Anselm Hannemann | The Blog Pros

September 13, 2019

Monthly Web Development Update 9/2019: Embracing Basic And Why Simple Is Hard

Anselm Hannemann

2019-09-13T13:17:00+02:00 2019-09-14T23:36:11+00:00

Editor’s note: Please note that this is the last Monthly Web Development Update in the series. You can still follow the Web Development Reading List on Anselm’s site at https://wdrl.info. Watch out for a new roundup post format next month here on Smashing Magazine. A big thank-you to Anselm for sharing his findings and his thoughts with us during the past four years.

Do we make our lives too complex, too busy, and too rich? More and more people working with digital technology realize over time that a simple craft and nature are very valuable. The constant hunt to do more and get more productive, with even leisure activities that are meant to help us refuel our energy turning into a competition, doesn’t seem to be a good idea, yet currently, this is a trend in our modern world. After work, we feel we need to do two hours of yoga and be able to master the most complex of poses, we need a hobby, binge-watch series on Netflix, and a lot more. That’s why this week I want to encourage you to embrace a basic lifestyle.

“To live a life in which one purely subsists on the airy cream puffs of ideas seems enviably privileged: the ability to make a living merely off of one’s thoughts, rather than manual or skilled labor.”

— Nadia Eghbal in “Basic”

What does basic stand for? Keep it real, don’t constantly do extra hours, don’t try to pack your workday with even more tasks or find more techniques to make it more efficient. Don’t try to hack your productivity, your sleep, let alone your meditation, yoga, or other wellness and sports activities. Do what you need to do and enjoy the silence and doing nothing when you’re finished. Living a basic life is a virtue, and it becomes more relevant again as we have more money to spend on unnecessary goods and more technology that intercept our human, basic thoughts on things.

News

Firefox 69 is out, bringing us JavaScript public instance fields, Resize Observers, Microtask APIs, CSS overflow-block, and @supports for selectors.

General

Chris Coyier asks the question if a website should work without JavaScript in 2019. It breaks down to a couple of thoughts that mainly conclude with progressive enhancement being more important than making a website work for users who actively turned off JavaScript.

Privacy

Brave’s research reveals how Google works around the legal requirements of the GDPR directive on its DoubleClick service, exposing private user data to millions of websites without any control.

UI/UX

In our modern world, it’s easy to junk things up. We’re quick to add more questions to research surveys, more buttons to a digital interface, more burdens to people. Simple is hard.

Web Performance

So many users these days use the Internet with a battery-driven device. The WebKit team shares how web content can affect power usage and how to improve the performance of your web application and save battery.

Visualization of high impact on the battery when scrolling a page with complex rendering and video playback. — Scrolling a page with complex rendering and video playback has a significant impact on battery life. But how can you make your pages more power efficient? (Image credit)

JavaScript

Philip Walton shows how we can use native JavaScript modules in production today.

Tooling

There’s a new tool in town if you want to have a status page for your web service: The great people from Oh Dear now also provide status pages.
Bastian Allgeier shares his thoughts on simplicity on the web, where we started, and where we are now. Call it nostalgic or not, the times when we simply uploaded a file via FTP and it was live on servers were easy days. Now with all the CI/CD tooling around, we have gotten many advantages in terms of security, version management, and testability. However, a simple solution looks different.

Accessibility

Adrian Roselli shares why we shouldn’t under-engineer text form fields and why the default CSS that comes with the browser usually isn’t enough. A pretty good summary of what’s possible, what’s necessary, and how to make forms better for everyone visiting our websites. It even includes high-contrast mode, dark mode, print styles, and internationalization.

Work & Life

Adam Blanchard summarized his notes and thoughts from TechFestival in Copenhagen and shares behaviors that transform organizations.
Claire Lew explains why the question of how to motivate employees is misguided and how great managers support their employees’ thoughts and ideas to foster self-motivation.
A lot of developers hate to be interrupted as it can harm productivity for hours. Samuel Taylor wrote a thought-provoking article to help us understand why a “developers vs. others” mentality decreases trust in a team and how you can take matters into your own hands, asking yourself why people interrupt you and take this as a chance to improve.
Nadia Eghbal shares why externalizing all our thoughts is not only a good thing. Embracing the basic in our lives is a virtue we should focus on more and this article is great food to make us think.
A method to solve the problem of that one thing on our task list that is “so meaningful and important that it brings up a ton of uncertainty for us, and causes us to avoid, run, distract, comfort, procrastinate.”

Going Beyond…

Snøhetta’s Powerhouse Brattørkaia produces twice the energy it uses with clever architecture and technology like solar panels all over the place. Isn’t that an office building we’d love to go to for work?
It might be that scientists have been underestimating the pace of climate change as the sea temperature measurements which were made in the past decade lacked accuracy.
This isn’t business as usual. Business as usual has time but we can use a short break to finally start shaping our future. From September 20th to 27th, millions will join young climate strikers on the streets and demand an end of the age of fossil fuels. I’m ready and will support this movement. Let’s do our best to cut down emissions — by driving less or flying less, especially if it’s “for fun”. Together we can change everything.

—Anselm

(cm)

August 16, 2019

Monthly Web Development Update 8/2019: Strong Teams And Ethical Data Sensemaking

Anselm Hannemann

2019-08-16T13:51:00+02:00 2019-08-16T19:06:00+00:00

What’s more powerful than a star who knows everything? Well, a team not made of stars but of people who love what they do, stand behind their company’s vision and can work together, support each other. Like a galaxy made of stars — where not every star shines and also doesn’t need to. Everyone has their place, their own strength, their own weakness. Teams don’t consist only of stars, they consist of people, and the most important thing is that the work and life culture is great. So don’t do a moonshot if you’re hiring someone but try to look for someone who fits into your team and encourages, supports your team’s values and members.

In terms of your own life, take some time today to take a deep breath and recall what happened this week. Go through it day by day and appreciate the actions, the negative ones as well as the positive ones. Accept that negative things happen in our lives as well, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to feel good either. It’s a helpful exercise to balance your life, to have a way of invalidating the feeling of “I did nothing this week” or “I was quite unproductive.” It makes you understand why you might not have worked as much as you’re used to — but it feels fine because there’s a reason for it.

News

Three weeks ago we officially exhausted the Earth’s natural resources for the year — with four months left in 2019. Earth Overshoot Day is a good indicator of where we’re currently at in the fight against climate change and it’s a great initiative by people who try to give helpful advice on how we can move that date so one day in the (hopefully) near future we’ll reach overshoot day not before the end of the year or even in a new year.
Chrome 76 brings the prefers-color-scheme media query (e.g. for dark mode support) and multiple simplifications for PWA installation.

UI/UX

There are times to use toggle switches and times not to. When designers misuse them, it leads to confused and frustrated users. Knowing when to use them requires an understanding of the different types of toggle states and options.
Font Awesome introduced Duotone Icons. An amazing set that is worth taking a look at.

JavaScript

Ben Frain explores the possibility of building a Progressive Web Application (PWA) without a framework. A quite interesting article series that shows the difference between relying on frameworks by default and building things from scratch.

Web Performance

Some experiments sound silly but in reality, they’re not: Chris Ashton used the web for a day on a 50MB budget. In Zimbabwe, for example, where 1 GB costs an average of $75.20, ranging from $12.50 to $138.46, 50MB is incredibly expensive. So reducing your app bundle size, image size, and website cost are directly related to how happy your users are when they browse your site or use your service. If it costs them $3.76 (50MB) to access your new sports shoe teaser page, it’s unlikely that they will buy or recommend it.
BBC’s Toby Cox shares how they ditched iframes in favor of ShadowDOM to improve their site performance significantly. This is a good piece explaining the advantages and drawbacks of iframes and why adopting ShadowDOM takes time and still feels uncomfortable for most of us.
Craig Mod shares why people prefer to choose (and pay for) fast software. People are grateful for it and are easily annoyed if the app takes too much time to start or shows a laggy user interface.
Harry Roberts explains the details of the “time to first byte” metric and why it matters.

CSS

Yes, prefers-reduced-motion isn’t super new anymore but still heavily underused on the web. Here’s how to apply it to your web application to serve a user’s request for reduced motion.

HTML & SVG

With Chrome 76 we get the loading attribute which allows for native lazy loading of images just with HTML. It’s great to have a handy article that explains how to use, debug, and test it on your website today.

Accessibility

The best algorithms available today still struggle to recognize black faces equally good as white ones. Which again shows how important it is to have diverse teams and care about inclusiveness.

Security

Here’s a technical analysis of the Capital One hack. A good read for anyone who uses Cloud providers like AWS for their systems because it all comes down to configuring accounts correctly to prevent hackers from gaining access due to a misconfigured cloud service user role.

Privacy

Safari introduced its Intelligent Tracking Prevention technology a while ago. Now there’s an official Safari ITP policy documentation that explains how it works, what will be blocked and what not.
SmashingMag launched a print and eBook magazine all about ethics and privacy. It contains great pieces on designing for addiction, how to improve ethics step by step, and quieting disquiet. A magazine worth reading.

Work & Life

“For a long time I believed that a strong team is made of stars — extraordinary world-class individuals who can generate and execute ideas at a level no one else can. These days, I feel that a strong team is the one that feels more like a close family than a constellation of stars. A family where everybody has a sense of predictability, trust and respect for each other. A family which deeply embodies the values the company carries and reflects these values throughout their work. But also a family where everybody feels genuinely valued, happy and ignited to create,” said Vitaly Friedman in an update thought recently and I couldn’t agree more.
How do you justify a job in a company that has a significant influence on our world and our everyday lives and that not necessarily with the best intentions? Meredith Whittaker wrote up her story of starting at Google, having an amazing time there, and now leaving the company because she couldn’t justify it anymore that Google is using her work and technology to get involved in fossil energy business, healthcare, governance, and transportation business — and not always with the focus on improving everyone’s lives or making our environment a better place to live in but simply for profit.
Synchronous meetings are a problem in nearly every company. They take a lot of time from a lot of people and disrupt any schedule or focused work. So here’s how Buffer switched to asynchronous meetings, including great tips and insights into why many tools out there don’t work well.
Actionable advice is what we usually look for when reading an article. However, it’s not always possible or the best option to write actionable advice and certainly not always a good idea to follow actionable advice blindly. That’s because most of the time actionable advice also is opinionated, tailored, customized advice that doesn’t necessarily fit your purpose. Sharing experiences instead of actionable advice fosters creativity so everyone can find their own solution, their own advice.
Sam Clulow’s “Our Planet, Our Problem” is a great piece of writing that reminds us of who we are and what’s important for us and how we can live in a city and switch to a better, more thoughtful and natural life.
Climate change is a topic all around the world now and it seems that many people are concerned about it and want to take action. But then, last month we had the busiest air travel day ever in history. Airplanes are accountable for one of the biggest parts of climate active emissions, so it’s key to reduce air travel as much as possible from today on. Coincidentally, this was also the hottest week measured in Europe ever. We as individuals need to finally cut down on flights, regardless of how tempting that next $50-holiday-flight to a nice destination might be, regardless of if it’s an important business meeting. What do we have video conferencing solutions for? Why do people claim to work remotely if they then fly around the world dozens of times in their life? There are so many nice destinations nearby, reachable by train or, if needed, by car.

Update from a team member of what happened during the week and what he’s working on — The team at Buffer shares what worked and what didn’t work for them when they switched to asynchronous meetings. (Image credit)

Going Beyond…

Leo Babauta shares a tip on how to stop overthinking by cutting through indecision. We will never have the certainty we’d like to have in our lives so it’s quite good to have a strategy for dealing with uncertainty. As I’m struggling with this a lot, I found the article helpful.
The ethical practices that can serve as a code of conduct for data sensemaking professionals are built upon a single fundamental principle. It is the same principle that medical doctors swear as an oath before becoming licensed: Do no harm. Here’s “Ethical Data Sensemaking.”
Paul Hayes shares his experience from trying to live plastic-free for a month and why it’s hard to stick to it. It’s surprising how shopping habits need to be changed and why you need to spend your money in a totally different way and cannot rely on online stores anymore.
Oil powers the cars we drive and the flights we take, it heats many of our homes and offices. It is in the things we use every day and it plays an integral role across industries and economies. Yet it has become very clear that the relentless burning of fossil fuels cannot continue unabated. Can the world be less reliant on oil?
Uber and Lyft admit that they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities. Next time you use any of those new taxi apps, try to remind yourself that you’re making the situation worse for many people in the city.

Thank you for reading. If you like what I write, please consider supporting the Web Development Reading List.

—Anselm

(cm)

July 19, 2019

Monthly Web Development Update 7/2019: Modern Techniques And Good Trouble

Anselm Hannemann

2019-07-19T14:00:00+02:00 2019-07-20T01:35:01+00:00

What can we do to cause “good trouble”? First of all, I think it needs to be friendly, helpful and meaningful actions that don’t impact other peoples’ lives. Secondly, it’s something we strongly believe in — it might be using simpler JavaScript methods, reducing the application size, a better toggle UI, publishing a book or building a business without selling user data to others. Whatever it is, it’s good to have a standpoint of view and talk about it.

It’s good to advocate others about accessibility problems, about how to listen better to others in a conversation, how to manage projects, products or even a company better. The most important thing on all these actions is to remember that they are helping other people and not impacting them as well as animals or our environment in general.

Doing something useful — as small as it might seem — is always a good thing. And don’t forget to honor your action just by smiling and being thankful for what you did!

News

Chrome 76 removes a couple of things like feature policy: lazyload, insecure usage of DeviceMotionEvent and the DeviceOrientationEvent. If you use them, please ensure you use a secure context by now or replace them by their successors.
Firefox 68 is out and this is new: BigInts for JavaScript, Accessibility Checks in DevTools, CSS Scroll Snapping and Marker Styling, access to cameras, microphones, and other media devices is no longer allowed in insecure contexts like plain HTTP. It’s now possible to resend a network request without editing the method, URL, parameters, and headers via DevTools, and a lot of (compatibility) fixes are included for CSS features as well.
Chrome 76 brings image support for the async clipboard API, making it easy to programmatically copy and paste image/png (currently, this is the only supported format though, unfortunately) images.
Tracking prevention is now available in Microsoft Edge preview, following other browsers like Safari and Firefox.

Generic

Have you heard of the concept of “good trouble”? Frank Chimero defines it as questioning and re-imagining the status quo, and having your actions stand in contrast to the norm. But the interview with the designer shows much more than a new concept, it’s challenging how we work today and how to do your own thing that doesn’t match the norm of the society.

Particularly, I like this quote here:

“Slow down, find a quiet place and create time for solitude so you can hear yourself. It’s so noisy out there.”

What if control is only an illusion? We would realize that the true nature of an experience is revealed only in the interplay with the people who use it and that an invalidated design is nothing but an opinion. Quite a thought that puts our assumptions and approach on projects into a different light.

UI/UX

Many single toggle buttons fail at either showing the current state or making the unselected option visible — here’s how to do toggle buttons and indicators the right way.

Accessibility

Lindsey Kopacz shares how we can create custom, yet keyboard accessible checkboxes with modern CSS techniques.

JavaScript

Marta Wiśniewska shares how flat(), flatMap(), and fromEntries() and other ES2019 features work and when to use them.
Addy Osmani on the cost of JavaScript in 2019. An article (or video, if you prefer) for everyone who builds JavaScript applications.

CSS

Miriam Suzanne explains CSS Custom Properties and their role in the cascade in a deep dive article.

Work & Life

Active Listening is a skill that helps us listening for meaning, and how the other person is feeling instead of that usual listening that focuses on ‘how can I reply or comment on this or how will we solve this?’. Buffer’s guide written by Marcus Wermuth is a great resource to learn and practice Active Listening.
Christoph Rumpel shares what he learned from self-publishing a book and shows interesting insights into finances of it and what to avoid or do better.
Ben Werdmüller on doing well while doing good: This is a personal story about struggling with revenue, investments, third-party capital, trying to earn money on your own by selling your product while having free competitors and how to still produce good things while doing financially well.
Shape Up — Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters is a new, free online book by Ryan Singer about project management, leading a company and product. It’s amazing and while I only had time to flick through it quickly and read some individual chapters and sections, this will definitely become a resource to save and refer to regularly.

Going Beyond…

I was in the cinema last week to watch a movie about some people who created a farm. The trailer was nice and while I wasn’t 100% convinced of it, it was an evening where I was up to go out to watch a movie. So I did and it was good that I went to see “The Biggest Little Farm”. The farmer made the film himself as he’s a wildlife filmmaker so expect some quite stunning pictures and sequences of wildlife animals in there!

The most revealing part was how much of an impact only a handful of people can make out of desert land in a few years of time, and how much we as humans can influence wildlife, give a habitat to insects, and produce quality food while including CO2 from the air into our soil to make plants grow better, in order to restore nature and make an impact in the effort to fight climate change.

At several points during the movie, I was close to tears and I was extremely thankful that I’m able to have my little garden space as well where I can do similar things (though way smaller than their farm). If you’re up for something new, to learn something about food, meat, economy and how it all connects or how to create a beautiful green space out of desert, this movie is for you.

Last but not least, solar panels are a good way to produce renewable energy and it’s good usage of roofs. In China though, air pollution is currently so bad that solar panels sometimes stop working. Another reason to act quickly! If solar panels don’t work due to missing sunrays, our bodies will suffer the same lack of sunlight and we need it for our health.

(il)

June 14, 2019

Monthly Web Development Update 6/2019: Rethinking Privacy And User Engagement

Anselm Hannemann

2019-06-14T14:30:00+02:00 2019-06-15T11:35:01+00:00

Last week I read about the web turning into a dark forest. This made me think, and I’m convinced that there’s hope in the dark forest. Let’s stay positive about how we can contribute to making the web a better place and stick to the principle that each one of us is able to make an impact with small actions. Whether it’s you adding Webmentions, removing tracking scripts from a website, recycling plastic, picking up trash from the street to throw it into a bin, or cycling instead of driving to work for a week, we all can make things better for ourselves and the people around us. We just have to do it.