I recently stumbled across an over 5 year old comment on Hacker News about performance.
Lots of people make the mistake of thinking there’s only two vectors you can go to improve performance, high or wide.
- High - throw hardware at the problem, on a single machine
- Wide - Add more machines
There’s a third direction you can go, I call it “going deep”. Today’s programs run on software stacks so high and so abstract that we’re just now getting around to redeveloping (again for like the 3rd or 4th time) software that performs about as well as software we had around in the 1990s and early 2000s
Going deep means stripping away this nonsense and getting down closer to the metal, using smart algorithms, planning and working through a problem and seeing if you can size the solution to running on one machine as-is.
The author talks about “high” and “wide” hardware changes, but this can apply to software too. It’s easier to throw a cache at a slow piece of code than going deep and fixing it.
No need to look far, Electron is built on this principle. We’re adding heavy runtimes to support multiple platforms instead of staying close to the metal, and we pay the price in performance.
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Last week, Unsplash added “blurhashes” to their API. Blurhashes are 20-30 character strings that represent a blurred placeholder of an image.
Blurred image placeholders aren’t new, but I was completely stomped to see what kind of gradient maps are generated with only 30 characters.
In short, BlurHash takes an image, and gives you a short string (only 20-30 characters!) that represents the placeholder for this image. You do this on the backend of your service, and store the string along with the image. When you send data to your client, you send both the URL to the image, and the BlurHash string. Your client then takes the string, and decodes it into an image that it shows while the real image is loading over the network. The string is short enough that it comfortably fits into whatever data format you use. For instance, it can easily be added as a field in a JSON object.
Unsplash uses the BlurHash algorithm to generate the placeholders. BlurHash is not a library but an algorithm, and they have 5 first party implementations including TypeScript. There’s also a third party package for PHP.
The algorithm is very simple - less than two hundred lines of code - and can easily be ported to your platform of choice.
Read more about BlurHash on GitHub.
Ryan Singer talked about how they (don’t) deal with roadmaps on the Signal v. Noise blog.
In short: roadmaps are a bad idea because they can create uncertainty, false expectations, and guilt. My favorite argument against long term roadmaps is the uncertainty.
We don’t have a crystal ball. Say we have features A, B, and C we want to build. We don’t know if A is going to work out as planned, and what that would mean for B. We don’t know if we’ll have a eureka in the bathtub one day, and new idea X will suddenly feel much more important than B or C. Or we might start building out B, only to realize that it’s not what we want or it’s harder than we thought and want to bail on it.
That means no explicit promises and no implicit promises either. A list on the wall or in some official strategy document is an implicit promise: “this is what we’re doing next.“ There is no official list of what we’re doing next anywhere in the company.
I strongly believe in not writing down big ideas for a product, because if it really is a good idea it will resurface, preferably multiple times.
That said, client projects are different beasts than homegrown software. Clients expect roadmaps, and there’s less wiggling room for features. You can’t really skip expectations, clients expect them. Mapping client projects is a different puzzle to solve.
If all went well, this post was published automatically. I added the ability to schedule posts on my static blog (built with Hugo). I wrote a short GitHub Action to trigger a build on Netlify every morning.
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I’m trying something new (well, old): Sublime Text. Sublime was my favourite editor for years. It took me a while to not crave Sublime’s speed in VS Code, but Code’s intelligence and extension ecosystem makes it a worthy competitor.
Sublime has a feel that no other editor has. Scrolling, jumping, and typing are seamless. It’s an analog tool in an Electron infested world. I miss that experience, so I’m giving it another go.
I already miss Code’s intelligence, especially with TypeScript, but Sublime feels like coming home. Time will tell if it will last.
Today I read “Web Apps Are Not A Thing, Please Stop” by Robin Rendle, who says we should stop treating websites different from web apps.
I agree that web apps need to play by the same rules as website. However, I draw a different line: between building for the web and building on the web.
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I created the original Spatie guidelines site three years ago. Last month, we consolidated a few of our subsites to our main spatie.be site, including the guidelines.
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My colleague Ruben released a new Spatie package to generate type declarations in TypeScript from a Laravel application.
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Last week, the W3C decided they were not going to use WordPress for their next website.
The decision making process behind this is happening in the open, on w3c.studio24.net. Accessibility was the driving force for the final choice between three contending CMS’s (WordPress, Craft, and Statamic), but they did a lot of research before.
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“Why Do We Interface?” is a micro-book about interfaces over the ages: from cave paintings to Google Glass to your latest note-taking app. It’s important to understand why we build interfaces in order to get better at building them.
The purpose of any interface, regardless of the technology, is to retrieve, decode, modify, and/or distribute information. […]
The core purpose of graphics in a GUI is not to be pretty
The purpose is to be informative.
Some questions to ask yourself when you’re designing an interface:
- How does the interface help us retrieve information?
- Is it easy to decode the information that was retrieved?
- Does the interface allow for easy and clear modification of information?
- Does the interface assist in, and clearly declare when it is going to distribute information?
- How will this interface redefine what it means to be human?
Number five is a bit too bold for my taste, but the first four are valuable guidelines.
Read the book on whydoweinterface.com.