You Will Always Have More Problems Than Engineers
- Matt Schellhas tl;dr: "Yet as companies far and wide try to use technology to solve the world’s ills, they grapple with an inviolable truth: there always will be more problems than engineers... that has consequences," which Matt discusses here.featured in #335
The Slow March Of Progress in Programming Language Tooling
- Adam Gordon Bell tl;dr: "My thesis is that the tooling and developer experience for programming languages is improving over time, but mainly in new languages. It goes like this: Tooling innovation happens, new languages adopt and standardize on it, and end up incrementally better than existing languages. If you add up enough of these increments, the older languages, which may have pioneered some of these innovations, seem painful and antiquated."featured in #335
Code Bloat Has Become Astronomical
- Cliff Harris tl;dr: "If I’m right and conservatively, we have 99% wastage on our PCS, we are wasting 99% of the computer energy consumption too. This is beyond criminal. And to do what? I have no idea, but a quick look at task manager on my PC shows a metric fuckton of bloated crap doing god knows what."featured in #327
Firefox Rolls Out Total Cookie Protection By Default To All Users Worldwide
tl;dr: "Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit. Instead of allowing trackers to link up your behavior on multiple sites, they just get to see behavior on individual sites. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website."featured in #326
The Collapse Of Complex Software
- Nolan Lawson tl;dr: Nolan discusses the trends causing increasingly complex software, such as commercial pressure or misaligned incentives. "It takes a lot of discipline to resist complexity, to say “no” to new boxes and arrows. To say, “No, we won’t solve that problem, because that will just introduce 10 new problems that we haven’t imagined yet.” Or to say, “Let’s go with a much simpler design, even if it seems amateurish, because at least we can understand it.” Or to just say, “Let’s do less instead of more.”featured in #324
The Demise Of The Mildly Dynamic Website
- Hugo Landau tl;dr: Hugo discusses the rise and decline of sites described as "mildly dynamic," which customize minor elements of a webpage but are, essentially static. Also, this post forecasts how these tools will play out and where opportunities lie.featured in #314
Things That Used To Be Hard And Are Now Easy
- Julia Evans tl;dr: (1) SSL certificates, with Let’s Encrypt (2) Concurrency, with async/await (in several languages) (3) Centering in CSS, with flexbox / grid. (4) Building fast programs with Go, and many more.featured in #295
The Major Software Industry Trends From 2021 And What To Watch In 2022
- Daniel Bryant Wesley Reisz tl;dr: (1) Hybrid working is here to stay but key questions remain e.g. how many days a week should we be in the office? (2) Companies that have been effective at developing loosely coupled systems - often with a microservices architecture - were better set up to work remotely and using a distributed approach. (3) Three interesting developments in the data engineering and AI/ML space in 2021, outlined here, and more.featured in #288
Making The Web Better. With Blocks!
- Joel Spolsky tl;dr: "You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long list of potential blocks that you can insert into this page." Joel thought it would be cool if blocks were interchangeable and reusable across the web, and is creating the Block Protocol doing just that, discussed here.featured in #286
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