of

https://robertheaton.com/pyskywifi/ - using an account info screen as a low-bandwidth but free TCP/IP-ish gateway.

Somehow this reminds me of how "Pickle Rick" in Rick+Morty bootstraps himself w/ sewer dweller pieces and misc. junk into a Barbie sized Terminator warrior...
 

state of js

https://2023.stateofjs.com/ -
the gender disparity in the respondent demographics is a little disheartening
the footprint of JS/ECMAscript a dev might choose to use (and should be able to recognize) is growing
I do love this kind of graph, and double axis of "I have used" and "I like it"

 

note to self - figma replacement?

 Note to self, at some point I should check out Penpot - looks like an interesting replacement for Figma.

(To be honest, I think it's a little bizarre that bare Figma starts you with like, just the rawest of shapes, and not much that looks like an actual UI until you start importing a lot of library things.)

urchin

 I kind of like how the semi-ubiquitous UTM code for putting analytics trackers in URL comes from the delightfully named, now defunct, yet perpetually memorialized company "Urchin" - here is a page on their history.

Also I like how they "cleaned up" their charming logo to make it look more professional...

KISS

I appreciate Chris Ferdinandi's "Go Make Things". He's a kindred soul to me shaking my head about how needlessly complex web development has gotten. (Maybe I should also take his lead on web components...)

But I really appreciated Evergreen tech is an asset (and dependencies are a liability).
For so many apps and sites, there just isn't that much the front end needs to do that core browser tech doesn't handily provide...

Maybe I should lean on the framing of "evergreen". It almost seems like a contradiction for "tech", but the fact is there are conservative low-turnover parts of tech and edge-y high-turnover parts prone to flavor of the month, and the latter doesn't have as many benefits as many in the industry seem to assume. Someone once said, the Internet just has one big trick, getting information onto and off of someone else's server, and PHP and browser-native tech does that very well, and even in attractive ways if you know how to work it.

1, 2, 3, 4 I declare cyberwar

 I need to reconsider how I'm getting my news headlines because I hadn't heard about the major auto finance industry cyberattack making many dealers fallback to old paper based systems.

Hello from the Middleman Economy quotes Cory Doctorow:

"This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects."

Actually it's probably better just to read that Doctorw piece