John’s Blog

It's a new year, and a good time for optimism and looking forward. I'm certainly not alone in trying to move on. The past year certainly sure has been something to wish away.

There's still much work to be done to fight this virus. There's still civil unrest and significant racial problems to focus on. The politics of this country don't seem to be slowing down. Just because a number on a calendar is different today than last week doesn't mean our problems are solved. But it's still a chance to stop and consider what's next.

Hopefully 2021 is a year of being nicer to one another, being more compassionate for your fellow man, and being more respectful of this planet we call home.

I'm not into resolutions but I do have some things I'd like to do differently and not at all in 2021. There's no better time to start moving forward than now.

Here's to 2021.

Mike Davidson, providing a proper eulogy for Flash which is about to reach end of life support in a few days:

Then one day in 1997, I clicked on a link to Kanwa Nagafuji’s Image Dive site and the whole trajectory of web design changed for me. It looked like nothing I had ever seen in a web browser. A beautiful, dynamic interface, driven by anti-aliased Helvetica type and buttery smooth vector animation? And the whole thing loaded instantly on a dial-up connection with nothing suspicious to install? What was this sorcery? Sadly, I can’t find any representation of the site online anymore, but imagine the difference in going not just from black-and-white TV to color TV, but from newspaper to television.

Nagafuji’s work was such a huge, unexpected leap from everything that came before it that I had to figure out how it was done. A quick View Source later revealed an object/embed tag pointing to a file that ended in “.swf”. A few AltaVista searches later led me to the website of Macromedia, makers of ShockWave Flash (“SWF”), the technology that powered this amazing site.

I downloaded a trial version and was blown away at the editing interface. Instead of a shotgun marriage of Photoshop, HTML, browser hacks, and a bunch of other stuff that felt more like assembly than design, here was a single interface to lay out text, shapes, images, and buttons, and animate everything together into an interactive experience! It was magic.

Flash was amazing for a few years before browsers started to catch up and standardize around modern features like, ahem, custom fonts.

This piece is a trip down memory lane for me. I’m so glad Flash is gone but like Mike, I am glad it did exist for a time.

An interesting visual analysis of Google Trends and searches throughout 2020 by Stef W. Kight and Axios:

If you’re feeling extra tired this holiday season, blame the non-stop news cycle of 2020, as visualized in Axios’ fourth annual Google Trends chart.

Why it matters: From a pandemic to multi-city protests to contested elections, 2020 has been one unprecedented crisis after another. “We have never seen a year like this in Google Trends history,” Simon Rogers, a Google data editor, told Axios.“These were huge stories that changed how we search.”

Hotwire, a new framework from the folks at Basecamp and Hey.com was released this week. It’s short for HTML-over-the-wire (HOT-wire), which is very clever and also quite a novel concept these days.

Hotwire is an alternative approach to building modern web applications without using much JavaScript by sending HTML instead of JSON over the wire. This makes for fast first-load pages, keeps template rendering on the server, and allows for a simpler, more productive development experience in any programming language, without sacrificing any of the speed or responsiveness associated with a traditional single-page application.

Complete with a lovely and efficient screencast of DHH walking through the entire setup in a standard Rails app:

<iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/eKY-QES1XQQ?controls=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>

This looks very nice. Excited to give it a spin in the new year. It’s very similar to my own existing patterns, but with a bit more polish.

Acclaimed filmmaker Peter Jackson has released an exclusive sneak peek of his upcoming documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” for fans everywhere to enjoy.

The 5-minute special look is available to fans worldwide on TheBeatles.com and streaming on Disney+.

Jackson said, “We wanted to give the fans of The Beatles all over the world a holiday treat, so we put together this five-minute sneak peek at our upcoming theatrical film ‘The Beatles: Get Back.’ We hope it will bring a smile to everyone’s faces and some much-needed joy at this difficult time.”

This made my day yesterday.

Kurt Wagner and Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg:

Facebook Inc. lashed out at Apple Inc. in a series of full-page newspaper ads, claiming the iPhone maker’s coming mobile software changes around data gathering and targeted advertising are bad for small businesses.

The ads, which ran Wednesday in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, carried the headline “We’re standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere.” They home in on upcoming changes to Apple’s iOS 14 operating system that will curb the ability of companies like Facebook to gather data about users and ply them with targeted advertising.

Alex Hern, summarizing nicely for The Guardian:

The point of contention is a feature coming to iPhones in the new year that will require developers to ask for permission before they can track what users do across apps. Apple says the feature, which was originally slated for launch in October before being delayed in order to allow advertisers time to cope, is necessary to protect user privacy; it comes alongside a number of similar changes in new versions of iOS, such as a requirement that app developers provide a “nutritional label” for their software to explain what they do with user data.

Facebook objects – but seems keen to stress it is not doing so because it is defending its bottom line. According to its pitch, the real victims are “your neighbourhood coffee brewery, your friend who owns their own retail business, your cousin who started an event planning service and the game developers who build the apps you use for free”.

“Yes, there will be an impact to Facebook’s diversified ads business,” said Dan Levy, the company’s head of ads and business products, “but it will be much less than what will befall small businesses, and we’ve already been factoring this into our expectations for the business.”

It’s pretty rich to see Facebook taking the angle of ‘standing up for the little guy.’ They’ve been getting away with a complete disregard for user privacy for a long time.

Danah Boyd:

Inside tech companies, there is often a more important but less visible role when it comes to getting things done. To those on the outside, a VP title appears far less powerful, far less important than a C-Suite title. If you’re not a tech geek, a VP of Engineering might appear less important than a CTO. But in my experience, finding the right VP of Engineering is more essential than getting a high profile CTO when a system is broken. A VP-Eng is a fixer, someone who looks at broken infrastructure with a debugger’s eye and recognizes that the key to success is ensuring that the organizational and technical systems function hand-in-hand. While CTOs are often public figures in industry, a VP-Eng tends to shy away from public attention, focusing most of their effort on empowering their team to do great things. VP-Engs have technical chops, but their superpower comes from their ability to manage large technical teams, to really understand the forest and see what’s getting in the way of achieving a goal so that they can unblock that and ensure that their team thrives. A VP-Eng also understands that finding and nurturing the right talent is key to success, which is why they tend to spend an extraordinary amount of time recruiting, hiring, training, and mentoring.

Good take, I agree with the thinking here.

I also think, more than anything, it would help our government to not focus entirely on people from big tech companies to run the show at a federal level.

Dylan Field, co-founder of Figma, writing about the company’s five year anniversary of launching on the web:

We didn’t realize that launching Figma was heresy, a generational assault on top-down, siloed models of decision making and a challenge to the identity of many designers. While some immediately understood the potential of building design software in the browser, our vision elicited an immediate and negative reaction from others. Some even told us that if this was the future of design, they were changing careers.

I remember when I first heard about Figma. It was at a Layers conference a few years ago and I thought the concept was cool, but wasn’t going to go anywhere. First: shows what I know, Figma is incredibly popular right now. And second: good for them. This is an amazing feat. I love companies that push the web forward and dream big when it comes to how we can all use it.

Initially I didn’t understand the negative reactions to Figma’s closed beta launch. I only saw the obvious benefits: a single source of truth for files, cross platform support, and multiplayer editing. Now I understand that the power of the browser lies in the broader cultural change it delivers — and this change can be scary. The browser is natively multiplayer. It forces a mindset shift on access. It strips away the need for expensive hardware. And it pushes us to embrace working together, especially when we are blocked and our default might be to hide.

This is the key. Recently I switched my workflow from Sketch to Figma as well. It’s just easier to collaborate with other folks on a project, share prototypes, and get feedback in the form of comments. It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better all of the time.

Darren Rovell with a pretty incredible story:

When the auction began, some of the prices paid seemed a bit high. Someone paid $80,000 for Johnny Bench’s last home run bat, more than double the estimate and $90,000 for his last Reds jersey, nearly five times what it figured to go for.

There was the $32,500 winning bid for his Rookie of the Year Gold Glove and a $55,000 winning bid for the same trophy he won in 1975, when the Reds won their first of two consecutive titles. His championship rings from the two titles went for $115,000 and $125,000, respectively.

Little did Bench know that the person bidding on these items was Alan Horwitz, who had set up with the auction house to do whatever it took to buy the items back so that Johnny could have them again.

Filed under: good things can happen in 2020 after all.

Jon Levine on The Cloudflare Blog:

In September, we announced that we’re building a new, free Web Analytics product for the whole web. Today, I’m excited to announce that anyone can now sign up to use our new Web Analytics — even without changing your DNS settings. In other words, Cloudflare Web Analytics can now be deployed by adding an HTML snippet (in the same way many other popular web analytics tools are) making it easier than ever to use privacy-first tools to understand visitor behavior.

It’s limited to one domain per account for now, but the sign up process is super simple. I’m trying this out on a test project to see how it looks. Mostly because of this:

Being privacy-first means we don’t track individual users for the purposes of serving analytics. We don’t use any client-side state (like cookies or localStorage) for analytics purposes. Cloudflare also doesn’t track users over time via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other immutable attributes for the purposes of displaying analytics — we consider “fingerprinting” even more intrusive than cookies, because users have no way to opt out.

The concept of a “visit” is key to this approach. Rather than count unique IP addresses, which would require storing state about what each visitor does, we can simply count the number of page views that come from a different site. This provides a perfectly usable metric that doesn’t compromise on privacy.

Excited to give this a spin. I really want a privacy-respecting alternative to Google Analytics.

Speaking of new stuff: I spent a few days this week upgrading my new project to use Stimulus 2.0 and Tailwind CSS 2.0, both out within the past few weeks.

I’m loving this new set up. I’ve used Stimulus a ton over the past few years, so that’s not particularly new to me. Although the new data values and classes APIs are pretty handy in 2.0.

But starting a project fresh in 2020 with all of the new good stuff, mostly Tailwind related, has been such a breath of fresh air. My app bundle is super small and focused on exactly what I need. I have a handful of generic Stimulus controllers that are used throughout the app to provide functionality. Nothing I’m doing there is limited to one particular context in the app: everything is reusable throughout.

There’s really never been a better time to develop for the web.

Rails 6.1 has been officially released. Time keeps marching forward for this framework.

There are a couple of really nice features in here I’m looking forward to working with. I’ve been resisting using the new multi-db features for a while now and it might be perfect timing for me on Air Mail. Not that there’s anything wrong with the features, but mostly because I didn’t want to introduce extra complexity until it was absolutely necessary.

We’re currently storing a ton of user-related data (subscriptions, invoicing, preferences, usage, etc) and a totally separate set of editorial data (photos, articles, revision history, etc). I’m thinking it might be really nice to separate the two distinct functions out since they don’t need to do anything together. Then I can scale each piece of the pie independently. We’ll see.

Anyways, congrats to the Rails team. This is a great release.

I thought this was interesting. A roundup of how president-elect Biden consumes his media, written by Daniel Lippman:

Biden is a devoted fan of the Apple News app on his iPhone, and frequently scrolls through it when he’s in a car, on a plane or just has some down time. (Playing chess and solitaire on his phone are also favorite activities.) He has the New York Times app on his phone, and a former Biden staffer said that when he was in the White House last time, Biden had the POLITICO app and checked it regularly.

He has the phone’s push notifications turned on: On the campaign trail, another Biden aide said, Biden would take meetings with his iPhone on the table in front of him and would get alerts from news apps. (The Biden aide declined to comment when asked if Biden still has his iPhone or if it’s having its security upgraded given that he’s about to become president.)

The Markup:

People build scrapers that can find every Applebee’s on the planet or collect congressional legislation and votes or track fancy watches for sale on fan websites. Businesses use scrapers to manage their online retail inventory and monitor competitors’ prices. Lots of well-known sites use scrapers to do things like track airline ticket prices and job listings. Google is essentially a giant, crawling web scraper.

Scrapers are also the tools of watchdogs and journalists, which is why The Markup filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court this week that threatens to make scraping illegal.

I’ve become quite a fan of The Markup’s work over the past year or so. They are fighting for important causes in the modern tech world, especially user and data privacy. They created the Blacklight, a really cool service that inspects web pages and reports on trackers.

This piece on scraping really hits home for me too. A few years ago, I co-founded and then sold a startup almost entirely based on scraping tech that I created. It was really fun and would have never been possible without web scrapers like Google.

The big news this week is that Slack has been acquired by Salesforce, as has been rumored recently. It’s a big deal: $27.7 billion.

Since I first saw it years ago, I’ve really loved Slack. We were using HipChat at the time and it was totally fine. Campfire was also around and doing very well in the space too. But Slack was such a breath of fresh air in the group chat market. It was well designed, fussy about typography, and has always been fast and feature-rich. I still wish that they would make a truly native Mac app so we weren’t stuck with the web UI, but it’s not the end of the world.

I’ve seen quite the consternation around the web about how Salesforce is bad and this is bad news for Slack. I think quite the opposite. Slack is currently running up against Microsoft Teams, a product that Microsoft is giving away for basically free with its Office 365 services. It’s the same reason so many companies have turned to SharePoint and other garbage Microsoft products over the years that have snuffed out great competition: it comes with Office for free. This is a bad thing for the industry and we need companies like Slack around. (Nothing against Microsoft Teams, by the way. It seems like it has its fans.) Salesforce buying Slack gives it the long-term support it will need. It’s not just a small player anymore, it’s part of a much bigger ecosystem.

Salesforce also acquired Heroku nearly a decade ago and there was much of the same concern then as there is now with Slack. I think Salesforce has done a fine job managing Heroku. Like Slack, I use Heroku every single day and it’s a great service. It could be better, of course. But that has nothing to do with Salesforce’s ownership.

Call me optimistic about Slack’s future. I’m excited to see how this goes.