Linkdump for January 26th
¶ by Rob Friesel-
Ari LaVaux, writing for Slate Magazine. tl;dr: It's OK to buy quinoa, just do everyone the favor of looking for Fair Trade, sustainably cultivated quinoa.
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Shane Tomlinson, with a great post on the anti-patterns (and patterns cum anti-patterns) that make so much front-end code so difficult to test. Some of these observations are obvious (e.g., how it's basically impossible to write automated tests for inlined scripts) but others have much finer points on them. In particular, I was drawn to his discussion of how the abuse of IIFEs for "privacy" and "security" (without exposing anything through the module pattern) is almost as bad as inlining all your code. Granted, he provides a solution — but relying on a pre-processor to strip out marked members of the module seems… specialized, brittle, and untenable. Just the same, it's a worthwhile read. (Also: I loved his phrase "Pyramid of Doom".)
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A presentation by Dale Sande to go along with his post (see below) on the subject.
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Dale Sande:
A developer never sets out with the goal of making a complete and total mess of things.
In some ways it's a bit of a "me too!" post about how to organize your stylesheets (e.g., somewhat more opinionated than SMACSS, a lot more opinionated than OOCSS) but still worth the read, even if you're feeling burned out on this kind of advice. Sande's proposal is to take a bottom-up/inside-out approach to engineering your (S)CSS and to organizing your directories and files. The key take-aways for me were: (1) the opinionated directory structure and (2) treating
style.scssas a manifest for everything else. (Though the second item is hardly a new idea, talking about it as a "manifest" is certainly an elegant expression of that idea.)There are still some unsolved problems here, but they're mostly social. ("How do I create the right traction for this work in a big organization? and/or reduce the friction for working within a big application?")
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Fantastic piece by Alexis C. Madrigal, writing at The Atlantic. It's short, but dense — he goes into a bit here about health, fitness, and urban planning. The article made me nostalgic for when I lived in downtown Burlington and walked to and from work every day. (Which sends me on little mental digressions about these choices we make re: where we can afford to live, where we work, where we want our kids to grow up and go to school etc.)
Who would have thought that an 850 word article about pedometers and walking could get you thinking about so many things?
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