Tags: reliability

Software developers have stopped caring about reliability

My web browser has been perfectly competent at submitting HTML forms for the past 28 years, but for some stupid reason some asshole developer decided to reimplement all of the form semantics in JavaScript, and now I can’t pay my electricity bill without opening up the dev tools. Imagine what it’s like to not know how to do that. Imagine if you were blind.

Folks, this is not okay. Our industry is characterized by institutional recklessness and a callous lack of empathy for our users.

On dependency | RobWeychert.com V7

I’m very selective about how I depend on other people’s work in my personal projects. Here are the factors I consider when evaluating dependencies.

• Complexity How complex is it, who absorbs the cost of that complexity, and is that acceptable?
• Comprehensibility Do I understand how it works, and if not, does that matter?
• Reliability How consistently and for how long can I expect it to work?

I really like Rob’s approach to choosing a particular kind of dependency when working on the web:

When I’m making things, that’s how I prefer to depend on others and have them depend on me: by sharing strong, simple ideas as a collective, and recombining them in novel ways with rigorous specificity as individuals.

Why Progressive Web Apps Are The Future of Mobile Web [2019 Research]

PWAs just work better than your typical mobile site. Period.

But bear in mind:

Maybe simply because the “A” in PWA stands for “app,” too much discussion around PWAs focuses on comparing and contrasting to native mobile applications. We believe this comparison (and the accompanying discussion) is misguided.

Reliable Experiences - PWA Roadshow - YouTube

A good hands-on introduction to service workers from Mariko.

The Fallacies of Distributed Computing (Applied to Front-End Performance) – CSS Wizardry – CSS Architecture, Web Performance Optimisation, and more, by Harry Roberts

Harry cautions against making assumptions about the network when it comes to front-end development:

Yet time and time again I see developers falling into the same old traps—making assumptions or overly-optimistic predictions about the conditions in which their apps will run.

Planning for the worst-case scenario is never a wasted effort:

If you build and structure applications such that they survive adverse conditions, then they will thrive in favourable ones.