i recorded a talk for jamstackconf.com — — about whether you should build multi-page apps (MPAs) or single-page apps (SPAs). spoiler: the answer is 'neither'. or 'both', depending on your definitions.
here's the condensed tweet thread version:
i sometimes get exasperated at the get-off-my-lawn mentality of people who reflexively deride SPAs, but the truth is they're kind of right: SPAs have ruined the web. the median MPA is better than the median SPA.
Jun 27, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The more I use HEY, the more I think it makes the case for 'modern' SSR'd SPA-ish development, rather than the Rails+Turbolinks+Stimulus model. I realise it's v1, but there are some rough edges that will be hard to fix, that you just don't expect to see in an app in 2020.
One example: if you have lots of unreads (which I always do 🙃), you might scroll to find a specific one, which causes additional emails to load (it starts with 30). Open it, navigate back, and your scroll position is lost — you're back at the top with the initial 30. That's bad.
May 12, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I don't like this trend.
I know a lot of you are going to turn Reply Guy on me, but I don't think it's good for humanity for everyone to work from home. Thread:
When I moved to London, then NYC, I knew almost no-one. I was able to form deep, meaningful friendships largely because I worked in offices with people. I can maintain those pre-existing relationships now, but I think I'd struggle to form similar new ones if we all WFH'd.
Nov 30, 2019 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
Several people have asked me to make a @sveltejs version of this interesting demo that's doing the rounds, which purports to show how fast React can be with 'scheduling'. Let's take a look!
) Here's a summary thread:
'Write Less, Do More' is the jQuery slogan. jQuery changed my life: I was working at a newsroom in South London, trying to learn to code so I could do e.g. fancy interactive dataviz like the big guys were doing, and I doubt I would have succeeded without it.
Sep 29, 2019 • 13 tweets • 8 min read
Today we published an important article on child sexual abuse imagery. Content warning: graphic descriptions of child sexual assault. This is the first part of a months-long investigation by @mhkeller and @gabrieldancenytimes.com/interactive/20…@mhkeller@gabrieldance Quick thread about the visual elements of the story. We open with an avalanche of images that document the abuse, provided by the Canadian Center for Child Protection, obscured using a technique devised to protect both the abused and the analysts who work with the material.
May 8, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Let's say your Pulitzer Prize-winning colleagues have unearthed new tax information about the president, and need you to make a bar chart to illustrate their findings. Bar charts are easy, right? But there's a catch. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
By the mid-90s, the losses are large enough that to do them justice would take more vertical space than we can allow for the chart. So we decide to let the bars break out of the chart boundary and into the text.
Apr 23, 2019 • 19 tweets • 14 min read
My talk from @YGLF_IL, 'Rethinking Reactivity', went online yesterday — . You probably don't have time to watch a 35 minute video though, so I'm going to pull out a few key slides into a quick tweet thread:
@YGLF_IL The talk is about how we can fuse ancient wisdom with modern techniques in such a way that front end development survives the coming tectonic shift — the embedded web.
Jul 18, 2018 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Happy to oblige! The biggest reason that a few frameworks dominate the landscape is probably straightforward inertia. Most devs (those of use who chat about this stuff on Twitter are NOT representative) don't want to investigate and learn alternatives; they have better things 1/
to do, and engineering PMs aren't picking the 'best' technology, they're picking the safe one that means they'll be able to hire some poor sap to maintain everything a couple of years down the line. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. These dynamics favour incumbents. 2/
Oct 26, 2017 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
It took the whole day, but I finally got a simple Node app to work that requires you to log in with your Twitter account. So now, a rant:
Maybe I'm just a shitty programmer, but this stuff is *unbelievably complicated*. Let's start with Twitter's API documentation, which
