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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
The new Salter Cane album is available on Spotify now:
daringfireball.net/2025/01/one_bit_of_anecdata_that_the_web_is_languishing
I have to agree with John here:
There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.
There’s absolutely no technical reason why it should be this way around. This is a cultural problem with “modern front-end web development”.
Wherein Brad says some kind words about The Session. And slippers.
Slippers are cool.
jarango.com/2025/01/09/prescriptive-and-descriptive-information-architecture/
Interesting—this is exactly the same framing I used to talk about design systems a few years ago.
At the thee-ah-tor!
Here’s a handy free tool from Calibre that’ll give your website a performance assessment.
I can’t wait to play this song live!
https://saltercane.bandcamp.com/track/something-underwater
“There’s something in the water Like the holy face of God It’s out there on the borders And rising inside us”
The new Salter Cane album just dropped on Bandcamp!
If you want to watch me and Remy presenting live, join us here at 7:30pm
People of Brighton—myself and Remy are giving a talk this evening at AsyncJS; you should come along!
https://asyncjs.com/built-www-in-5-days/
There will be pizza!
Deceptive design meets gamification in this explanatory puzzle game (though I wish it weren’t using the problematic label “dark patterns”).
I created this interactive experience to explore the intersection of design ethics and human psychology, helping us all make more informed choices while browsing the web.
This is a very smart way to handle feedback about a product.
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
— James Joyce, The Dead
Brighton snow!
asktheuxer.com/2025/01/07/the-two-rules-of-software-creation-from-which-every-problem-derives/
- Humans can not accurately describe what they want out of a software system until it exists.
- Humans can not accurately predict how long any software effort will take beyond four weeks. And after 2 weeks it is already dicey.
Withdrawing from a conference I was supposed to be speaking at later this year. The line-up currently shows that out of a total of 73 speakers, a grand total of 8 are women.
Tuesday session
thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-inclusive-web-of-progressive-enhancement/
This is a great history of the idea of progressive enhancement:
It is an idea that has been lasting and enduring for two decades, and will continue.
wired.com/story/html-is-actually-a-programming-language-fight-me/
Monday session
Remember when every company rushed to make an app? Airlines, restaurants, even your local coffee shop. Back then, it made some sense. Browsers weren’t as powerful, and apps had unique features like notifications and offline access. But fast-forward to today, and browsers can do all that. Yet businesses still push native apps as if it’s 2010, and we’re left downloading apps for things that should just work on the web.
This is all factually correct, but alas as Cory Doctorow points out, you can’t install an ad-blocker in a native app. To you and me, that’s a bug. To short-sighted businesses, it’s a feature.
(When I say “ad-blocker”, I mean “tracking-blocker”.)
Thursday session
Starting 2025 as I mean to continue …with a cat on my lap.
Athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh go léir a chairde!