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Author Archives: !undefined

About !undefined

Syndicated content from the !undefined Tumblr blog where Rob Friesel posts items related to software engineering, user interface/experience design, and Agile software development. Lots of JavaScript here.

because they are in crisis

by !undefined

“Why do I tell this story? Mostly because it’s an example of a problem that found a solution, rather than the other way around. But also because it illustrates why people require solutions in the first place: because they are in crisis.”

–

Amy Chess, The User Experience of….Fixing Things

She brings up a good point here about empathy: that it’s the critical tool in the UX researcher or designer’s toolkit because she is not faced with the same motivation-generating crisis that the person on the other end of the problem is.

Matt Asay: Why Web Tools Like AngularJS Need To Keep Breaking Themselves

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Why Web Tools Like AngularJS Need To Keep Breaking Themselves:

By Matt Asay, writing for ReadWrite.

tl;dr: AngularJS 2.0 is targeting the future because the future is where we’re going and anyway let’s not forget that the existing architecture/design is at least four years old anyway, and who’s on a 10-year software development lifecycle anymore?

In large part, I think the points that he’s making are good, but easy to make. What he doesn’t seem to address, and is the thing that keeps coming up in the conversations I’ve been having, has been the real-world developer concerns around the upgrade path. Or rather: the fact that none has been communicated. In other words, “the point” of picking a framework like AngularJS has a lot to do with not wanting to solve the problems that are not central to your application’s domain. You’re building a travel planning app or a photo sharing site or a CMS or… fill in that blank with just about anything. You’re not building dependency injection and data-binding and a whole host of other abstract things because… well, that’s not what you’re customers are paying for. And I think that by and large no one minds the occasional refactor of their application, so long as the things that you’re refactoring are your features.

Not having an upgrade path is a source of anxiety because it goes from feeling like a “big refactor” to “complete rewrite”. This is the cringe that I hear in everyone’s voice.

That being said… (1) I’m still not convinced that we won’t see any upgrade path — even if it’s a painful one. And (2) I agree that we want the frameworks we’re using (when we’re using them) to be powerful and tap into the powerful underlying modern APIs.

optimize for trade-offs

by !undefined

Optimize for change. It’s the only constant.:

Alas — the snark and schadenfreude are terribly unconstructive and show a shocking lack of empathy from someone who has otherwise gotten a rather fantastic reputation for having exactly that kind of empathy.

There’s an unstated assumption that people selected AngularJS for their projects simply because it was “backed by Google” or because it was some kind of shiny thing that everyone was playing with “at the time” — and while this may be true for some, there are many who have done their homework and did their framework/library bake-offs and looked at their specific situations and said: “You know what? AngularJS is the best solution for us for these legitimate reasons.”

Right. So the schadenfreude? Not helping anyone.

Which is unfortunate, because this point is really good and really important:

As a leader on a dev team, I personally consider it too risky to invest our team’s energy in learning the intricacies of a particular framework; I want our team to learn how to solve problems in JavaScript by combining the right tools for the job.

And/but here’s the twist: your customers never give a shit about what language or framework or library you use to solve their problem, they just want you to solve the problem. In that respect, domain knowledge is more valuable than any piece of technical minutia you’re picking up along the way. Which is not to say that that technical knowledge is not important — after all, these are (probably) the tools you need to use to solve exactly the problems in that domain you’ve worked so hard to learn something about. Which brings us full circle: do you burn time writing your own thing? or searching for and stitching together the little libraries? or buy into that larger framework which is going to allow you to off-load a lot of that?

Each team needs to decide this for itself. What trade-offs are you willing to make to get where you’re going? Because don’t believe for a second that you can just pick “a loose collection of a bunch of optional modules” and say that you’ve “optimized for change”. You’re just choosing a different set of dragons to wrestle with.

And anyway, everyone needs to draw a collective deep breath and chill the hell out over this. (1) Your software choices and architecture designs are always wrong to someone. (2) Maybe this event serves as an important wake-up call to you and your team and you come out on the other side of it having learned some valuable lessons about how to build front-end apps. (3) And/or just because no AngularJS upgrade path got announced doesn’t mean there won’t be one and maybe 6 months from now there’s a blog post that reveals just how everything is going to be just fine.

Regardless: relax, don’t worry, it’s just software.

UPDATE: Just about as soon as this was published (after simmering overnight as a draft in the queue…), I saw that Joreteg has re-written the post to be… less harsh. I’ve decided to leave my post as-is because if nothing else it will serve as a reminder to myself that we can all act too hastily in our responses at times. The main points of my own response remain the same: (1) try to be constructive in your criticism; (2) do your own research and make the right choice for your team; and (3) maybe just maybe it’s still too early for everyone to freak out as much as they have.

“the real lowdown on what works with PhantomJS”

by !undefined

review of PhantomJS Cookbook by Joe Colantonio:

My favorite part:

This is not a book on theory; it is the real lowdown on what works with PhantomJS by someone who has years of hands on experience. Consequently, Rob’s recipes cover the most common scenarios you’ll likely face during your development efforts, so you’ll be learning practical recipes you can put to work right away.

Mission accomplished.

what we talk about when we talk about type-safety

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Rambles around computer science:

Thought-provoking piece by Stephen Kell on type systems, type-safety, and what a lot of people mean when they talk about it. My main takeaway from Kell’s piece was that type systems, like everything else in programming/computer science, comes with trade-offs and though there are many advantages to using a language with good type-safety, it’s also not a panacea and to believe so is dangerous and naïve. Part of what’s interesting here, is that he claims that many people are simply semantically wrong when talking about “types” when what they are discussing is actually compile-time checking, use of predicates, or other abstractions.

surrounded by all that framework magic

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Why I Don’t Want Your JavaScript Framework but I Love You:

A very worthwhile read from Keith Rosenberg.

If there’s a tl;dr then it’s this: choose when to use a framework, not which framework — if you choose any framework at all, and/but/so when you do: take the time to get to know the source code, not just the docs.

Rosenberg has lots of good points in here, and while no single pithy quote jumped out as pull-worthy, it’s worth noting that he doesn’t simply dump on frameworks (as some do) but rather tries to ask the more interesting meta-question re: why are you even choosing to use one at all?

Obviously there are plenty of reasons to use a framework. There’s that old adage about either spending your time learning the framework or spending your time building all the home-brew infrastructure that turns in to your own personal framework. What Rosenberg points out though is that if you’re not digging deep into the source, then you’re not really learning, and you wind up in a bad place anyway — surrounded by all the framework magic that’s undocumented and you don’t understand, can’t debug, and spend days trying to work around, over, under, or through.

(Having been guilty of the above, and having been there myself, I cannot stress that enough.)

As he says: take the time to think about your problems and spend some time designing your application and discovering what you really need, instead of just diving in with your AngularJS life-jacket because that worked out so well on that last thing your build.

(Previously/related: RE: Developers are calling it quits on polyglot programming.)

trifleJS

by !undefined

trifleJS:

“Headless automation for Internet Explorer”

Which looks like a port of (part of) the PhantomJS API to an environment that wraps IE by way of some .NET controls. (Also: V8 is in the mix somehow and/but/so not sure how that changes the equation w/r/t/ if the IE runtime is using that as the underlying JS interpreter or if it’s just some kind of bridge.) See also: SlimerJS : Gecko :: PhantomJS : WebKit

And speaking of SlimerJS: its API is also “PhantomJS-compatible” which raises the question of whether we need to be doing some work to create a “headless browser scripting” standard that we can reliably lean on, or if we’re just going to accept that PhantomJS came first and everyone is going to ape its API.

the boring designer

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“The boring designer chases the right idea over their idea every time. They respect their team and will try almost any idea (whether on a whiteboard or in Sketch or in code) that gets thrown their way. Instead of arguing about whose idea should win, the boring designer tries all the ideas and even elevates others’ ideas in the process. The boring designer abhors groupthink and being told “yes.” They consistently request feedback and new ideas. And as a result when they feel super passionately about their own idea, the team listens.”

–

Cap Watkins, The Boring Designer

So many of these points translate (or apply directly) to lots of other leadership roles, technical or otherwise.