[webfinds] Ethical performance, programming sucks and 101 bash tips

As people complained that I post too many links to follow on Twitter (it is my stream of consciousness – as I find it, I post it), I’m starting to release these link lists every few days now. Hopefully that helps.

Performance

• Tim Kadlec is back with The Ethics of Performance in which he discusses why it is important to offset your web footprint.
• Jack Lenox has similar thoughts in his save the planet by improving your website performance outlining the energy consumption of the web.
• Doug Sillars wrote a lot of sensible things about how bad animated GIFs are for performance. His State of the Web: Animated GIFs is not likely to stop people from posting them, but it is good to know

Web Development

• Terence Eden has a nice one meta element trick to generate an Automatic preview image based on screenshot
• Thomas Steiner wrote his first Web Fundamentals article covering the highly experimental Faces, and Barcodes—The Shape Detection API in Chrome. This is a great step forward, but I’d like more transparency where the detection happens. That’s why I am part of the W3C Web ML discussion.
• My former colleague Kirupa has a nice, no-nonsense introduction to building your first PWA
• Andy Fitzgerald wrote a great piece on A List Apart about the impact of well structured HTML on getting found via conversational interfaces. Conversations with Robots: Voice, Smart Agents & the Case for Structured Content has a positive outlook. I wonder though if there won’t be some random META element or special file format coming up in the nearer future. Remember when we all got excited because touch interfaces would be great for accessibility as people have to re-think their UI?

Work inspiration

• Tiffany Tseng has a nice tweet about learning to code

not sure about the plumbing / toilet analogy, but this argument from New Dark Age about why learning to code is not enough is at least thought provoking

• Cameron Adam’s The importance of craftsmanship has him pondering about our work through the genius of M.C. Escher.

We need more people who are willing to travel that distance and build up the craftsmanship that produces great work. So take pride in your craft. Take interest in learning. And create great things.

• Peter Welch’s Programming sucks is almost five year old but still full of gems:

This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

• I want to learn how to maintain software is an interesting request, but, to me, incredibly important. We will need good maintainers seeing how much terrible code we put live right now.

References

• Sara Soueidan put together a great
  SVG Filters 101. I like SVG filters and their support across browsers is much better than the CSS ones. Seems to me applying styling in the markup rather than CSS is the reason they are not that popular.
• Andrew William Watson put together an excellent 101 Bash Commands and Tips for Beginners to Experts about all things command line

Meta stuff, long reads

• Ruben Verborgh has a lot to say about Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
• 11,000 Digitized Books From 1923 are now available online at the Internet Archive