Books and Links: June

The cicadas in our yard have been proclaiming the arrival of Summer... I joke that in Alabama, the temperature of summer follows the same curve as the cicadas scream... slow for a bit, then escalating quickly. God has been good to my little family. While there is much in the world to break our hearts or create fear, when I surrender my anxiety and throw my trust on Him, this season is sweet indeed.

On the creativity front, lots of posts written this month... some random updates on ongoing projects:

I'm still happily hacking away on my headspace project. Just today I finally fixed the v2 version... now it reliably blocks an app no matter where it's launched! I'm going to live in it for a while, then I'll do an update post once I've been using it a bit longer.

I'm also still working on my zettelkasten. I'm playing with obsidian.md... and I think with a few tweaks it'll do perfectly. I've finished (I think!) the transition from plain text notes to zettel, I'm working on writing that up too.

Books

I need to get back in the habit of reading again... I'm working on and off on a couple... but I've been doing more blog/web reading.

Links

Building a Lego-powered Submarine 2.0 - magnetic couplings - YouTube

This utterly delighted me today when I saw it.

Building a Lego-powered Submarine 2.0 - magnetic couplings - YouTube

Case study: Analyzing Notion app performance · PerfPerfPerf

Incredibly detailed analysis of a 3rd-party application from a performance perspective. Recommended read if you are interested in working on the performance of your application.

But if you’re building a software product, chances are you’re relatively unaffected. And in this case, having a quick app is more important than ever. Internet is slowing down due to increased demand, and people are holding on to their phones for longer – so if your app is slow, your users will be affected by it.

And slow app means worse business.

Case study: Analyzing Notion app performance · PerfPerfPerf

What Happened to the Webmaster - The History of the Web

Which brings us to ownership, that fundamental quality of a web creator we have lost over the years. The web is simply too big and monolithic for any person to know how any complex website works in its entirety. And even with smaller sites, the web has matured to a point where it’s perfectly plausible for a website to change hands many times over.

What Happened to the Webmaster - The History of the Web

Tradeoffs and Shifting Complexity - daverupert.com

Some wisdom from Mr. Rupert. There is nothing perfect, there is only moving the pain from one are to another.

If that sounds a lot like modern day Front-end Development, you already see where I’m going with this. Not much has changed since Tesler’s day, code runs on either the client or the server. Thankfully today we have a few more levers to pull like “The Edge”, but the principle still applies; you get “advances” by shifting where the complexity lives. There’s good technical nuance, but most of the web’s fresh #hotdrama gets reduced to this for me.

Tradeoffs and Shifting Complexity - daverupert.com

Accessible to some - Manuel Matuzović

This is awesome. A simulation of what it's like to visit a site that's designed to be accessible for people with capabilities you don't have. Most of the time it's unsighted people trying to use sighted websites, here's a 100% "sighted accessible" site that's 100% unusable.

I guess that most of you could not access all the information. How does that feel? Especially with my b------ justifications. Pretty bad, right? Now imagine having a similar experience on most websites you visit. That’s not just annoying and troublesome, but it makes you angry and sad.

Please remember how this experience made you feel every time you work on a new website, page, or component. Make your websites accessible to all, not just to some.

Accessible to some - Manuel Matuzović