2024.01.15 - Recalibrating Our View of Everything

Title: 2024.01.15 – Re‑calibrating Our View of Everything

Business software htmx & Webpage & Dìshuǐshī & Calm

This Week’s Highlights

New Year, re‑calibrating our view of everything so we’re no longer off‑balance https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lGFksPU9LPxMrToFHL2xiQ
Because our perspective has shifted, people who once seemed odd now appear less strange. When we regain our balance we realize it’s we who have distorted our relationships, viewpoints, and actions. The more upright we stand, the more normal and robust the qi (vital energy) flowing through our bodies becomes. Our perception of the world becomes truer, and we become more tolerant—finally able to accept the world’s rich complexity. The more out of balance we are, the more black‑and‑white our view of the world; only as insight deepens can we see the many shades of gray.

The Future of Business‑Software Production https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/676642636
In the past few months I’ve chatted with a variety of people, gaining many insights and forming a few conclusions that I’m jotting down here. A year or two ago I was deeply involved in a medium‑to‑large‑scale business‑software development effort: building a supply‑chain procurement system from scratch. The business was fascinating and representative, but the delivery experience was, to put it mildly, a mess. Setting aside issues of timing, expectations, and domain knowledge, the project raised several points of reflection from a pure R&D‑process standpoint.

How to Interview Someone for Two Years https://mindhacks.cn/2011/11/04/how-to-interview-a-person-for-two-years/
No industry places intangible assets at the core of a company’s balance sheet like IT does. Rumor has it that Bill Gates once said something to the effect of, “Give me 100 people and I can rebuild Microsoft.” I couldn’t find the original source, but the quote underscores how heavily intellectual assets weigh in tech firms. A natural inference follows: hiring may be the single most critical decision a company makes. Joel Spolsky collected his observations, experiences, and insights on this topic in a short booklet, Smart and Gets Things Done. He opens by challenging the conventional wisdom that “product is the key to a company’s success,” arguing instead that creating the best possible environment for engineers and retaining top talent is the first—and most important—step; great products then follow naturally.

Is htmx Just Another JavaScript Framework? https://htmx.org/essays/is-htmx-another-javascript-framework/
In short, while htmx can be used as a framework, it deviates far less from the web’s native semantics than typical JavaScript frameworks, and it will automatically benefit from any improvements to those semantics without extra work from the developer, thanks to the web’s strong backward‑compatibility guarantees. If you want to build a site that endures, these qualities make htmx a substantially better bet than many of its contemporaries. Related: htmx: a new old way to build the web.

The Perfect Webpage https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization
How the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms—and into a world where websites all look the same. Related: The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn’t Exist.

Frontend Predictions for 2024 https://buttondown.email/whatever_jamie/archive/frontend-predictions-for-2024/
Jamie dresses up as a fortune‑teller, gazing into a crystal ball with astonishment.
It’s been a remarkable year for the frontend. We’ve seen a gold rush to capture—and invent—the server‑side rendering (SSR) market; the ever‑advancing tentacles of AI; a Cambrian explosion of web renderers and JS engines; a formidable line of hopefuls trying to unseat the big names from their pedestals; and movements on various other fronts. So before the traditional soothsaying of the year to come, let’s review the hotchpotch this year has been so far.

Deep Reads

When “Everything” Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024 https://socket.dev/blog/when-everything-becomes-too-much
An npm user named PatrickJS launched a troll campaign with a package called “everything,” which depends on every public npm package.

The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/goldenrules.html
I’m often asked to distill the massive body of UI design knowledge into a handful of principles. Though I was reluctant, writing a set of “Golden Rules” turned out to be a useful exercise. These principles, honed over three decades, apply to most interactive systems but still need validation and tweaking for specific domains. No list can be exhaustive, yet the original 1985 list has been well‑received as a practical guide for students and designers. Related: Design Thinking in the New Year.

The World’s Smallest PNG https://evanhahn.com/worlds-smallest-png/
The smallest PNG file is 67 bytes—a single black pixel. There’s a big twist at the end if you’re curious, but I hope you’re mainly excited to learn about PNGs.

Interdependencies in Your System of Work, and How Not to Evaluate Software Practices https://sollecitom.github.io/software-product-development-blog/posts/2024/2024-01-10-interdependencies-in-your-system-of-work/
I hear people say their team tried Trunk‑Based Development and decided it wasn’t beneficial after a couple of months. I’m not going to argue the merits of Trunk‑Based Development today—though I love the practice. Instead, I want to point out why that kind of statement is problematic. Trunk‑Based Development is a practice, and therefore part of a larger work system. A system’s performance depends on how its parts interact, not on how each part performs in isolation.

Convert the Kernel to C++ https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20240111A0794200 https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/3465e0c6-f5b2-4c42-95eb-29361481f805@zytor.com/
Both C and C++ have evolved a lot since 1999, and in my view C++ has finally “grown up” enough to be a better C for the kind of embedded programming an OS kernel embodies. I say this as someone who has written countless macro and inline‑assembly hacks in the kernel. What convinces me is that many things we recently needed as GCC‑specific extensions are relatively easy to implement in standard C++, and in many cases allow infrastructure improvements without sweeping code changes.

Between Art and Algorithms https://alexkondov.com/between-writing-and-programming/
To many, logic and art sit at opposite ends of the creativity spectrum, forcing a choice between the two. To me, they are opposite sides of the same circle, converging on absolute craftsmanship. The greatest engineering feats are works of art, and the best paintings and poems contain more logic than you might expect. Programming and writing are two sides of the same coin.

Empowering Uruguay’s Future Workforce with AI https://github.blog/2024-01-11-empowering-uruguays-future-workforce-with-ai/
During the second cycle of Git Commit Uruguay, students learned AI basics and built their own AI‑powered projects. Related:

• Introducing the GPT Store
• Introducing ChatGPT Team
• Can large language models identify and correct their mistakes?
• How Meta is advancing GenAI

The Story Continues: Announcing Version 14 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/01/the-story-continues-announcing-version-14-of-wolfram-language-and-mathematica/
Building Something Greater and Greater… for 35 Years and Counting. Today we celebrate a new waypoint on our journey of nearly four decades with the release

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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.