I joined Twitter that week in March 2007. I was at SXSW when everyone was talking about it.

I remember when it was a small community of web designers talking to each other.

I remember being astounded when I got 1,000 followers. Twitter changed the course of my career and life. It provided many of us a bridge between attending a conference/event and turning brief introductions into actual relationships.

It’s how we got jobs, got gigs, found amazing people, and places to learn.

We built community here.

Web Push is coming to Safari 16 on macOS Ventura. It sends notifications even if Safari is closed. Is built with the same web technologies as other browsers. Doesn’t require an Apple Developer Program membership. And is coming to iOS and iPadOS next year.

webkit.org/blog/12824/new… For everyone rightly concerned about the user experience of Web Push in Safari — a website or web app using our implementation can only ask you for permission to send Notifications after you’ve indicated such interest with a user gesture, like clicking on a button.

What an exciting day for web developers! Let’s look at what’s in Safari 15.4… 🧵1/9

webkit.org/blog/12445/new… HTML
* lazy loading
* dialog element, with CSS :backdrop
* global autofocus attribute

2/9

You know how each browser used to have totally different technologies for making add-ons or extensions. (They weren’t even called the same thing.) And how more recently, several browsers totally changed their extensions to use a similar set of APIs as the others? Yeah. That. Now it’s official. There’s now a WebExtensions Community Group, initiated by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, for aligning on a common vision for browser extensions and to work towards future standardization. w3.org/community/webe…

Web standards. For extensions.

Remember a year ago when they kept telling us COVID was under control in NYC, & would stay under control — that we only had a few cases. Later research would show there were 100s of thousands of cases by then, soon 2 million.

We KNOW extra contagious variants are already here…

https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1361407050908057619

My advice, do not for one moment reassure yourself that “there are only a few cases of the variants”. Have you looked up how often they test samples for which variety of SARS2 it is? tl;dr: almost never. Instead assume there are 100s of thousands of cases *now*, doubling often.

It’s hard to watch people not take strict precautions against COVID, despite raging case loads all around them. All while claiming they are being careful — when it's clear they are NOT.

Then, it’s even harder when they get COVID to know what to say besides “I fucking told you.” I‘m not proud of my reaction. At all. But I have no empathy, no kindness, no caring left.

You’ve been running around, traveling, visiting, putting other people in danger — acting from of selfishness & delusion. And *now* you want other people to care about you?

Uh. I’m done.

Day 30.
Still sick.
Still well-enough to avoid the hospital, thankfully.

What does still-sick look like lately? 99.X°F Fever. No appetite. General feeling of deeply unwell. Pressure in chest, ill lungs. Oxygen saturation of 95% often. Sometimes faster breathing. Exhausted. I’ve talked to ER docs via video twice now, including recently. They say hang in there. As long as oxygen is above 91%, I’m ok. Rest. Take care. Drink fluids. Keep an eye on vitals.

“Just a flu.”
“7-10 days.”
“Mild.”
Bullshit.

I wish the news had more truth about the reality.

I’m pretty sure I have COVID-19. I’ve had symptoms for a week, and got more sick about 3 days ago. I cannot get a test in NYC, so there’s no way to know for sure, but this presents as described by international medical professionals. I haven’t left my apartment for days. Realized I need to quarantine my dog as well (she won’t get it, but could carry virus on her fur). This is why I spent two solid weeks in Feb preparing — so I can lock myself away and protect my neighbors. Especially my super & his wife.

Right now, responsible news sources & medical pros are pleading with us to avoid getting or spreading COVID-19. Asking us to stay home, cancel events, change how we live. Yes. We *must* do these things to help each other & lessen the overall impact. Collective action & benefit. And yet, this pleading with us to avoid, avoid, avoid also leaves each of us with a lot of fear & stress. What if we can't avoid it? What if it gets me?

I always find it helpful to face such fears straight on. What am I afraid of exactly? What if that happens? What's the worst?

As COVID-19 spreads in the U.S., don’t assume new cases happened because other people known to have it or be exposed (Diamond Princess passengers for example) being brought back to quarantine here. Of all cases, those are the ones that are handled quite skillfully by experts. I learned from @NYCMayor yesterday NYC is only testing people with flu symptoms who’ve travelled to China or had family/similar who did. We’ve tested 7 people total. We don’t have the ability to test in NYC.

We are not testing other patients. Not checking airport passengers.

It’s become very clear that odds are, COVID-19 will reach where you live. Rationale doctors & scientists are explaining what’s happening, and telling us quarantine measures, esp in China, have given us a gift — of time. We need to use this time to prepare. Mentally, emotionally… Think through: when will you pull your kids out of school? Where do you want to be? Do you have enough food, medicine & other daily stuff to get through an extended stay at home? What might you want to do now? How can you calmly prepare?

BTW, I agree that making a website work in IE11 is an important thing. For every project. Here are two resources for understanding how...

1) A video about IE11 & CSS Grid:

2) A 7-part series on writing CSS that works all the time: youtube.com/playlist?list=… The other common misunderstanding — people think it's a one-and-done decision. Either use Grid totally-everywhere all-in, or Nope No Grid, nowhere, on nothing. A single decision to be made for the whole website.

No, no no.... you decide for each little bit of layout...

It’s beginning to feel like the HTML-CSS-JS vs JS-JS-JS war is a class war. If your project has a budget of millions, “of course” you should use a complex build process and a JavaScript framework that handles everything (according to the folks who believe this). The pressure… The pressure to re-architect the web itself to conform to these ideas, and abandon the original design principles (HTML as a base, super robust, works with *all* devices; CSS for styling on top of that, with a cascade; JS for bonus fanciness) is fierce. Feels like a class war.

This is going to grind on me for a while. 240 characters is nowhere near enough to explain what’s wrong here. Also, I’ve learned the hardest way possible that you should never get involved with an open source project that’s making a moral plea for free labor while there’s a VC-backed startup adjacent, set to capture all the value. Turns out, “open” is usually a synonym for exploitation.

If you are a developer, and you feel bad about not knowing everything, I have one item I want you to memorize:

No one knows everything. No one.

The best coders in the world only know a small fraction of everything there is to know about coding. The only skill you need is to know 1) how to identify what you don’t know / when you don’t know something; and 2) how to look things up, how to read documentation, how to try & try & try and keep trying while things fail, until they work. That’s literally the job of writing code.

As a person who 300+ shows in my 20s, I’ve been sitting here for an hour trying to figure out how Beyoncé’s team did that show. A one time performance? On a festival stage with one hour to complete load-in? With perfect everything — sound, choreography, CAMERA, live editing… At least 1,000 people worked that show. And I’m not counting the festival staff. I mean her show. On stage, backstage, load-in, production, filming, streaming. How in the world? How? No, really, how?

I’m glad we are finally having a conversation about how horrible Facebook’s spying operation is. Can we talk about Google’s yet? We’ve let Google collect all of our email for a decade. And for many of us, all of our work documents. Their bots read & store our corporate docs. Why? And if you use Chrome, Google is watching everything you do online. If you use Android, they are collecting data history on literally everything you do — on and off line. Why do we opt into this? Because we like the UX of their their free software?