@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

nickautomatic

@nickautomatic@mastodon.social

I make web things.

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matthiasott, to random
@matthiasott@mastodon.social avatar

What a beautiful album! And so good to hear Beth Gibbons’s voice again… ☺️ #LivesOutgrown
https://bethgibbons.net/

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@matthiasott I've been listening to it all week and I'm beginning to think it might be a total masterpiece!

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@matthiasott Yeah, I was surprised how it seemed to arrive without much hype or warning! Sudden unexpected albums from favourite artists are the best kind of surprise. 😄

nickautomatic, to random
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

So far today I've taken the train from London to Düsseldorf for Beyond Tellerand. Now having a coffee and looking forward to ...

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@sarajw weirdly no, despite an email from Deutsche Bahn telling me my journey was no longer possible, which was a bit alarming... Fortunately it turned out it was in fact possible! 🎉

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@sarajw yeah, I'm still not sure what they actually meant, beyond "we have cancelled your seat reservation for secret reasons." Oh well, v happy to have made it!

nickautomatic, to random
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

This, from @adactio, is great advice. The more I've worked with design systems, the more I've felt like the really important bits are low-level, composable things like layout and typography components, form inputs, and buttons. Fancier components often end up being "noise" that make the more useful bits harder to find and use.
https://adactio.com/journal/21084

nickautomatic, to react
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

Has anyone here got opinions about Preact vs React?

Specifically, I'm weighing up migrating a large-ish codebase to Preact instead of upgrading React, and I'd be interested to hear from anyone who a) has done this, b) has decided not to do this, c) can think of solid reasons to stick with React.

I can't see much benefit to choosing React over Preact, but is there anything I'm overlooking?

#preact #react #javascript

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@developit I've already tried it and it seems to work perfectly! We're using a handful of React-based libraries (eg. react-router) that seem to work equally well with Preact, so no incompatibilities I can see.

I've written up an RFC to propose switching, so this was really a last attempt to catch anything I might have overlooked (and because I'm interested to hear from anyone who's already gone down this path). I'm taking the lack of anyone saying "don't do it!" as a good sign! :)

nickautomatic, to random
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

"There’s no future for humanity in space — or at least not for such a long time that it’s pointless to make sacrifices to try to realize it in the present."

Enjoyed this piece by @parismarx on the false futures tech billionaires try to sell us for their own self-serving purposes.

https://disconnect.blog/what-if-we-never-live-on-mars/

bastianallgeier, to random
@bastianallgeier@mastodon.social avatar

This is an article that took a lot of strength to write and I might take it down again. But I felt like it is an article that is very necessary right now. https://bastianallgeier.com/notes/grandpa

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@bastianallgeier This is a brilliant, brave piece of writing. Thank you for posting it.

I've also recently been thinking a lot about my German grandparents. Their story is very different from your grandpa's (they were Jewish refugees from the Nazis, and very lucky to escape in the 30s) but learning about their lives led me to the same conclusions as you, and, also like you, to an anti-fascism I feel in my bones.

clive, to random
@clive@saturation.social avatar

I just realized an interesting client-side filter it would be fun to try and make for Mastodon

I’d like to generate views/panes based on level of activity

A pane devoted to posts by people who don’t post very often …

… and whose posts I might otherwise miss

They’re often terrific gems

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@clive This is a nice idea. I guess a lo-fi way you could already do this is to make a list and put anyone who posts a rare gem on it (and then remove them again if they start posting too often!)

mia, to random
@mia@front-end.social avatar

Playing with a new pair of custom elements: <show-when> & <hide-when>

They show or hides content based on various criteria:

  • url param
  • url hash
  • language preferences
  • browser support

<show-when has-param="view=edit" hidden>Hidden by default, but shown when the url has a ?view=edit query parameter</show-when>

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@mia Oh, I've been playing with a similar but much more limited "if-offline" conditional component to show/hide things based on network status.

For fun I had a go at adding this functionality to "show-when". In case it's of interest:
https://github.com/oddbird/show-when/compare/main...nickautomatic:show-when:is-offline

(Happy to open a PR btw if this is useful to you as well, but no worries if not)

nickautomatic, to react
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

Has anyone here switched a codebase from React to Preact?

I found switching the libraries themselves straightforward, but updating the test suite from React Testing Library to Preact Testing Library has me stumped - tests failing for reasons that are mysterious to me. At this point I'm keen to find anyone else who's attempted the same thing to compare notes...

#Preact #React #TestingLibrary

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

Specifically, the thing I'm stumped by is to do with the need to waitFor certain test assertions following the switch from React to #Preact.

If I wrap them in waitFor they pass but in some cases if I then await the waitFor (as I'm meant to, because it's an async function) they fail again.

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@developit Oh, thanks, that makes sense and gives me some useful clues about where to look for what might be causing the issue!

It's puzzling that in all cases the tested behaviour still seems to work fine in the browser - I'm only seeing issues in the context of the tests... This is some old, quite knotty React code though, so it may well be that there is some odd lifecycle stuff going on that switching to Preact has brought to light.

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@developit Thanks again. This gives me some useful threads to pull on when I pick up the investigation again in January! Very much appreciated.

clive, to random
@clive@saturation.social avatar

I just realized i've never had a red bull

what am I missing?

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@clive The first time I had a red bull I experienced perfect photographic memory for an hour or so (it was before an exam at uni, and I found I could visualise my notes so clearly I could "read" them in my mind).

It happened that first time, and never again after that (subsequently it just seemed like an unremarkable, overly sweet caffeinated drink). Very strange.

b0rk, (edited ) to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

my rules for git rebase

permalink: https://wizardzines.com/comics/rules-for-rebasing/

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@b0rk Oh yes, I think point 3 in particular is a golden rule! Rebasing the same branch multiple times and doing one small thing each time is so much more manageable than trying to do it all in one go.

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@b0rk Also, on point 5: I recently learnt about ORIG_HEAD, which is a reference to where you were before the last rebase, which makes undoing a rebase much easier ("git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD"), and as a result has made me a lot more relaxed about finishing a rebase that turns out to be tricky.

andy, to random
@andy@bell.bz avatar

whitespace? never heard of her

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@andy My particular bugbear is the way clicking the "expand" button on the thumbnail in the bottom left causes the album artwork to appear in the top right! It surely breaks the record for largest distance between a UI button and the thing it affects.

sophie, to random
@sophie@social.lol avatar

People like to shit on React, and with good reason. But sometimes it feels like people forget that a lot of us get paid to write React, whether we like it or not. When working on a massive React codebase it absolutely doesn’t make sense to migrate to a new framework unless you can justify the time, effort and expense. So all these posts/blogs I’ve seen that suggest that developers are somehow making mistakes or ignorant for still using React - a lot of us don’t have a choice.

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@sophie I feel like I've seen a disheartening increase in "your choice of tech is terrible"-type posts recently. Not just React, but TypeScript (which I quite like, tbh), literally all tooling, and yesterday even Git (which for me is totally indispensable).

These takes often seem based on an assumption that the tools that work best for that person's projects are in fact the best tools, and that everyone must have similar requirements + similar contexts for their decisions.

nickautomatic, to random
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

Does anyone know of any good resources on software maintenance?

Specifically, I'm interested in what strategies there are for maintaining very old software projects other than "retire it", "leave it and hope for the best", or "keep updating it forever", none of which seem completely ideal.

(The specific project I have in mind happens to be Ruby on Rails, in case that makes a difference, but non-Ruby-specific pointers are welcome too)

matthiasott, to random
@matthiasott@mastodon.social avatar

Alright, let’s do another round! 😎

✨ What’s your favorite personal website and why? ✨

(Feel free to add your own site after mentioning someone else’s – but posting ONLY your site is cheating! 😉)

#websites #IndieWeb #personalsites

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@matthiasott I really like @maggie Appleton's site: it's beautiful, full of interesting, thought-provoking writing, and her own excellent illustrations too.

https://maggieappleton.com

JamesGleick, to ai
@JamesGleick@zirk.us avatar

We all have experience with genuine novelty: in art, and in science. Yet Sam Altman seems to be saying originality is an illusion. There is “remix” and there is randomness and that’s all. I think he’s profoundly wrong.

#AI https://mastodon.social/@ricmac/110759107057259579

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@JamesGleick I find the idea that "everything is a remix" so overstated. To the extent that it's true, it's not a very interesting observation - yes, everything depends on some sort of existing context in order to have meaning - but beyond that it seems to reduce all creativity to the same thing, which is faintly depressing, probably wrong, and either way doesn't really seem to shed much light on anything.

Edent, to accessibility
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

“I could build that in five minutes!”

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/i-could-build-that-in-five-minutes/

#accessibility #usability

nickautomatic,
@nickautomatic@mastodon.social avatar

@Edent "Getting the wrong answer quickly is not as useful as getting the right answer slowly" is such a nice way to put it!

This reminded me of an old post by @codinghorror that I've often borne in mind when someone (including occasionally myself) thinks that something would be "trivial" to implement:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/

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