Afontcu’s Food for Thought (XL)

(XL as in 40 in roman numerals)

“Various currency bills pinned to a large world map with colorful pins in various locations” by Christine Roy on Unsplash

1. The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming — Jessica Kerr

Mental models, programming, and Opera. Seriously.

the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming

Learnings:

1. When does your team move quickly together? When you share common ground, compatible mental models.
2. It’s way harder to modify an existing mental model than creating a new one. Ever wondered why we have 5.000 Javascript frameworks?
3. This happens to me too often: “When you do have a decent mental model of a system, sharing that with others is hard. You don’t know how much you know.”
4. We know that a team greater than sum of parts. Interrelationships matters. And we know it because we see it every day. But the thing is that we grow and adapt every day, and so does our environment. Looks like there’s a word for this: Symmathesy.
5. Another new concept: Generativity: the difference between the team’s output with me and without me. It greatly differs from productivity (our own personal output).
6. “Our current time is the next thing after the Renaissance”. A bold statement, but it ressonates with me. “We are developing whole new ways of being human together”.

Seriously, grab a cup of coffee and read this post slowly. Let it sink.

2. The Cost Of JavaScript in 2018 — Addy Osmani

“Byte-for-byte, JavaScript is still the most expensive resource we send to mobile phones, because it can delay interactivity in large ways.”

The Bible of frontend performance for 2018. 20 minutes of wisdom.

The Cost Of JavaScript In 2018

Learnings:

1. The lest code you ship to the user, the better. Lazy load the rest. Use code splitting. Don’t block the UI with unused code.
2. Set a performance budget.
3. A calorie is not a calorie, and a byte is not a byte. A JavaScript byte is way more expensive than an image bit, for instance. You don’t have to parse and execute an image.
4. Have you really considered the benefits of server-side rendering your app? Think about limiting frontend frameworks to pages that really require them.