Nolan @nolan@toot.cafe

New blog post: "Introducing Pinafore for Mastodon" https://nolanlawson.com/2018/04/09/introducing-pinafore-for-mastodon/

#Pinafore was really a labor of love for me, and I spent many months working on it nearly every day. My output has slowed, though, because I'm taking the summer off to rest and pursue hobbies other than OSS.

That said, Pinafore is still my primary way of interacting with Mastodon. I find it sufficient for all my needs, so I'm happy with it. If you run into any problems though, please file an issue! 🙇‍♂️ https://github.com/nolanlawson/pinafore/issues

"Queens of Infamy: Joanna of Naples" by Anne Thériault https://longreads.com/2018/07/03/queens-of-infamy-joanna-of-naples/

Another fun little bit of obscure history. I really enjoyed the Anne Boleyn portrait, and this one is even better.

"Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition" by Caroline Haskins https://theoutline.com/post/5172/juggalo-juggalette-facepaint-makeup-hack-beat-facial-recognition-technology

OK, this might be the most cyberpunk headline I've read all year

"Ice Poseidon’s Lucrative, Stressful Life as a Live Streamer" by Adrian Chen https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/ice-poseidons-lucrative-stressful-life-as-a-live-streamer

Living in the future is so bizarre. Who would have guessed that The Truman Show and EdTV would serve as blueprints for a new career category?

"Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets" by Katrina Brooker https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/the-man-who-created-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets

I like how TimBL sees problems of data privacy and centralization as bugs to be rooted out and fixed.

"The current state of web design" http://fczbkk.com/current-state-of-webdesign/

Actual thing I wrote in an email today: "Your metrics reporting library is adding 6 seconds to your page load." 🤢

Interesting post from Firefox folks on how they sped up rendering using retained display lists: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/06/retained-display-lists/

Compare with Edge's Independent Rendering, and the concepts are pretty similar (dates back to IE 11 BTW 😉) https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/08/17/making-web-smoother-independent-rendering/

As a browser perf guy, I've seen some shit:

- web pages that continually peg a CPU core at 100% even after loaded (not cryptocurrency mining, just poor code)
- a web page that allocates 1GB of memory, frees it, and then repeats ~15 times
- a web page that loads >20MB of JS and then they wonder why their site is slow
- a web page creating >30,000 DOM nodes and they wonder why it's slow
- a web page where every "component" is an iframe and they wonder why it's slow

The web is wild.

As for the user experience of Svelte, I really enjoyed it even beyond the perf benefits or the space-age feeling of having a framework compile my code for me. It's similar to Vue in that you have computations and watchers, and that you write single-file components.

I also found that Svelte "got out of my way" and let me write vanilla JS code whenever I wanted to. Compared to something like React, I found Svelte was both 1) easier to learn, and 2) felt less like I was writing "framework code."

@rich_harris did a great job explaining the concepts behind SvelteJS at JSConf EU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqt6YxAZoOc).

I saw the same Jed Schmidt talk he mentions, and it really was enlightening to realize that a web app is conceptually a directed graph but the DOM is a tree, and this is why it's so hard for JS frameworks to get the abstraction right. But if your JS framework is a compiler, then that means you can describe your app as a graph and the framework can generate the tree.