I have subscribed so many new-to-me RSS feeds in the last few months that it feels like an Indieweb renaissance for independent publishing
Category: technology
javascript frustration
I’ve been taking a deep dive into Javascript and React. Progress is slow, frustration is high. I’m still wondering where this will all end up. Didn’t I major in music? Hmm…
the new web development
The modern web developer is more a software engineer than what I would call a web developer. The app-ification of the web isn’t a case of writing some HTML, authoring a CSS file, and using a new jQuery-like library to get that sweet interaction.
You are going to need to know how to program; like a real programmer. You are going to need to know some very different approaches to how you build, deploy, and maintain things. You’re going to need to question the value of some of your strongest held best practices.
And you’re going to need to get to grips with tooling. So much tooling. Because the new web development has matured enough to be dangerous to ignore, but not enough to be simple and entirely stable.
Matt’s summary of his transition closely aligns what I’ve been going through. Even though I saw the writing on the wall with Javascript, I couldn’t motivate myself to travel down this path because it was a repeat of what I left behind in Computer Science 101 in college. I just wasn’t interested at the time and this felt like more of the same.
It’s clear now that a programmer path for the web requires skills that I don’t have and must continue to learn. I have to cross the line to the left brain from the safety of the right brain.
I think I’ll write a post about my journey and struggles.
the great divide
Let’s say there is a divide happening in front-end development. I feel it, but it’s not just in my bones. Based on an awful lot of written developer sentiment, interviews Dave Rupert and I have done on ShopTalk, and in-person discussion, it’s, as they say… a thing. The divide is between people who self-identify as a (or have the job title of) front-end developer, yet have divergent skill sets.
The article shows two comparison lists, and in both lists I’m more on the right side than the left. In order to make advancements in my career as well as continue increasing my salary, I’m forcing myself into the left side little by little. But it’s been a huge struggle because both of those left sides were for the back-end developers and I was always more interested the technical aspects of the design more than the data flow and interactions.
The Twitter comments are a good reflection of this divide:
Two front-end developers are sitting at a bar. They have nothing to talk about. Welcome to "The Great Divide." https://t.co/LVfxHqT5i3 pic.twitter.com/6thByIniC9
— CSS-Tricks (@css) January 21, 2019
T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.
This type of story makes me want to embrace my inner Luddite. The fact that phone locations are routinely tracked and sold to third parties is only the tip of an enormous privacy-is-dead iceberg that continues on with Facebook freely giving access to our data to third parties and onto Google knowing everything that we do online based on its trackers like Google Analytics. It doesn’t matter how much I lock down the technology I use, I’ve been concerned for years; the last three years I’ve been as active as I can to keep as much of that control as possible.
Without discontinuing the use of a smartphone that doubles as a GPS device, which is all smartphones, I don’t know of a good solution for this.
The flip side of losing Edge is that Microsoft now has the potential to take an advanced product and outdo its competitors. Lose some potential, gain some potential.
LiveJournal has export to WordPress project on Github
Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)Import–needs rock solid LiveJournal-clone and Tumblr support if your site is to serve as an archive. I don’t know if there even is a working WordPress plugin to import from LJ or Dreamwidth. The best-supported Tumblr->WordPress importer is actually better than most standalone Tumblr backup tools…
I made some commits to a project on Github that allows LiveJournal to be imported into WordPress. Would be great to see other projects that import other silo content into WordPress.
Why couldn’t Microsoft allow EdgeHTML to be open source software? Why couldn’t it be evergreen? I am torn about Edge moving to Chromium under the hood.
Taking back control takes time…
complicated browser relationships
Since I started using the Internet in the late 90s, I’ve had two long-term monogamous relationships with two browsers: Internet Explorer and Chrome. When Firefox appeared on my radar, sometime before its 1.0 release, I’ve used it off and on. I was, however, mostly faithful first to IE6 and then again to Chrome.
Google owns a lot of my data and this won’t change in the near future. It’s naive to think I can completely quit Google even if I want to. Why? Their services like Google Maps are far ahead of the competition. Google Analytics is almost as synonymous with websites as HTML, CSS and Javascript. I use an Android phone and likely will continue to because of my reliance on Google services. I also have a naive but established level of trust that Google is only profiling my data for ads and not selling identifiable information to third-parties.
For the foreseeable future, I will probably have a complicated relationship with Chrome. All Google services will continue to use Chrome. I will keep using Chrome’s DevTools for most development work because of features like Workspaces, Lighthouse, and breakpoint inline comments which are quite useful.
Google has forced Chrome to become a huge privacy mess. I don’t care how much trust I put into Chrome, I will treat it like any other service that wants to siphon my data by now limiting my usage.
I’m forcing myself to go back to Firefox. But I will likely switch between the two most of the time.
For all the rest…
- I don’t use Windows enough to care about Edge and its user experience doesn’t impress me. It also lacks privacy and script blocking extensions I desire
- Using Safari is no better than Edge for the same reasons. Apple is likely not a privacy issue like Chrome but I don’t have the same established trust with Apple’s closed-source browser code. I also don’t enjoy using it for development; its version of DevTools aren’t as polished in ways that Chrome’s is such as inline comments during debugging
- Tor Browser is great privacy browser but far too slow for day-to-day use. Good to keep it in the toolset, however
I hope Firefox can claim almost all of my Internet consumption someday. Until then..
It’s complicated.