Web Applications

RSS Reader Review (2023)

After every social media convulsion there is always a view that we’re heading back to blogs again. Regardless of whether this is true or not there is always an uptick in posting and blogs are definitely better for any kind of long form content compared to a 32 post “thread” on any kind of microblogging social platform. So I’ve been revising my line up of RSS readers (like email I use a few) and I wanted to post my notes on what I’ve tried and what I’ve ended up using.

My first key point of frustration is viewing content on a phone browser; my primary reader (which I migrated to from Google Reader) is Newsblur but the design of the site is not responsive and is large screen focused. My second issue is specifically around Blogger sites; while these do have a mobile view most of the themes for Blogger feel unreadable and harsh on smaller screens. Not to mention the cookie banner that is always floating around.

I have been using Feedbin whose main feature is that it can consolidate content from Twitter, RSS and email newsletters into a single web interface. It does deliver this promise but while its small screen experience and touch interface has been considered, the resulting UI is quite fiddly with a side-swipe scheme for drilling in and out of content and I often need to switch out of its default rendering mode to get something that is easy to read. I’m still using Feedbin to follow news sources on Twitter but have mostly given up on RSS there except indirectly through topic subscriptions.

I want to give an honourable mention here to Bubo RSS. This is essentially a static site builder that reads your subscriptions and builds a set of very lightweight pages that list out all the recent posts and uses the visited link CSS property to indicate the unread items. In the end this didn’t really solve my reading issues as you just link through to the original site rather than getting cleaned up small screen friendly view. However its idea of building a mini-site from your RSS feed and then publishing a static site would solve a lot of my problems. I was almost tempted to see if I could add a pull of the content and a Readability parse but I sensed the size of the rabbit hole I was going into.

Another great solution I found was Nom which is a terminal RSS reader written in Go. You put your subscriptions into a config file and then read the content via the terminal. If I had any feedback for Nom it would be that the screen line length is not adjustable and the default feels a bit short. The pure text experience was the best reading experience for the Blogger subscriptions I have but ultimately I wanted something that I could read on a mobile phone web browser.

In the end the thing that has been working for me was Miniflux. You can self-host this but the hosted option seemed cheaper to me than the cost of the required hosting. I had only one issue with Miniflux’s reading mode out of the box which was to do with margins on small screens.

I thought I might have to try and get a PR organised but helpfully you can save a custom CSS snippet in the settings and with a few lines of customisation I was entirely happy with the reading experience. This is now what I’m using to read RSS-based content on my phone.

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London, Programming, Web Applications, Work

Halfstack on the Shore(ditch) 2022

This is the first time the conference has been back at Cafe 1001 since the start of the Pandemic and my first HalfStack since 2021’s on the Shore event.

In some ways Halfstack can seem like a bit of an outlandish conference but generally things that are highly experimental or flaky here turn up in refined mainstream forms three to five years later. Part of the point of the event is to question what is possible with the technologies we have and what might be possible with changes that are due in the future. Novelty, niche or pushing the envelope talks are about expanding the conversation about what is possible.

The first standout talk this year was by Stephanie Shaw about Design Systems. It tries to make the absurdist argument that visual memes meet all the criteria to be a design system before looking at what are the properties of a good design system that would disqualify memes. The first major point that resonated with me was that design systems are hot and lots of people say they have them when what they actually have are design principles, a component library or an illustration of UI variant behaviour.

I was also impressed that the talk had a slide dedicated to when a design system would be inappropriate. Context always matters in terms of implementing ideas in organisations and it is important to understand what the organisation needs and capabilities that are required to get value from an idea. Good design systems provide a strong foundation for rapid, consistent development and should demonstrate a clear return on the investment in them.

One of the talks that has stayed with me the longest was one that was about things that can be done now. I’ve seen Chris Heilmann talk about dev tools at previous conferences but this time the frame of the talk was different and was about using dev tools in the browser to make the web sane again. He reminded me that you can use the dev tools to edit the page. Annoying pop-up? Delete it! Right-click hijacked? Go into the handler bindings and unbind the customer listener. Auto-playing video? Change it’s attributes or again just delete the whole thing. He also did explain some new things that I wasn’t aware of such as the ability to take a screenshot of a specific node from within the DOM inspector. I’ve actually used that a few times since in my work.

There was an impromptu talk that was grounded in a context that was a little hard to follow (maintaining peer to peer memes in a centralised internet apocalypse I think) but was about encoding images into QR codes that included an explanation of how QR codes actually work and encode information (something I didn’t know). The speaker took the image data, transformed it into a series of QR codes, then had a website that displayed the QR codes in sequence and a web app that used a phone camera to scan the codes and reassemble the image locally. The scanning app was also able to understand where in the sequence the QR code was which created a kind of scanning line effect as it built up the image which was very cool to watch.

There were three talks that all involved a significant amount of simultaneous interaction and each using slightly different methods but clearly the theme was having many people together on a webpage interacting in near real time.

The first thing to say is that I took a decent but relatively low-powered Pinebook laptop to the conference as I thought I would just need something simple to take notes and look things up on the internet, maybe code along with some Javascript. All of the interactive demos barely worked on it and the time to be active was significantly longer than say the attendees with the latest Macs. I think the issue was a combination of having really substantial downloads (which appeared not to be cached so refreshing the browser was fatal) but also just massive requirements on CPU in the local synchronisation code.

The first was by a pro developer relations person, Jo Franchetti, who works for Ably and who used the Ably API. Predictably this was the best working (and looking) demo with a fun Halloween theme around the idea of an ouija board or, more technically, trying to spell out messages by averaging all the subscribers’ mouse movements to create a single movement over the screen. However even using a commercial API, probably having no more than 25 connections and a single-screen UI my laptop still ground to a halt and had significant lag on the animations. It did look great projected on the big screen though.

Jo’s talk introduced me to an API I hadn’t heard of before scrollTo (part of a family of scrolling APIs). This is an example of how talks about things on the edge of the possible often come back to things that are more practical day to day.

James Allardice and Ross Greenhalf had the least successful take on the multiuser extension and in terms of presentation style seemed to be continuing an offstage squabble in front of everyone. I get the impression that they were very down on what they had been able to achieve and were perhaps hoping for a showcase example to promote their business.

Primarily they didn’t get this because they were bizarrely committed to AWS Lambda as the deployment platform. Their idea was to do a multiplayer version of Pong and it kind of worked, except the performance was terrible (for everyone this time, not just me). This in turn actually created a more fun experience that what they had intended to build as the lag meant you needed to be quite judicious in when you sent your command (up or down) to the server as there was a tendency to overshoot with too many people sending commands as ball approached and then another as they were waiting for the first one to take effect. You needed to slow down your reaction cycle and try and anticipate what other people would be doing.

The game also only lasted for the duration of a Lambda timeout of a single execution run as the whole thing was run in the execution memory of a single Lambda instance. This was a consequence of the flawed design but again it wasn’t hard to imagine how Lambda could be quite effective here as long as you’re not using web sockets for the push channel. It feels like this kind of thing would probably be pretty trivial in something like Elixir in a managed container but was a bit of a uphill battle in a Javascript monolith Function as a Service.

The most creative multi-user demo was by Mynah Marie (aka Earth to Abigail who has been a performer at previous Halfstacks) who used Estuary to create a 15 person online jam session which was surprisingly harmonious for a large group with little in the way of being able to monitor your own sound (I immediately had more empathy for any musician who has asked the desk for less drums in their monitor). However synchronisation was again a big problem, not only did other people paste over my loops but also after leaving the session one of my loops remained stubbornly playing until killed by the admin despite me not being able to access the session again, I was given a new user identity and no-one seemed able to reconnect with the orphan session.

Probably the most mindblowing technical talk was by Ulysses Popple about his tool Nodessey which is both a graph editor or notebook and a way to feed values into nodes that can then visualise the input they are receiving from their parent nodes. It reminded me a bit of PureData. I found following the talk, which was a mixture of notes and live-coded examples, a bit tricky as its an unusual design and trying to follow how the data structure was working while also trying to follow the implementation was tricky for me.

One thing I found personally interesting is that Nodessey is built on top of a minimal framework called Hyperapp which I love but have never seen anyone else use. I now see that I have very much underestimated the power of the framework and I want to start trying to use it more again.

Michele Riva did a talk about the use of English in programming languages which had a helpful introduction to programming languages that had been created in non-English languages. As an English speaker you tend to not need to ever leave the US-led universe of English based languages but it was interesting to see how other language communities had approached making programming accessible for non-English speakers. There was a light touch on non-alphabetic languages and symbolic languages like J (and of course brainfuck).

Perhaps the most practical talk of the conference was by Ante Barić around browser extensions. I’ve found these really valuable for creating internal organisation tooling in a very lightweight way but as Chris Heilmann reminded us in his talk too many extensions end up hammering browser performance as they all attempt to intercept the network requests and render cycle. The talk used a version of Clippy to create annoying commentary on the websites you were visiting but it had some useful insight into what is happening with browser extensions and future plans from both the Google and Mozilla teams as well as practical ways to build and use them.

Ante mentioned a tool that I was previously unaware of called web-ext that is a Mozilla project but which might be able to build out Chrome extensions in the future and gives a simplified framework for putting together extensions.

General notes

Food and drink is available when you want it just by showing the staff your conference lanyard. Personally I think it is great when conferences are able to be so flexible around letting people eat when they want to and avoiding the massive queues for food that typically happen when you try and cram an entire conference into a buffet in 90 minutes. I think it also helps include people who may have particular eating patterns that might not easily fit into scheduled tea and lunch breaks. It also makes it feel less like school.

In terms of COVID risk, the conference was mostly unmasked and since part of the appeal is the food and drink I felt like I wasn’t going to be changing my risk very much by wearing a mask during the talk sections. The ventilation seemed good (the room could be a bit cold if you were sitting in the wrong place) and there was plenty of room so I never had to sit right next to someone. This is probably going to remain a conference that focuses on in-person socialising and therefore isn’t going to appeal to everyone. Having a mask mandate in the current environment would take courage. The open air “beach” version of the conference on the banks of the Thames would probably be more suitable for someone looking to avoid indoor spaces.

Going back?

Halfstack is a lot of fun and I’ve booked my super early-bird for this year I think it offers a different balance of material compared to most web and Javascript conferences. This year I learnt practical things I could bring to my day job and was impressed by what other people have been able to achieve in theirs.

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Software

Futurespectives

Futurespectives seem to be a much rarer practice than retrospectives. I learnt about using Futurespectives when I working with ThoughtWorks and I’ve used them a few times but I can’t seem to find a great online resource to introduce people to the idea. Liz Keogh’s advice on Futurespectives is probably the best I’ve found (beyond a lot of retro as a service companies writing marketing blog material about them).

One reason for their lack of adoption is that they require a certain amount of speculative imagination and that sometimes doesn’t come easily to developers who are very rooted in the realities of their work and sometimes think it is fanciful to speculate about the future.

However if you can persuade people to engage then I find this exercise to be very valuable for surfacing concerns and getting delivery teams to align on the broad shape of their approach to the work. It often sparks conversations that are being suppressed particular if people are being pressed for “commitments” on the upcoming work.

As with retrospectives, generating responses to the initial questions is best done independently and the consolidation of the individual answers and the discussion of what they reveal is best done collectively.

I ask the following questions but as with all practices it is often worth investing some time in trying to figure out what the purpose of the exercise is and what questions would best elicit responses that drive the conversation forward.

As a facilitator the frame for these questions are: “Imagine that we have completed our project. It has been a success even if at times it may have been hard work. The project meets the requirements and is working well in production. Our solution may be different from what we imagine today but we were able to adopt new ideas successfully. The team is happy and satisfied with how the work has gone and we didn’t need to make any excessive requests on their time and skills.”

  • How were we successful?
  • What problems did we have to overcome?
  • What are we proud about what we’ve done?

I ask people to generate responses from their perspective alone although they are free to speculate about how other teams and people will have helped or contributed along the way.

If people are struggling with the exercise I sometimes try to provide some starting questions. How do you feel about the project being complete? What do you feel satisfied to have done? What went better than you were expecting? How do other people feel about the work when they are talking to you about it?

Again the frame for all these questions is that the project has been successful (despite any doubts the participant may have now); the engineering mindset needs to accept that as definite thing and that the problem to be solved is: how was it successful despite this doubts? How were the problems solved or mitigated?

This last part is the critical step because it typically allows people to apply unconventional problem solving ideas. Typically people who are worried about a future problem cannot get past it if they feel it is unsurmountable however if you tell them that someone else has already solved it then just knowing that a solution exists allows people to reframe the problem and overcome their block on what the answer may be.

During the consolidation phase of the exercise, you bring the individual answers together and play them back to the group as a whole. This element is exactly the same as facilitating a regular retrospective. Try and ensure that any explanation of people’s ideas that the group needs is done during this phase. Often people are more aligned than they think but if there are any sharp disagreements in the approach they will typically come out now and its important that participants don’t reject any ideas at this stage because they will just return to their existing mindset.

Pay particular attention to similar ideas using different language, this can indicate that people are probably approaching the problems in a similar way but aren’t yet communicating enough to have shared ideas or a collaborative design approach. If there’s a lot of this it may be worth setting up a follow up to just review and consolidate the current state of play in the project. It may be that preparation is being rushed and the team isn’t having enough time to work together.

After creating and consolidating the initial input we now look at the three questions in a different way to help us generate actions from the futurespective. I sum up how we move from our imagined future to actions today in the following way for each question:

  • How do we realise our expected paths to success? What needs to happen to start towards that outcome? (Make true)
  • It is likely that we will encounter our anticipated problems, how can we minimise the impact they will have on us? (De-risk)
  • How can we ensure we have pride in our work? (Achieve)

At this point the session is more of a facilitated free-for-all with the initial phase being open to all ideas and suggestions. Some really common actions are that technical leaders realise they need to share more information on their vision and ideas with the rest of the team. It is also really common that when several people anticipate the same problem that prototyping, testing or training can be done very early on in the project plan to remove the problem or shift it a better understood class of problem.

The pride question often has actions that are associated with process, quality and shared standards and beliefs. Often though ideas about collaboration and the “team contract” come into play. Leaders can explain what others can rely on them for and what they want from the rest of the team. People can share fears in a way that allows people in authority to acknowledge that they share the same fears in a safe way. The format encourages not just the expression of fear but how will we manage our anxiety about the upcoming work.

In many ways if you’ve facilitated a retrospective you have all the skills that are required to run a futurespective, the tricky thing is about getting the participants in the right frame of mind.

In terms of measuring the impact of a successful futurespective you should be able to see a move from analysis to action and a growth of shared language and outcomes. Perceptions between the key participants of the project should be positive as they are already imagining a successful partnership ahead.

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Programming, Software, Work

Defining the idea of “software engineering”

I have been reading Dave Farley’s Modern Software Engineering. Overall it’s a great read and thoroughly recommended (I’m still reading through it but I’ve read enough to know it is really interesting and a well-considered approach to common problems in development).

One of the challenges Dave tackles is to try and provide a definition of what software engineering actually is. This is actually a pretty profound challenge in my view. I’ve often felt that developers have usurped the title of engineer to provide a patina of respectability to their hacky habits. Even in Dave’s telling of the origin of the term it was used to try and provide parity of esteem with hardware engineers (by no lesser figure than Margaret Hamilton).

In large organisations where they have actual engineers it is often important to avoid confusion between what Dave categorises as Design and Production engineering. Software engineering sits in the world of design engineering. Software is malleable and easy to change unlike a supply chain or a partially completed bridge. Where the end result of the engineering process is an expensive material object Dave points that it is common to spend a lot of time modelling the end result and refining the delivery process for the material output as a result of the predictions of the model. For software to some extent our model is the product and we can often iterate and refine it at very low cost.

Dave proposes the following definition of engineering:

Engineering is the application of an empirical, scientific approach to finding efficient, economical solutions to practical problems.

Dave Farley, Modern Software Engineering

This definition is one I can live with and marries my experience of creating software to the wider principles of engineering. It also bridges across the two realms of engineering, leaving the differences to practices rather than principles.

It is grounded in practicality rather than aloof theories and it emphasises that capacities drive effective solutions as much as needs. This definition is a huge step forward in being able to build consensus around the purpose of a software engineer.

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Programming

State of the Browser 2022

I’ve attended a few of these conferences and have always found them helpful. This year it had relocated to the Barbican Centre with the food and drink area overlooking the beautiful Conservatory there, great choice as a venue.

The conference was a hybrid in-person/online event that I think could serve as a model for other conferences that seem to only be focusing on their return to in-person. Due to other commitments I wasn’t able to be at the venue all day and so at lunchtime I headed home and picked up a few of the rest of the talks on the livestream. It was great to have the flexibility and made the whole conference more accessible.

Talks-wise it was interesting as ever and a little bit less inward looking or niche interest that it has been in the past. There were the usual mix of upcoming standards and challenges in implementing them, how to apply techniques to the current broad mainstream of browsers and a little bit of evangelism for playfulness and environment impact.

One of my key takeaways was on this last point; using an image CDN that can do automatic content negotiation to use an efficient modern image standard has a huge carbon saving. It feels a bit crazy that so many companies are still serving fixed sizes and formats off things like Cloudfront and S3.

Bruce Lawson kicked off the event with a good historical perspective talk on the history of standards (and the struggle to create and maintain them) and brought the issues of standardisation through the search for technical solutions to the world of regulation and better digital policy. Engaging with law makers is a more realistic way to improve the online world that the search of technical solutions to social problems.

More practically we can hope that Apple will be compelled as a digital gatekeeper to allow competition on browser implementations on its platform and maybe even fund its Safari team properly to have better compatibility with the general web standards on iOS. I felt it was nice for a recognition that government organisations can be engaged and willing to listen and that progress can be made be working together rather than outside of regular power structures.

Probably the best talk I heard was “Be the browser’s mentor not it’s micromanager” by Andy Bell this talk neatly encompassed two major ideas: the first was the way that layout systems in CSS have advanced to the point where you are describing structure and allowing the layout manager to actually decide the rendering and secondly on how digital design approaches have managed to fall between the abstractions of the grid system and the precise layout of magazine style layout.

By leaning on the layout engines the amount of CSS we have to write is much more minimal than the micromanaging fussiness typical to component design systems. It is also more powerful and expressive, avoiding the overly complex muddle that is often associated with component style systems but also not going too far down the class frenzy of utility class systems.

Sophie Koonin taught me how to use the prefers-reduced-motion preference via the medium of late 90s website chaos. A good example of the mixture of fun and practical content.

I also enjoyed Alistair Shepherd‘s talk which had a few technical bits and pieces but managed to bridge the themes of the conference by wanting to create a personal website that first and foremost reflected his personal interests and then used the tech to deliver the vision he had for himself. Although the idea to have websites that vary according to the time of date is quite an interesting idea.

I didn’t catch the last few talks so I’m hoping to be able to watch them when they come to YouTube (or maybe some federated alternative!).

Overall still one of the necessary conferences to catch for web technology and now easier to engage with than ever before.

Links

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Blogging, Python

PyCon UK 2022

This was the first in-person PyCon since the start of the pandemic. It had slightly changed format as well, now being mostly single-track (plus workshops) and not having a teacher/youth day. Overall I found the changes welcome. I’m generally a big fan of single track conferences because they simplify the choices and help concentrate the conversation amongst the attendees.

A lot of talks were by developer advocates but some of the most interesting talks came from the core language maintainers talking about the challenges in balancing the needs of different parts of the community while the least interesting were from the company sponsors who generally didn’t seem to have refined their content for a general audience.Typescript

A simple lightning talk about the need to sanitise the input of the builtin int function was illuminating about the challenges of reconciling web needs versus data science. However the general point about whether unlimited number functions are necessary or not was interesting. Similarly the challenge of when to adopt new syntax and keywords in the case of the addition of Exception Groups to the language.

There were a few talks about how the process of maintaining a language and community actually works. How conferences get listed on the Python website, how performance benchmarks are built and used and the desire to have a single place to centre conversation about the language.

There were talks about how to interface to various technologies with Python (Kafka, Telegram) and the inevitable talk about how to improve the performance of your data science code by using NumPy. There were also quite a few talks about Hypothesis; which probably still isn’t used as much as it should be in the community. The library now includes a test generator that can examine code and suggest a test suite for it which is quite a cool feature and certainly would be a boon for those who dislike test-first approaches (whether it has the same quality benefits is another question).

The other talk that had a big impact on my was the introduction to using PyScript in static websites. Python is going to start targeting WebAssembly as a platform which will help standardise the various projects trying to bring a fully functional interpreter to the browser and provide a place to pool efforts on improvements.

PyScript aims to allow Python to also script DOM elements and be an alternative scripting language in the browser. That’s fun but not massively compelling in my view (having done many compile to Javascript languages in the past I think it’s easier to just do Javascript (with an honourable exception for Typescript). Being able to run existing code and models in the browser without change maximises the value and potential of your existing Python codebases.

Cardiff remains a lovely venue for the conference and I think it is worth taking time out from the tracks to enjoy a bit of the city and the nearby Bute Park.

Links

  • Pyjamas, a 24 hour online conference
  • Pyrogram, a Python library for interacting with Telegram
  • HPy, an updated API for writing C extensions in Python
  • Discuss Python, the general Python community forum
  • Trustme, a testing library that allows local certificates as testing fixtures
  • PyScript, Python in the browser via Web Assembly
  • PyPerformance, benchmarks for testing Python implementations
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Blogging, Work

Trivialising stress with “Wellness at Work”

Burnout is a complex topic but employer responses to it are even more complex. Some definitions of burnout make it a direct occupational health hazard and therefore something that all employers need to consider and manage.

But the way that many companies are responding is facile and, as many other people have already pointed out, patronising to employees and minimising the employer’s own responsibilities. Occupational stress is not something that is resolved by reminders of “mindfulness” and the offer or an meditation app and an employee helpline.

Stress at work is probably inevitable for most workers employed by organisations. The friction and pressures of work continually generate stress which needs to be managed through conventional tools like support and leave. An employee does need to be aware of the indicators and behaviours associated with their own stress but this is probably something that requires some individual coaching rather than an app and a video lesson.

By offering inadequate or lackluster support employers seem to put themselves in the worst possible position, acknowledging their responsibility for the occupational nature of the problem and yet not offering a meaningful solution to it. Ultimately some reckoning seems inevitable in this situation.

A deeper review of the origins of stress within the organisation is needed. Things like client interactions, challenging targets, arbitrary deadlines, interpersonal issues may all be deemed a necessary part of an organisation’s management but acknowledging the consequences of these sources of stress and figuring out how the consequences can be managed and ideally neutralised through more positive activities is vital management work.

Commercialised wellness is an almost meaningless marketing concept, mixing it with the realities of workplace stress seems a recipe for disaster rather than the cheap, effortless fix some employers seem to think it is.

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Programming

Keeping the batteries included

Python is well-known for being a “batteries included” language which means it comes with a rich variety of modules that work right out of the box. However this recent post about the regular expression library shows the problems that can occur from shipping such a wide variety of code as part of the language core. Maintaining a wide-ranging codebase is challenging as is keeping it aligned to a language’s release cadence.

The problems suggest that really the language should focus just on the core tools and syntax of the language with everything else being on a different release cycle. However by itself that core isn’t too useful for pragmatic coding purposes. Curation of code and having a sensible selection of libraries is a challenge. Some languages like Clojure and Elm have a controlled ecosystem of libraries that are adjacent to a small language core. However here the difference between curation and gatekeeping is fine and it feels like only languages with a large community can do it effectively.

Perhaps the answer is to have a basic implementation of core functionality in the core but to use the language documentation to suggest alternative libraries. This moves the problem to the documentation team but hopefully this is a simpler arena to both maintain and curate.

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Software

State of the Browser 2021

This is the first in-person conference I’ve been to since the pandemic and since it normally clashes with PyCon UK this is also the first State of the Browser that I’ve been too in a while.

As a high-level pitch for the conference it a chance to hear from standard makers and browser developers about their thoughts on the web, web standards and issues in web development.

The conference had an audience of probably a third of what I felt it had the last time I attended in person. There was not issue with distancing and you could add a stickers to your attendee batch to nix photography and to ask for people to keep their distance.

Usually the chance to socialise and network is a major part of the conference experience but once I was there I realised that I didn’t really want to spend the time required to get to know someone new while COVID is as prevalent as it is, not attend the generous post-conference drinks.

Which made me wonder why I was there at all. The answer, on reflection, is that being physically present meant that I was actually present for the talks as well. I’ve bought tickets for virtual events earlier in the year and I still haven’t watch the videos.

By physically turning up I did pay more attention and I did engage and learn more than I did virtually.

I found a few things about the conference frustrating though. Firstly a number of the speakers weren’t there and instead had recorded a talk so being at the conference ended up being a collective video watch without being able to control the video and skip the boring bits. Also there were no questions from the audience because that was being handled on Discord. Now most of my Discord is taken up with gaming because, y’know that’s what Discord pretty much is for the most part. So I wasn’t able to see that side of things because I didn’t have time to set up some kind of work account. But generally whether it was Slack or something else I kind of think having the questions on the conference chat meant that the talks were actually lectures and where the speakers weren’t that proficient with their delivery it made the talks more boring.

So at the end of the experience I have no idea as to whether my attendance was a good idea or not. I probably would have been distracted at home but at least I could have sorted out Discord and have watched the pre-recorded videos in a more comfortable environment (I certainly could of dodged the morning torrential rain).

But when there was a good in-person speaker it was great. Rachel Andrew was the standout for managing a review of the history of layout systems while also previewing the thinking of the standards groups. In particular drawing a fascinating line between the necessity of the contains CSS directive to the ability to be able to look forward to container queries. Stephanie Stimac shared similar insight into what the future may hold for the development of the Form elements and their backwards-compatible codification and customisation.

Alex Russell offered a rebuttal of the locked down mobile ecosystems from a capitalist perspective but failed to really offer remedies given that this overall is a capitalist failure.

In a totally different vibe Heydon Pickering did a talk about requiring people to switch off Javascript to read his blog. It was closer to standup and I did laugh out loud several times although trying to explain what made it funny and entertaining has proven highly difficult.

Rachel Andrew is one of the people behind Notist which a few people were using to share slide links. I hadn’t heard of it before and I can see it’s pretty handy compared to trawling Youtube trying to figure out if some talk you half remember has been posted there.

Overall I think it was worth the effort, I felt I got outside my bubble for a while and felt a bit more connected to the efforts that are still ongoing to safeguard and advance the web as a whole.

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Web Applications

Email services in 2021

I read this article about switching away from GMail and it struck a bit of a chord in terms of my own attempts to find a satisfactory replacement.

At the moment I feel I’m using all the services and at some point I should actually pick one or two that actually meet my need.

I have ProtonMail and Tutanota accounts for security. In truth I’ve ended up using neither (unless I see someone else using a ProtonMail address).

Day to day I’m probably still using GMail for most things and Fastmail for things where I don’t want to embarrass myself with my GMail address which is based on a gaming handle. Therefore over time my Fastmail address has become my address for financial things, communication with tradespeople and professionals and the odd real-world email invoice and so on.

It may sound strange but the biggest reason I don’t use Tutanota more is that it is hard to communicate verbally to other people. Fastmail still needs to the first word to be spelled out but people expect the XMail.com format and seem to have a lot less trouble with it.

I was on the verge of unsubscribing from Hey when it had it’s massive wobble over handling political issues at work (or alternatively white privilege, whichever way you see it). Rightly or wrongly I’ve kept on using and paying for it.

The strange niche that I’ve found for it is communicating with my extended family and occasionally a bit of business communication. The mail handling features just seems to work really well in terms of not wanting to respond immediately but wanting something better than “star” or “pin”.

When I started with Hey I was very excited about the “Feed” feature for managing email newsletters but after a while I’ve found myself not using it very much and instead I’ve started using Feedbin for these instead.

The Hey Paper Trail function is also good but when it comes to things like online orders I find the delivery updates easier to handle in GMail.

However exactly like the author of the article Fastmail is the most complete replacement for GMail having a similar functionality set (including a calendar) and while Hey might be better for having a well-managed near-zero mailbox, Fastmail is better for the pragmatic keep it all and search it when you need it approach to email.

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