Moving on from React, a Year Later

Offloading JavaScript With Custom Properties: HeydonWorks

With classes, we can send CSS static values but with custom properties we can send dynamic ones, which is a major shift in the way we can style state. This is something that has been true for some time—and is extremely well supported—but sometimes it takes solving a small real-world problem to make you appreciate the value of it.

I think we still haven’t come to fully appreciate the superpower of custom properties: dynamic values that are shared between CSS and JavaScript.

Pinboard is Eleven (Pinboard Blog)

I probably need to upgrade the Huffduffer server but Maciej nails why that’s an intimidating prospect:

Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary.

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?

We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.

This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.

Time to First Byte: What It Is and Why It Matters by Harry Roberts

Harry takes a deep dive into the performance metric of “time to first byte”, or TTFB if you using initialisms that take as long to say as the thing they’re abbreviating.

This makes a great companion piece to Drew’s article on server timing headers.

Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.

Chris broke both his arms just to avoid speaking at the JAMstack conference in London. Seems a bit extreme to me.

Anyway, to make up for not being there, he made a website of his talk. It’s good stuff, tackling the split.

It’s cool to see the tech around our job evolve to the point that we can reach our arms around the whole thing. It’s worthy of some concern when we feel like complication of web technology feels like it’s raising the barrier to entry