Qubyte Codes - IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024
Mark’s write-up of the excellent Indie Web Camp Brighton that he co-organised with Paul.
Link tags: hack
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The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden
I agree with the reasoning here—a new display value would be ideal.
Hacks Are Fine / Matt Hogg FYI
If you employ a hack, don’t be so ashamed. Don’t be too proud, either. Above all, don’t be lazy—be certain and deliberate about why you’re using a hack.
I agree that hacks for prototyping are a-okay:
When it comes to prototypes, A/B tests, and confirming hypotheses about your product the best way to effectively deliver is actually by writing the fastest, shittiest code you can.
I’m not so sure about production code though.
Ancestors and Descendants – Eric’s Archived Thoughts
Eric looks back on 25 years of CSS and remarks on how our hacks and workarounds have fallen away over time, thank goodness.
But this isn’t just a message of nostalgia about how much harder things were back in my day. Eric also shows how CSS very nearly didn’t make it. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Todd Fahrner and Tantek Çelik saved the day. If Tantek hadn’t implemented doctype switching, there’s no way that CSS would’ve been viable.
Gaming the Iron Curtain
The ZX Spectrum in a time of revolution:
Gaming the Iron Curtain offers the first book-length social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere in the Soviet bloc. It describes how Czechoslovak hobbyists imported their computers, built DIY peripherals, and discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression.
The Healing Power of Javascript | WIRED
I can very much relate to what Craig is saying here.
Enable/unmute WebAudio on iOS, even while mute switch is on
Remember when I wrote about Web Audio weirdness on iOS? Well, this is a nice little library that wraps up the same hacky solution that I ended up using.
It’s always gratifying when something you do—especially something that feels so hacky—turns out to be independently invented elsewhere.
Revisiting Adaptive Design, a lost design movement (Interconnected)
This sounds like seamful design:
How to enable not users but adaptors? How can people move from using a product, to understanding how it hangs together and making their own changes? How do you design products with, metaphorically, screws not nails?
Principles and priorities | Hacker News
I see that someone dropped one of my grenades into the toilet bowl of Hacker News.
Old CSS, new CSS / fuzzy notepad
I absolutely love this in-depth history of the web, written in a snappy, snarky tone.
In the beginning, there was no CSS.
This was very bad.
Even if you—like me—lived through all this stuff, I guarantee there’ll still be something in here you didn’t know.
Google Maps Hacks, Performance and Installation, 2020 By Simon Weckert
I can’t decide if this is industrial sabotage or political protest. Either way, I like it.
99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic
Jeremy Keith & Remy Sharp - How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days on Vimeo
Here’s the talk that Remy and I gave at Fronteers in Amsterdam, all about our hack week at CERN. We’re both really pleased with how this turned out and we’d love to give it again!
Opinion | It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning - The New York Times
The New York Times is publishing science-fictional op-eds. The first one is from Ted Chiang on the Gene Equality Project forty years in our future:
White supremacist groups have claimed that its failure shows that certain races are incapable of being improved, given that many — although by no means all — of the beneficiaries of the project were people of color. Conspiracy theorists have accused the participating geneticists of malfeasance, claiming that they pursued a secret agenda to withhold genetic enhancements from the lower classes. But these explanations are unnecessary when one realizes the fundamental mistake underlying the Gene Equality Project: Cognitive enhancements are useful only when you live in a society that rewards ability, and the United States isn’t one.
CSS-only chat
A truly monstrous async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.
This is …I mean …yes, but …it …I …
CERN Hack days – Chiteri’s Blog
Martin gives a personal history of his time at the two CERN hack projects …and also provides a short history of the universe.
First Web browser revived during hackathon - YouTube
This is the lovely little film about our WorldWideWeb hack project. It was shown yesterday at CERN during the Web@30 celebrations. That was quite a special moment.
WorldWideWeb coverage
Remy’s keeping a list of hyperlinks to stories covering our recent hack week at CERN.
n-gate.com. we can’t both be right.
Hacker News is an echo chamber focusing on computer posturing and self-aggrandizement. It is run by Paul Graham’s investment fund and sociopath incubator, Y Combinator.
There’s never been any reason to visit Hacker News, but now you really don’t need to ever go there. This site posts a weekly roundup, complete with commentary that’s even more snarky than Hacker News.
Here’s a fairly typical summary of a fairly typical thread:
A programmer at a spamhouse is transported to a world where people are not judged by the color scheme of their Atom window, but by the character assessment and culture fit reports they write about potential new hires. Hackernews spends a lot of time discussing how to bullshit people like the author into hiring them. A few Hackernews struggle with the knowledge that there are people who contribute to business without involving Git. Furious debates about “title inflation” break out amongst people who type javascript into computers and straight-facedly refer to themselves as “engineers”.
Oh, and I love the “about” page.
nexus-project / nexus-browser · GitLab
Here’s the source code for the WorldWideWeb project we did at CERN.