2022.11.07 - Tim Berners-Lee: Web3 is not the web at all

Title: 2022.11.07 – Tim Berners‑Lee: Web3 Is Not the Web at All

Web3 & Reinvent the browser & Clean code & 10x engineering organizations & Recognize reality, focus on growth

This Week’s Highlights

Web inventor Tim Berners‑Lee wants us to “ignore” Web3: “Web3 is not the web at all.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/04/web-inventor-tim-berners-lee-wants-us-to-ignore-web3.html
“Blockchain protocols may be good for some things but they’re not good for Solid,” the web‑decentralization project led by Berners‑Lee, he said. “They’re too slow, too expensive, and too public. Personal data stores have to be fast, cheap, and private.” “Ignore the Web3 stuff, the random Web3 that was built on blockchain,” he added. “We’re not using that for Solid.” Related: Accelerating the energy transition with Web3 technologies, Can Web3 beat public cloud?.

Why one web pioneer thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23428862/arc-browser-web-company-darin-fisher
Darin Fisher has been working on browsers since practically the beginning. And he’s ready to finally build the one he’s been waiting for. Related: The Browser Company – Building Arc.

Is Turbopack really 10× faster than Vite?
https://github.com/yyx990803/vite-vs-next-turbo-hmr/discussions/8
As the author of Vite, I am glad to see a well‑funded company like Vercel making significant investments into improving frontend tooling. We may even leverage Turbopack in Vite in the future where applicable. I believe healthy competition in the OSS space eventually benefits all developers. However, I also believe that OSS competition should be based on open communication, fair comparisons, and mutual respect. It is disappointing and concerning to see aggressive marketing using cherry‑picked, non‑peer‑reviewed, borderline‑misleading numbers typically only found in commercial competition. As a company built on top of its OSS success, I believe Vercel can do better.

Design Principles for the Web
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q03gUCB690
Designing and developing on the web can feel like a never‑ending crusade against the unknown. Design principles are one way of unifying your team to better fight this battle. But in addition to the principles specific to your product or service, there are core principles underpinning the very fabric of the World Wide Web itself. Together, we’ll dive into applying these design principles to build websites that are resilient, performant, accessible, and beautiful.

When clean code becomes harmful
http://blog.wolksoftware.com/when-clean-code-becomes-harmful
Writing clean code is not what makes a developer a great developer. A great developer should:

• Be obsessed with delivering customer value.
• Have good judgment for reaching compromises between code quality and customer value.
• Try to write clean code but know when to stop pursuing it.
• Know that not all parts of a solution are equally critical and will only pursue clean code when it’s worth it. For example, interfaces are much more important than implementations. If you get interfaces right, replacing implementations over time should not be a problem.

We should aim to write “good enough” software while remembering that developers don’t get to decide when software is good enough: users do.

Why Functional Programming Should Be the Future of Software Development
https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming
It’s hard to learn, but your code will produce fewer nasty surprises.

Deep Reads

A Love Letter to React
https://fly.io/blog/love-letter-react/
My previous attempts at drive‑by learning other reactive frameworks of the day were not so successful. Phoenix borrowed a lot from React when we first shipped LiveView in 2018, but only recently have we gone all‑in with an HTML‑aware component system in Phoenix 1.7. It’s hard to imagine building applications any other way. What follows is a heartfelt homage to React’s impact on the front‑end and back‑end world, and how Phoenix landed where it did thanks to the revelations React brought almost ten years ago.

What is a realm in JavaScript?
https://weizman.github.io/page-what-is-a-realm-in-js/
The realm security field is far from being properly addressed, and I hope to gradually fix that starting by introducing the first open‑source realms security tool—Snow‑JS ❄️ by LavaMoat 🌋 (stay tuned). But in order for any of this to make sense, we must first understand what realms are—and apparently that’s not an easy question to answer in a correct, yet informal and educational way.

Is There Too Much CSS Now?
https://css-tricks.com/is-there-too-much-css-now/
As front‑end developers, we’ve wished for a lot of things over the years—ways to center things in CSS, encapsulate styles, set an element’s aspect ratio, get finer‑grained control over our colors, select an element based on its children’s properties, manage layers of specificity, allow elements to respond to the width of their parents… the list goes on and on. And now that we got all we wished for and more, some of us are asking—do we now have too much CSS? Related: OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL, Speedy CSS Tip! Animated Gradient Text.

Talk Emoji to Me: The Science Behind Why We Love These Tiny Pictures
https://discord.com/blog/talk-emoji-to-me-survey-the-science-behind-emojis
To further understand the magic behind emojis—both on and off Discord—we surveyed 16,000 people around the world 🌎 to learn why they’re beloved by so many.

5 Mistakes That Kill Collaboration Between Designers and Developers
https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/mistakes-that-kill-collaboration-between-designers-and-developers/
We’ve looked at how to make it easier for designers and developers to work together. But what roadblocks and workflows work against this collaboration? We’ve researched common mistakes design teams and product managers make when working with software engineers and how they can collaborate better. Reducing friction and roadblocks creates a smoother product development process while increasing design’s value.

Embedded programming is like web development
https://the.scapegoat.dev/embedded-programming-is-like-web-development/
I have learned a lot from working in both domains and have carried over not just ideas but actual code and tooling. Framing embedded development as low‑level systems requiring advanced skills versus web development as a free‑for‑all, low‑hanging fruit obscures how similar they are. Both are hard to get right, both benefit from a holistic systems approach, and actual code and tooling carry over surprisingly easily. I plan for this to become a longer series that explores what I learned in my career in web and embedded, so stay tuned!

**Performance: Rust and its relationship w

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Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.