A year and three months later, a follow-up on leaving the web industry. I was supposed to have distanced myself from that by now, to speak about it lightly. Not true.
Disclaimer: most of the content for this article comes from a few posts of mine published between 2013 and 2014 on the blog of my then co-directed web design/dev London-based firm. Sometimes things don't change.
Applying to jobs bearing the title 'Front-end Developer' never landed well with me. Seeing how I never accepted the demise of web designer, the imposed division between developers and "UX designers" felt like the fruit of a narrow-minded vision. Without any doubt, it was a large contributor to the multiplication of horrible and unusable web products. As a designer who can code, with an extensive experience, I used to be comfortable in being present at each stage of a web production.
After spending more than two decades working for all kind of clients, building a familiarity with how browsers behave, developing a knack for making simple concepts shine, honing a natural ability to discern the best typography for each situation, I could achieve what I consider a good web design:
Creating websites that worked well on any browser, maintaining a visual consistency without obsessing over every cross-platform minute differences.
Coding with web standards for sustainability, durability, and maintainability.
Learning WCAG guidelines and ARIA roles enough to make them accessible to everyone.
Staying away from pointless buzzwords, such as "pixel-perfect", "above the fold" or any other soundbites constantly regurgitated by every recruiter in the industry — and probably by "AI" now.
Relentlessly testing my work against the proper validators.
Working with the largest clients made me realise what people want, but especially with what they don’t want. That is why I addressed accessibility and performance from the get-go, instead of an afterthought.
Reinventing the wheel
I’ve witnessed many tech fads throughout my career, especially web frameworks, with their cycle of time and energy wasted to learn the stack, only to see it slowly morphing into something different, or simply cease to exist. One recent example being JAMstack, which I kind of welcomed a while ago, before realising that it even had the JAM acronym upside down: familiarity with progressive enhancement would make it evident that Markup should come before APIs, with Javascript as a last step to add interaction, when and if needed. I get it: MAJ would not have given a VC-funded Silicon Valley startup a funky name to extract enough money.
Ironically, while each and every framework shared the same theoretical goal of stop reinventing the wheel, it ended up in a deathly spiral of doing precisely that: reinventing the wheel by using different names and architectural starting points.
I used to be baffled as to why the web industry kept behaving this way, shifting from one fragile cauldron to the next, creating unmaintainable cathedrals on quicksand while trying to reach El Dorado: the ultimate vendor lock-in. With all that's been happening over the last few years of late-stage capitalism, I now understand why.
Yet, I've always preferred to create my design and code 'system' — modular, easy to apply and adaptable, based on a solid foundation of accessibility, usability, performance. My work did NOT need Javascript or any progressive enhancement, because it should have been the foundation. Other people were supposed to improve on that, using progressive enhancement if required.
Does this mean that I'm out of the game in today's upside-down web industry? So be it. Happy to have pivoted out of it. Sitting by the river, watching the dead results passing by: a web full of crap, slow, inaccessibile, fragile, broken. Good riddance. Enjoy your JS-only designers, and the way nobody notices the oxymoron.
My tech stack was made of solid semantic HTML, even when created by either PHP or a static site generator (the Liquid template language, for example), and well-structured CSS. Jeremy Keith said, CSS is simple but not easy, which is why developers who are not familiar with web standards always fail.
Someone wrote this on their blog — and I'm royally pissed that I didn't take note of the name, or the URL:
CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap or Tailwind might be a good way to quickly work on prototypes, but they hinder knowledge of CSS. Using them as the foundation for a workflow is the telltale sign of developers who don't know how to properly approach design and web standards. Web design takes time, care, and proper testing. Trusting frameworks to do the heavy lifting is part of what make websites unusable and inaccessible today.
Hopefully, I'll find out the source one day.
Similar and related concepts are talked about in these articles:
Here is my car the day I test drove it. I went back to the dealership and bought it.
I have loved this car. Everything about it. It was so comfortable to drive. It was my daily driver and we’ve taken it across the country several times. For a 15 year old car with 170k miles it seemed to be just hitting its stride. It has served me well from daily commuting to errands to hauling 10 foot tall Christmas trees inside with the hatch closed (it had an amazing amount of interior room).
This car likely saved my life.
The guy at the collision place said that there was no way any other make of vehicle would have taken a drivers side hit that pushed the car along 15 feet by a fully loaded FedEx truck and had the driver walk away without a scratch.
The FedEx manager who came to the scene said he’s never seen a car do that much damage to the truck that hit it.
The police officer said for someone my age who has never even had so much as a moving violation, let alone an accident, I sure did pick a doozy for my first time.
I’m a bit sore this morning so will be going in for a check just to make sure all is actually well. That said, my heart is a bit broken at the loss. This was the car that Beatrix has been learning to drive and the plan was to give it to her to take to college. Those plans now have to change.
But, mainly, this is a public thank you to a car that brought me a tremendous amount of joy and utility over the years. It served me and my family gallantly.
My beloved Chevy truck will become my daily driver for now until the dust settles and I find a worthy replacement for the car. I’m thankful for that.
P.S. Thanks to all of the people, too many to name, who reached out to check on me and offer condolences. It means the world to me.
Life has gotten in the way of one of my most anticipated annual events. For the first time since the day of its official launch (barring the pandemic years), I won’t be attending the new phone model launch in person, which also means I am going to miss getting my hands on the device and forming a first opinion. I’ll have to depend on others’ opinions to inform me (and everyone else) about the device(s) being unveiled.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has done his best to steal Apple’s thunder, but given his endless micro-scoops and breathless news about new (or possibly new) products, they have started to lose meaning. Just as endless reels on Instagram or bumper-sticker wisdom on Twitter make you tune out a lot of “influencers,” the constant, endless battering of one’s attention can ruin the impact of news, although you can’t blame him for doing his job.
Still, I am excited about the day. I love my iPhone and upgrade to a new model every year—usually because it has a better battery and a better camera. Apparently, the new iPhone 17 Pro Max will have a new camera bar design that replaces the camera bump and will have a bigger battery. Sign me up!
Why do I get excited about events like the iPhone launch even now, when smartphones as we know them have clearly reached their logical conclusion? The form needs to morph into something else. We don’t quite know what, but I don’t expect the status quo to remain in five years.
The irony is that none of the phone makers are trying anything new are radical. This reminds me of the fading days of Nokia-driven smartphone boom of mid-2000s. No one, including Apple, wants to upset the proverbial apple cart. Google could be brave and create an AI-first device (instead of foldable Pixels), minus all the bloatware they push. That would be one way to seize the mandate and become the device of the next technology wave.
I do indeed have a FOMO about the future—the one I won’t experience—good or bad. Maybe it’s about getting older. Maybe it’s about understanding mortality. But I can’t help thinking about what’s next more than I should. I should enjoy the present more. In a way, I share Bob Lefsetz’s perspective. In his “birthday” post, he writes, “I ask my contemporaries if they died tomorrow would they feel ripped off. Most say no, that there are things they want to do, but if they passed they’d be satisfied with their lives. Not me! There’s so much more I want to accomplish.”
Amen, brother. I wish I could be as raw and open as Bob, but I am who I am. I love reading him just for riding his wild thought waves. Happy 72nd birthday, Bob, and may you be blessed with lots of words and even more opinions. Speaking of birthdays, that young punk, Anil Dash, has turned 50. I can still remember the day I met him.
He has a great blog post today: Five for 50. The best one for me is “Don’t wait till they are dead.”
“This one is a thing people say all the time, but I can’t emphasize enough how much it’s true: Do not wait until someone is gone to praise them, or thank them, or acknowledge them, or to tell them what you’re grateful for or how they’ve impacted your life.”
This is such a small thing, and probably the most important thing. It’s a lesson for me too—FOMO for the future has to be balanced with the joy of the present.
Allea Grummert, of Duett, and I cover the topic of being ok with constant change, a never-ending to-do list, and finding peace even though publishing online can be hard work.
Of course, I found a way to work in an illustration about gardening and a plug for Hubbub.
For the past couple of days at work I’ve been stuck doing something I’m not assigned to very often. Luckily. It’s monotone and, to be honest, painfully boring.
I can feel this droning ghost following me after work too. The absence of creativity casts a long shadow, dimming whatever spark of inspiration is left. Like a crystal without light, its prism disappears.
So I try to remind myself that even if there’s no prism to catch the eye, the crystal is still there. If I approach it from a different angle, maybe I can catch a glimpse of those beautiful colors.
One small shift to bring back some balance. To catch a little light, a little color.
Sometimes, a different angle is all we need to catch the creativity.
Dave Winer posted notes from his recent recording about why blogging lost to social networks. I’m smiling at the Radio WordLand name. My blog started on Radio Userland! (Then Movable Type → WordPress → Micro.blog.)
iPhone announcement day. I do not need a new phone, but I am curious about the iPhone Air. Years ago, I switched to the iPhone 5C just for a change, and actually liked the color and plastic. But I can’t see giving up the best cameras now. 📱
An apocalypse is always both an ending and a beginning. Lizzie Wade charts past apocalypses, correcting glib narratives that too often presume neat binaries of winners and losers, or assert that apocalypses were always complete. In fact, what happens during and after an apocalypse is never straightforward, and a great deal of adapting—and surviving—takes place amid the ruins. Wade shows how we live in a post-apocalyptic world, one wrought by colonial atrocities of which the consequences are still unfolding. But within that acknowledgement is a hint of power: if we choose to heed the lessons of the apocalypses of the past, we just might learn how to survive the one we’re in now—and all the ones ahead.
I’ve written a lot on here about Attention. What we do with it, where we put it, how it gets siphoned away online. As part of that current, I’ve been thinking more and more about taste. Where it comes from, how you cultivate it, how you hold on to it Tracy Durnell has been exploring similar territory, so credit where it’s due.
Over on Substack, for the last week or so , my notes feed has been dominated by the seasonal online debate about how genre fiction or sci-fi/fantasy “isn’t real literature” and huge comment threads about what is and isn’t ‘literary fiction’. These arguments and the behaviour of the people conducting them is of course entirely about engagement farming.
I’ve had a hard rule for almost twenty years, related to, but separate from, not posting negative things on the internet: I don’t argue with people about anything on the internet.
I grew up in the late 90’s and early 00’s on phpBB forums. At university I was immersed in the blast furnace of 4chan for days at a time. Maybe it’s the Gen-X hangover I carry as a Gen-Y geriatric millennial, but I realised in my early 20’s that I just don’t care enough. I spent whole days, whole summers even when I was younger, lost to endless back-and-forth about whether a band sold out, what sci-fi books were overrated, or particular egregiously on my side, what choice of operating system or KDE vs GNOME proved you were secretly a poser. My mind boggles at it all now, the thought of spending my youth in a permanent trial by forum post. I saw the pattern in my self, how it was making me feel and how permanently warfare online was effecting other people so I opted out.
The times I have argued about something on the internet as an adult, have all resulted from a lapse in judgement, and without exception left me feeling guilty and full of shame. Not because of what others might have thought about the argument, but because I had wasted my energy and got emotionally involved in something that just… didn’t matter.
The ad-driven narrative economy of social media has been built around using this behaviour as fuel. Flame wars, quote tweets etc juice engagement and dwell time for networks. All day long people are on the internet arguing about pointless shit. Because otherwise how else are people going to spend long enough logged in to see all the adverts?
Now, I get it, I totally do. I understand that when ones identity has been so completely ‘formatted’ by social platforms and consumer capitalism that an attack on a media property, tv show, album, podcast, game, book, football team or whatever, feels like an attack on your own identity as a person. One can’t help feel the need to go to war, to protect yourself. You aren’t the media you consume, and media properties aren’t your friends. Why argue or care about if genre fiction “is real literature” or not? I suspect its because people feel like they need validation for their choice of media diet? Validation for the amount of time and energy one has spent putting ones attention towards a certain interest. This need for validation results in people expressing their taste online, not by sharing what they love, but by fighting with someone who doesn’t.
This is why people feel the need to back up every preference with a bibliography or stats. There’s so much ablative language used online. People prefacing their joy with “I know this is cringe but” as if they need to apologise before voicing their opinion. Building shields out of caveats.
But for what? and for whom?
Mostly it’s all done to placate the opinions of people that they’ll never meet.
This is a trap. The rhetorical game that keeps the whole engine of user generated content networks humming. But you don’t actually need to play the game.
Just like stuff. That’s all.
There is a fundamental truth about the internet, and it also applies to building/having an audience: 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter. You don’t know these people, and they don’t know you. Other peoples approval won’t keep you warm but the perceived lack of it will keep you awake at night. Their disapproval also shouldn’t stop you from loving the thing. You don’t need anyones approval to post on the internet, you can just do things, and like stuff.
The only people whose opinions really matter in this world are the ones expressed from across the table. From your family and friends over dinner. The people in your life who’ll ask your recommendations because they know that your taste is your own.
If your position or thoughts on something emerge from a practice of discernment, and become an actual expression of your taste, then you don’t owe anyone an explanation about why you like (or don’t like) something.
You don’t need to defend what you like to people whose opinions shouldn’t mean anything to you.
It’s one of my favourite shows, so it was a real pleasure to join him on air. Lance has interviewed a whole cluster of online weirdos recently, and I think the pod will become a fascinating record of where a certain current of people find themselves intellectually in the mid-2020s.
Across 100 minutes we covered many of the usual hits from this blog: Solarpunk, Cultural Fracking, and the importance of Worlds as a lens. We also touched on AI in the present moment, blogging, and making podcasts, and in an unguarded aside I think I shared some spicier opinions about copyright.
Subscribing to SSRZ supports my writing, podcasts, and creative projects. As a thank you, I’ll send you a hand-made zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.
Recorded and started editing a new episode of Experience.Computer
Several Meetings and Calls
Wrote all the press and marketing copy for the game i’ve been working on. More to do
Long call / workshop about next 18-24months. On device inference and what capabilities it we might see.
The ink stamp for Family of Giants logo arrived. Unfortunately my ink pad was at the end of its life, but you get the idea:
Terminal Access
‘White People Spicy’. This recent piece in Vittles mag on how the regulation of spicy food feeds racial anxieties is really interesting!
The danger invoked by Buldak’s spiciness functioned as a proxy for many other anxieties: the xenophobia that finds public salience in questions of food and eating; fears about children’s online media consumption and the ways that the internet can encourage stupid, painful and risk-taking behaviour; and the racial disgust and desire that coalesce around spicy food products. And in doing so, the Buldak ban awakened anxieties of my own: that Asian food products, no matter how popular they become, might never escape their status as spectacle.
Part of the reason that science has been hesitant to embrace cellular-scale memory is sociological, Gunawardena said. The findings of early researchers such as Jennings and Gelber were memory-holed because they didn’t resonate with the prevailing theories of their time: Jennings’ discovery of memory in Stentor went against the dogma of “tropisms,” which inspired the behaviorist psychology dominant in Gelber’s day. Both of these views presumed a living world populated by biological automata, cycling through preprogrammed responses. Cells that can learn and adapt didn’t figure into such models.
your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.
“The new development in the twenty-first century is the rise of an almost post-economic voting block: the retired and those nearing retirement who are insulated from the day to day gyrations of the economic cycle by guaranteed pensions and asset ownership. And what is more is that they are a group whose share of the population is rising and who are much more likely to vote”.
The Dungeon Keeper story didn’t end with the original game. Late in 1997, Bullfrog and EA released a rather lazy expansion pack called The Deeper Dungeons, a collection of leftover scenarios that hadn’t made the cut the first time around, with no new campaign to connect them. Far more impressive is Dungeon Keeper 2, which arrived in the middle of 1999.
Putting it all together, when a model is a Reliable Instruction Follower, then that means it always reads its instructions and provides a useful response based on them. Simple as that.
This week I read and finished Family Wealth–Keeping It in the Family: How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations by James E. Hughes Jr.
Started reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. Still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr
Just got round to listening to the new AM sin record, which came out a few weeks ago. I’ve been waiting for a full length feature and this does not disappoint. It’s a real breath of noisy air next to all the lo-fi rock i’ve also been listening to this week. My favourite track is the remix of their previous single The Abyss by Sakr. After finishing the album I immediately went and listened to the newest Sakr album which like this track is all fat distorted kicks and snares. love it all.
Remember Kids:
Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say, “I am free to write the worst junk in the world.” You have to give yourself the space to write a lot without a destination.
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron
