Tinned Fruit Missives August 2018
Looking through the links below there seems to be a somewhat… negative theme this month. Computers are hard and people are harder, what can I say? Put them together and you have a basically intractable problem.
Let’s all go back to text-based browsers like browsh linked below. Simpler times.
Have a great month!
– Jim
Building the Google Photos Web UI - Antin Harasymiv
An epic breakdown of the suite of algorithms and tricks used to achieve the Google Photos scrubbable photo timeline view for the web. This is a great example of the lengths often required to achieve good performance when creating application views with very large datasets. Not to mention thousands of thumbnail images. The co-operation between back-end and front-end systems to make this work is very revealing.
What kind of ethics do front-end developers need? - Hidde de Vries
A call for front end developers to consider how they want to help shape the world. This is a great start, but I can’t help feeling there is more to consider here than the article suggests, including what role groups like Web Matters can play.
Operationalizing Node.js for Server Side Rendering - Ben Hughes
When I read engineering blog posts like this from bigger tech companies, I do a little sigh inside. It feels like they’ve massively overcomplicated things for themselves. But on the other hand, clever and creative people work there, and it’s very easy to be critical looking in from the outside. File under ‘you’re not [big company with complex stack]’, unless, of course, you are.
Some other World Wide Web hyperlinks I have enjoyed this month
- The web’s bloated middle - Duncan Stephen
- Why bad technology dominates our lives - Don Norman
- The myth of human-centered design - Mark Rolston - A counterpoint to Don Norman’s article above
- Building a progressive web app (PWA): No React, no Angular, no Vue - Florian Rappl
- A one year PWA retrospective - Zack Argyle - Looking back on Pinterest’s efforts to improve their mobile web offering
- browsh - the modern text-based browser
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it!
https://tinnedfruit.com/newsletter/
Tinned Fruit Missives is a monthly newsletter about web product development and front-end practices published by Jim Newbery, an independent coach and consultant from Edinburgh in Scotland.
I help growing B2B SaaS companies create profitable and sustainable web applications. Find out more.
