- awesomplete — MIT-licensed ultra lightweight, usable, beautiful autocomplete with zero dependencies in Javascript.
- How to Seize the Opportunities when Megatrends Collide — excuse the cheesy title, the chart from PwC showing pairwise combination of trends, is interesting.
- Adopting Microservices at Netflix: Lessons for Architectural Design — you want to think of servers like cattle, not pets. If you have a machine in production that performs a specialized function, and you know it by name, and everyone gets sad when it goes down, it’s a pet. Instead you should think of your servers like a herd of cows. What you care about is how many gallons of milk you get. If one day you notice you’re getting less milk than usual, you find out which cows aren’t producing well and replace them. People for Ethical Treatment of Iron, your time has come!
- Your Job is Not to Write Code (Laura Klein) — I know what you’re thinking. This will all take so long! I’ll be so much less effective! This isn’t true. You’ll be far more effective because you will actually be doing your job. Amen to it all.
"javascript" entries
Full-stack tensions on the Web
How much do you need to know?
I expected that CSSDevConf would be primarily a show about front-end work, focused on work in clients and specifically in browsers. I kept running into conversations, though, about the challenges of moving between the front and back end, the client and the server side. Some were from developers suddenly told that they had to become “full-stack developers” covering the whole spectrum, while others were from front-end engineers suddenly finding a flood of back-end developers tinkering with the client side of their applications. “Full-stack” isn’t always a cheerful story.
In the early days of the Web, “full-stack” was normal. While there were certainly people who focused on running web servers or designing sites as beautiful as the technology would allow, there were lots of webmasters who knew how to design a site, write HTML, manage a server, and maybe write some CGI code for early applications.
Formal separation of concerns among HTML, CSS, and JavaScript made it easier to share responsibilities among specialists. As the dot-com boom proceeded, specialization accelerated, with dedicated designers, programmers, and sysadmins coming to the work. Perhaps there were too many titles.
Even as the bust set in, specialization remained the trend because Web projects — especially on the server side — had grown far more complicated. They weren’t just a server and a few scripts, but a complete stack, including templates, logic, and usually a database. Whether you preferred the LAMP stack, a Microsoft ASP stack, or perhaps Java servlets and JSP, the server side rapidly became its own complex arena. Intranet development in particular exploded as a way to build server-based applications that could (cheaply) connect data sources to users on multiple platforms. Writing web apps was faster and cheaper than writing desktop apps, with more tolerance for platform variation.
Read more…
Pandora’s box model
An experiment in containing stylesheet complexity.
This post is part of my personal notes about the benefits currently specified in Shadow DOM, but contentious and held up in committee. We’ll work it out in standards, I’m sure — but given the number of things Shadow DOM was addressing, it may still be several years until we have solutions widely implemented and deployed that solve all of them. This has me doing a lot of thought exercises about what can be done in the meantime. The following reflects one such exercise: specifically, what would it mean to solve just the styling end of this on its own. Warning: it may be mildly crazy.
The Pandora Box
CSS works really well if you can follow good patterns and have nice rich markup. It lets you define broad rules and inherit and override selectively, and if used well it cleanly decouples a separation of concerns — it’s pretty elegant actually.
On the other hand, in the real world, things are often not that simple: until pretty recently, HTML wasn’t especially expressive natively, so we worked around it — many times on our own by adding classes like “article.” But, there wasn’t a standard. Likewise, our ideas about the patterns we should follow or best practices continues to change as we gain new powers or spend more time with the technology. Of course, there are a vast number of cases where you’ll just go and upgrade your philosophy and be the better for it, but there are a number of times when this just isn’t an option. This is sometimes referred to in standards circles, less colorfully, as “the composition problem.”
When it comes to these sorts of cases, quality and philosophy are inevitably mixed and not entirely in the control of any one team. In these sorts of cases, CSS selectors are kind of like live hand grenades, it’s just way too easy to do damage you didn’t intend to do because it requires a level of coordination of approach which is, for business reasons, highly impractical. And so you try really hard to analyze the problem, get the right select/cascade/descend/inherit/specificity, pull the pin, lob it into the pages and… hope. Frequently, all hell breaks loose. The more you mix it up, the harder it gets to reason about and the more our stylesheets explode in complexity. You’ve opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box.
Four short links: 26 February 2015
Autocompletion, Colliding Trends, Microservices, and Writing Useful Code
When can you learn JavaScript?
Khan Academy explores how far learners can get at different ages.
I picked up a brief guide to programming in 6th grade. There, on page 1, was A = A + 1. I knew that wasn’t possible, so I put it down, and came back to programming in 7th grade.
Khan Academy is having better luck with young students, but learning to program is kind of like learning to drive: the prerequisites aren’t obvious, but they’re helpful and often come later. At Fluent 2014, Pamela Fox explored the data Khan Academy has collected on learner age, and what it might mean for curricula going forward.
In her keynote, Fox explored:
- What the world might look like if JavaScript were part of the curriculum as early as possible. (1:42)
- Developing a sense of how kids respond to fairly easy challenges with Khan Academy’s participant data. (3:24)
- What in the first programming challenge might keep people from succeeding? (4:37)
- How different is the data for a logic challenge? At what age does completion level off? (6:16)
- What might JavaScript skills enable in a high school curriculum? (8:24)
Four short links: 10 February 2015
Speech Recognition, Predictive Analytic Queries, Video Chat, and Javascript UI Library
- The Uncanny Valley of Speech Recognition (Zach Holman) — I’m reminded of driving up US-280 in 2003 or so with @raelity, a Kiwi and a South African trying every permutation of American accent from Kentucky to Yosemite Sam in order to get TellMe to stop giving us the weather for zipcode 10000. It didn’t recognise the swearing either. (Caution: features similarly strong language.)
- TuPAQ: An Efficient Planner for Large-scale Predictive Analytic Queries (PDF) — an integrated PAQ [Predictive Analytic Queries] planning architecture that combines advanced model search techniques, bandit resource allocation via runtime algorithm introspection, and physical optimization via batching. The resulting system, TUPAQ, solves the PAQ planning problem with comparable accuracy to exhaustive strategies but an order of magnitude faster, and can scale to models trained on terabytes of data across hundreds of machines.
- p2pvc — point-to-point video chat. In an 80×25 terminal window.
- Sortable — nifty UI library.
Power of the platforms
Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug.
After decades of work on programming, we finally got a development environment with massive reach and tremendous power. Somehow, though, the web isn’t centered on a comprehensive programming environment. The web succeeded with a (severely) lowest-common denominator, specification-driven approach that let it grow with time, technology, and multiple communities, across multiple platforms.
Almost two decades ago, I was all excited about Java. Write applets once, run anywhere, with libraries to make sure it all came out the same wherever anywhere might be. Java is still a powerhouse, but it all worked out differently than I expected. Even in Java’s early years, before the Java news was filled with security bulletins, applets felt like a strange mix with their surrounding web pages. Creating an applet demanded programmers to build every detail. Even with Java’s ever-improving libraries, creating a Java applet that did much was an intense experience focused on programming.
Java wasn’t the only comprehensive way to build web apps, of course. Flash demanded programming, but its values always incorporated design, action, and well, flash, in ways that meshed well with the way people built sites. Flash kept growing and growing before its ecosystem took a fatal hit from the iPhone as HTML5 offered replacements for some of its key strengths. I mostly notice Flash these days because it asks me to update it regularly and because pages tell me when it’s crashed.
Compared to either of those rich environments, web technology is a tangled mess. The early web was functional but unstyled, with no behavior beyond navigating among pages. That? That would dominate client-side computing? Read more…
Four short links: 17 December 2014
Security Stick, Spyware Toy, Bezos Time, and Popular JavaScript
- USB Armory — another Linux-on-a-stick, but this one has some nifty dimensions and security applications in mind.
- Who’s the Boss? — The Elf on the Shelf essentially teaches the child to accept an external form of non-familial surveillance in the home when the elf becomes the source of power and judgment, based on a set of rules attributable to Santa Claus. Excellent deconstruction of ludic malware. (via Washington Post)
- Bezos on Time (Business Insider) — Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life. We all have a limited amount of time, and where you spend it and how you spend it is just an incredibly levered way to think about the world. This (he says at 9 p.m. in the office, in a different city from his family!).
- libscore — popularity of JavaScript scripts and libraries in the top million sites. But remember, just because all the cool kids do it doesn’t make right for you. (via Medium)
Four short links: 16 December 2014
Memory Management, Stream Processing, Robot's Google, and Emotive Words
- Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale — how they gathered data, how Javascript memory management works, and what they did to nail down leaks.
- tigon — an open-source, real-time, low-latency, high-throughput stream processing framework.
- Robo Brain — machine knowledge of the real world for robots. (via MIT Technology Review)
- The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum — convincing argument for teaching intro to programming with Scheme, but not using the classic text SICP.
Update: the original fourth link to Depeche Mood led only to a README on GitHub; we’ve replaced it with a new link.
Four short links: 27 November 2014
Scalable Infrastructure, Lens Tech, Javascript Frameworks, and Morality Valley
- Stumbleupon’s Big Data Architecture Using Open Source Software (PDF) — not just the list of tools but the functions they implement. Useful!
- Innovega — making a contact lens with a tiny bump that acts as a microscope for content shown in glasses. That description, and this link via MIT Technology Review)
- How to Pick a Front-End Framework — not unreasonable opinions, largely useful.
- [Silicon Valley] Bedevilled by Moral Issues (NYT, registerwall) — given that Silicon Valley tends to copy and paste the mantra, “we’re making the world a better place,” it seem reasonable to expect that tech companies would hold themselves to a higher ethical standard.
Four short links: 6 November 2014
Javascript Testing, Dark Data, Webapp Design, and Design Trumps Data
- Karma — kick-ass open source Javascript test environment.
- The Dark Market for Personal Data (NYTimes) — can buy lists of victims of sexual assault, of impulse buyers, of people with sexually transmitted disease, etc. The cost of a false-positive when those lists are used for marketing is less than the cost of false-positive when banks use the lists to decide whether you’re a credit risk. The lists fall between the cracks in privacy legislation; essentially, the compilation and use of lists of people are unregulated territory.
- 7 Principles of Rich Web Applications — “rich web applications” sounds like 2007 wants its ideas back, but the content is modern and useful. Predict behaviour for negative latency.
- Collaborative Filtering at LinkedIn (PDF) — This paper presents LinkedIn’s horizontal collaborative filtering infrastructure, known as browsemaps. Great lessons learned, including context and presentation of browsemaps or any recommendation is paramount for a truly relevant user experience. That is, design and presentation represents the largest ROI, with data engineering being a second, and algorithms last. (via Greg Linden)