2024.05.13 - Only genuine people and genuine life yield genuine knowledge

Title: 2024.05.13 – Real Life Brings Real Knowledge

Declarative Design & Google I/O & Conversation with Yu‑Bo & Open Source & Longevity Secrets

This Week’s Highlights

Declarative Design https://adactio.com/articles/21110
Ten years after John published A Dao Of Web Design on A List Apart, Ethan Marcotte published Responsive Web Design on A List Apart. The first thing he does in that article is quote John Allsopp’s A Dao Of Web Design. He was building on top of it. It was the same approach, the same mindset that underpinned responsive web design. That was 2010. And now, are we in a new era? Is it time for the next phase—a new era of declarative design, perhaps?

Google I/O – May 14, 2024 https://io.google/2024/ https://developers.googleblog.com/en/tune-in-for-google-io-on-may-14/
Discover how we’re furthering our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Related:

• Cross‑Platform development with Flutter — How Google Classroom gets teachers and students on the same page
• Kubernetes 1.30 is now available in GKE in record time
• How we developed Chrome’s first AI tools
• AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules

The Case for Human‑Centered Project Management https://www.viget.com/articles/the-case-for-human-centered-project-management/
The idea is simple: build a project ecosystem that effectively supports the real humans working within it, and those humans will be poised to do their best work and deliver a quality product every time. Let’s look at the four principles of Human‑Centered Design (and a few supporting social‑work concepts) as they relate to managing digital project ecosystems.

Deno KV Internals: Building a Database for the Modern Web https://deno.com/blog/building-deno-kv
The development of Deno KV was informed by the needs of modern web development and the possibilities presented by FoundationDB. Our emphasis has always been on functionality, scalability, and seamless JavaScript integration. Related: How to document your JavaScript package.

Conversation with Yu‑Bo: “ByteDance Was My 16th Year at Alibaba—Today Is My Last Day” https://www.xiaoyuzhoufm.com/episode/663dbcbdeb5653e14a4f814d
After leaving Alibaba, how does Yu‑Bo look back on the past 15 years of work? How does he assess himself—what can he do, what abilities does he have, where are his strengths, what value can he offer others? What is he good at, what does he struggle with, what does he enjoy? Why did he not start a startup when AI was already booming, instead of after leaving Ant Group? Why join Feishu, and why leave after less than a year? What similarities and differences does he perceive between ByteDance and Alibaba? Additional links: Yun Feng – A New Beginning, A Letter to taobao.com Users: PC Web Returns to the Scene.

In‑Depth Reading

Open Source Is at a Crossroads https://www.lightbend.com/blog/open-source-is-at-a-crossroads
Cracks are beginning to show in this global ecosystem, as many projects lack the basic funding to sustain the software that literally runs the world. Open‑source software is having a midlife crisis. Contributors are struggling to keep pace. Popular projects are making restrictive licensing changes. Back‑door threats are jeopardizing the open‑source supply chain. And no one seems to have a clear grasp of what “open” means in the context of artificial intelligence.

At Some Point, JavaScript Got Good https://jonbeebe.net/2024/05/javascript-got-good/
After the big “boost” JavaScript received with ECMAScript 2015 (ES6), the language has seen continuous improvements and just keeps getting better. Because of the wide range of implementations, using transpilers has become standard, so we can all take advantage of the newest JavaScript features on a per‑project basis without worrying (too much) about what each individual engine supports.

Design Taste vs. Technical Skills in the Era of AI https://www.nngroup.com/articles/taste-vs-technical-skills-ai/
The need for discernment is amplified when generative AI enables anyone to create anything. Creative skills will still be necessary to produce superior designs.

Development Notes from xkcd’s “Machine” https://chromakode.com/post/xkcd-machine/
On April 5th, xkcd released Machine, the 15th annual April Fools project I’ve made with them. It’s a game we’d been dreaming of for years: a giant Rube Goldberg‑style builder in the vein of the classic Incredible Machine games, assembled from a patchwork of machines created by individual xkcd readers. For more details, check out xkcd’s wonderful write‑up. This is the story of how we built Machine in three weeks and what I learned along the way.

The Evolution of Figma’s Mobile Engine: Compiling Away Our Custom Programming Language https://www.figma.com/blog/figmas-journey-to-typescript-compiling-away-our-custom-programming-language/
We’ve long written core parts of our mobile rendering architecture in Skew, the custom language we invented to squeeze extra performance out of our playback engine. Here’s how we automatically migrated Skew to TypeScript without disrupting a single day of development.

Design Docs at Google https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-google/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40273534
Design docs are a great way to gain clarity and achieve consensus around solving the hardest problems in a software project. They save money because they avoid costly coding rabbit holes that fail to meet project goals and could have been avoided with upfront investigation; they also cost money, because creation and review take time. So choose wisely for your project!

The Nature of Code (2nd Edition) https://natureofcode.com/introduction/
Over a decade ago, I self‑published The Nature of Code, an online resource and print book exploring the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software via the creative‑coding framework Processing. It’s an understatement to say that much has changed in technology and creative media since then, so here I am again with a new, rebooted version built around JavaScript and the p5.js library. The book includes a few new coding tricks, but the core remains the same—birds still flap their wings, and apples still fall on our heads.

Fresh Finds

• GitHub Copilot Chat in GitHub Mobile is now generally available
• A Single Div: a CSS drawing project by Lynn Fisher
• DerbyJS: a full‑stack framework for writing modern web applications
• Headless UI v2.0 for React
• Introducing “Unleash the Power of Scroll‑Driven Animations”
• [Exploring a 3D Text …] (content truncated)

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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.