Design and Engineering, As One · Matthias Ott
A thoughtful piece by Matthias that’s a must-read for both designers and developers.
Link tags: gin
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Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity – Terrible Software
You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.
Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it.
Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.
Smaller and dumber - daverupert.com
The principle of least power expressed nicely:
Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.
Coding Is When We’re Least Productive – Codemanship’s Blog
I’ve seen so many times how 10 lines of code can end up being worth £millions, and 10,000 ends up being worthless.
The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button
Well, this is horrifying.
Blogs Are Back
A browser-based RSS reader that stores everything locally. There’s also a directory you can explore to get you started.
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.
Blog Alarm Clock | Brad Frost
See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.
CSS-in-JS: The Great Betrayal of Frontend Sanity - The New Stack
This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:
CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.
Resonance | James’ Coffee Blog
Ah, the circle of life!
What happened to the comment section? - The History of the Web
I always enjoy reading Jay’s newsletter, but this was a particularly fun trip down memory lane.
There’s a link to an old post by Jeff Atwood who said:
A blog without comments is not a blog.
That was responding to an old post of mine where I declared:
Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.
That blog-to-blog conversation took place almost twenty years ago.
I still enjoy blog-to-blog conversations today.
Echoes of Connection · Matthias Ott
Matthias responds to my pondering about the point of “likes” and “shares”:
I like to think of Webmentions not as a measure of popularity. To me, they measure connection. Connection to individual people and connection to the community as a whole. Webmentions let you listen into the constant noise out there and, just like a radio telescope, pick up scarcely audible echoes of connection.
Most of What We Call Progress - Yusuf Aytas
Every engineer eventually overbuilds something. You think you’re being smart. You’re thinking ahead, building for growth and before you know it, you’ve created a system ten times heavier than your actual problem. That’s the trap. We keep designing for imaginary futures for scale that may never come and call it engineering. But it’s not engineering. It’s over-engineering.
The industry rewards it too. Nobody gets promoted for keeping things small and sane. You get promoted for complexity.
Rob Weychert | Art & Design
Rob has redesigned his site and it’s looking gorgeous.
I really like the categories he’s got for his blog.
We Are Still the Web - The History of the Web
The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.
Why Silicon Valley CTOs Are Secretly Moving Away from React | by Coders Stop | in JavaScript in Plain English - Freedium
“We’ve stripped React out of our highest-traffic user flows and replaced it with vanilla JavaScript using small, focused libraries for specific needs,” said the CTO of a streaming service. “Our page load times dropped by 60% and our conversion rates improved by 14%.”
P&B: Jeremy Keith – Manu
In which I answer questions about blogging.
I’ve put a copy of this on my own site too.
Once Again From the Top • Jason Santa Maria
Welcome back, Jason!
Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (Interconnected)
Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)…
Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)
Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.
Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.