TRST_Blog

I do adore writing that's addressed to a specific audience, more so when that audience is you. Frank has written himself a reminder, but the wisdom here is clear and accessible for anyone who works in their head or behind a desk. I often find it hard to disentangle what I'm capable of as a single person and the impression I get of what everyone else seems to be capable of in aggregate. So, any tricks to re-ground myself are welcomed.

Here is one of my favourite tips:

A massive block of [tasks that have a difficulty of] four’s and five’s means you need to ask for help. (This is okay! Now you know where you need it, which is half of asking.)

And I'll leave off with one more:

But usually—mostly—the things left on the list are our fears. There is no pleasant way to face them, but we must.

Great question, honestly. I wasnt sure we’d get ’em, but there are well reasoned/rational explanations that follow. I'll admit, I was definitely let down to see very little wild speculation. The one commenter who guessed that the human part was akin to an organ-less extended neck was my favourite.

(H/T Daniel Benneworth-Grey)

I liked D&D but I didn’t have anyone to play with in the small community I grew up in and even as a nostalgic adult, I doubt I’d invest the time to learn to play again. This seems like a smart idea from their teaser page. I’m excited to see what their future Kickstarter campaign will bring.

Bookmarked for future reference.

I’ve long been wondering why I have any analytics whatsoever. I mean, what am I doing with that information? Call it bandwagon jumping, but I’m not running Google Analytics^[1] anymore.^[2]

[View Source] was one of the most effective technology teaching tools ever created. And no surprise, since the web was invented for the purpose of sharing knowledge.

That’s where I started. I remember there was a small golden age of writing little notes to whomever was browsing your source. It was like finding the carpenter’s name scratched in the bottom of a bench.

I’m not going to stop concatenating and minifying my sites, but perhaps leaving the original files/partials/whatever available to browse would be a step in that direction. Although, that’s probably what Github is used for these days. Another distant step removed from the web of old, but it’s where we’re at today.

My internet avatar grew up following the same guide posts as Brendan here: constantly pouring through a webpage’s source and a keeping an eye towards the URL structure. Suffice to say this love letter to the humble URL resonated with me.

My favourite reads lately have been, in their own way, love letters to a certain time or place. I reread a load of Dickens over the winter holiday season and couldn’t help but trudge down the same coal-darkened London streets that he wrote so deftly about. And Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Shadow of the Wind, with a remarkable rush of deja vu, placed me right back in the sun-baked streets of Barcelona. The earnest, childish affection for the spirit of a city and its idiosyncrasies grabs ahold of something deep within me. A loving description of time or place makes me perk up.

More and more regularly, people of the Internet seem to writing in this vein. Capturing the spirit of the web, describing its strange contours and revealing the glowing hearts of its inhabitants.

Playful and useful resources to explain difficult programming concepts. Loved So You Want to be a Wizard and couldn’t help sending it on.

I totally want to make one of these. The iPad and Apple Pencil is just begging to be used for this. Anybody want to join in?

I’m an old Internet person, relatively speaking, so I get teary-eyed thinking about the role Mozilla played in the web standards movement. They’ve revamped Firefox with a brand new rendering engine and some very clever developer tools (love the grid view). It’s worth taking a look, if you haven’t recently.

I think at this point, switching browsers to “keep browsers manufacturers competing,” is probably misguided. Leaving aside rendering engines and their slight differences, this becomes a debate about identity. Apple people use safari. Google/Android/Chrome people use, well, Chrome. Web people also use Chrome. Everyone else runs something probably powered by the Blink (née Webkit, née KHTML) rendering engine. Sure Microsoft has their own thing going on with Edge (which, from what I hear is pretty good), but the main point to underscore is that web standards was largely victorious and how the web works is roughly the same for everyone above a certain income level.^[1]

If you want deeper integration with your OS level features, more privacy, more extensibility and so on, then you are likely to make a choice for a niche browser. That however, comes with the realisation that you know what you want out of an internet browser. These days, that’s pretty esoteric. Most people see the world through tiny film-covered windows looking out of Facebook’s high tower.