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(I present to you my stream of consciousness on the topic of casing as it applies to the web platform.) I’m reading about the new command and commandfor attributes — which I’m super excited about, declarative behavior invocation in HTML? YES PLEASE!! — and one thing that strikes me is the casing in these APIs. For example, the command attribute has a variety of values in HTML which correspond to APIs in JavaScript. The show-popover attribute value maps to .showPopover() in JavaScript. hide-popover maps to .hidePopover(), etc. So what we have is: lowercase in attribute names e.g. commandfor="..." kebab-case in attribute values e.g. show-popover camelCase for JS counterparts e.g. showPopover() After thinking about this a little more, I remember that HTML attributes names are case insensitive, so the browser will normalize them to lowercase during parsing. Given that, I suppose you could write commandFor="..." but it’s effectively the same. Ok, lowercase attribute names in HTML makes sense. The related popover attributes follow the same convention: popovertarget popovertargetaction And there are many other attribute names in HTML that are lowercase, e.g.: maxlength novalidate contenteditable autocomplete formenctype So that all makes sense. But wait, there are some attribute names with hyphens in them, like aria-label="..." and data-value="...". So why isn’t it command-for="..."? Well, upon further reflection, I suppose those attributes were named that way for extensibility’s sake: they are essentially wildcard attributes that represent a family of attributes that are all under the same namespace: aria-* and data-*. But wait, isn’t that an argument for doing popover-target and popover-target-action? Or command and command-for? But wait (I keep saying that) there are kebab-case attribute names in HTML — like http-equiv on the <meta> tag, or accept-charset on the form tag — but those seem more like legacy exceptions. It seems like the only answer here is: there is no rule. Naming is driven by convention and decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. But if I had to summarize, it would probably be that the default casing for new APIs tends to follow the rules I outlined at the start (and what’s reflected in the new command APIs): lowercase for HTML attributes names kebab-case for HTML attribute values camelCase for JS counterparts Let’s not even get into SVG attribute names We need one of those “bless this mess” signs that we can hang over the World Wide Web. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
Dismissing an idea because it doesn’t work in your head is doing a disservice to the idea. (Same for dismissing someone else’s idea because it doesn’t work in your head.) The only way to truly know if an idea works is to test it. The gap between an idea and reality is the work. You can’t dismiss something as “not working” without doing the work. When collaborating with others, different ideas can be put forward which end up in competition with each other. We debate which is best, but verbal descriptions don’t do justice to ideas — so the idea that wins is the one whose champion is the most persuasive (or has the most institutional authority). You don’t want that. You want an environment where ideas can be evaluated based on their substance and not on the personal attributes of the person advocating them. This is the value of prototypes. We can’t visualize or predict how our own ideas will play out, let alone other people’s. This is why it’s necessary to bring them to life, have them take concrete form. It’s the only way to do them justice. (Picture a cute puppy in your head. I’ve got one too. Now how do we determine who’s imagining the cuter puppy? We can’t. We have to produce a concrete manifestation for contrast and comparison.) Prototypes are how we bridge the gap between idea and reality. They’re an iterative, evolutionary, exploratory form of birthing ideas that test their substance. People will bow out to a good persuasive argument. They’ll bow out to their boss saying it should be one way or another. But it’s hard to bow out to a good idea you can see, taste, touch, smell, or use. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
I refreshed the little thing that let’s you navigate consistently between my inconsistent subdomains (video recording). Here’s the tl;dr on the update: I had to remove some features on each site to make this feel right. Takeaway: adding stuff is easy, removing stuff is hard. The element is a web component and not even under source control (🤫). I serve it directly from my cdn. If I want to make an update, I tweak the file on disk and re-deploy. Takeaway: cowboy codin’, yee-haw! Live free and die hard. So. Many. Iterations. All of which led to what? A small, iterative evolution. Takeaway: it’s ok for design explorations to culminate in updates that look more like an evolution than a mutation. Want more info on the behind-the-scenes work? Read on! Design Explorations It might look like a simple iteration on what I previously had, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t explore the universe of possibilities first before coming back to the current iteration. v0: Tabs! A tab-like experience seemed the most natural, but how to represent it? I tried a few different ideas. On top. On bottom. Different visual styles, etc. And of course, gotta explore how that plays out on desktop too. Some I liked, some I didn’t. As much as I wanted to play with going to the edges of the viewport, I realized that every browser is different and you won't be able to get a consistent “bleed-like” visual experience across browsers. For example, if you try to make tabs that bleed to the edges, it looks nice in a frame in Figma, and even in some browsers. But it won’t look right in all browser, like iOS Safari. So I couldn’t reliably leverage the idea of a bounded canvas as a design element — which, I should’ve known, has always been the case with the web. v1: Bottom Tabs With a Site Theme I really like this pattern on mobile devices, so I thought maybe I’d consider it for navigating between my sites. But how to theme across differently-styled sites? The favicon styles seemed like a good bet! And, of course, what do to on larger devices? Just stacking it felt like overkill, so I explored moving it to the edge. I actually prototyped this in code, but I didn’t like how it felt so I scratched the idea and went other directions. v2: The Unification The more I explored what to do with this element, the more it started taking on additional responsibility. “What if I unified its position with site-specific navigation?” I thought. This led to design explorations where the disparate subdomains began to take on not just a unified navigational element, but a unified header. And I made small, stylistic explorations with the tabs themselves too. You can see how I played toyed with the idea of a consistent header across all my sites (not an intended goal, but ya know, scope creep gets us all). As I began to explore more possibilities than I planned for, things started to get out of hand. v3: Do More. MORE. MORE!! Questions I began asking: Why aren’t these all under the same domain?! What if I had a single domain for feeds across all of them, e.g. feeds.jim-nielsen.com? What about icons instead of words? Wait, wait, wait Jim. Consistent navigation across inconsistent sites. That’s the goal. Pare it back a little. v4: Reigning It Back In To counter my exploratory ambitions, I told myself I needed to ship something without the need to modify the entire design style of all my sites. So how do I do that? That got me back to a simpler premise: consistent navigation across my inconsistent sites. Better — and implementable. Technical Details The implementation was pretty simple. I basically just forked my previous web component and changed some styles. That’s it. The only thing I did different was I moved the web component JS file from being part of my www.jim-nielsen.com git repository to a standalone file (not under git control) on my CDN. This felt like one of the exceptions to the rule of always keeping stuff under version control. It’s more of the classic FTP-style approach to web development. Granted, it’s riskier, but it’s also way more flexible. And I’m good with that trade-off for now. (Ask me again in a few months if I’ve done anything terrible and now have regrets.) Each site implements the component like this (with a different subdomain attribute for each site): <script type="module" src="https://cdn.jim-nielsen.com/shared/jim-site-switcher.js"></script> <jim-site-switcher subdomain="blog"></jim-site-switcher> That’s really all there is to say. Thanks to Zach for prodding me to make this post. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
Jason Fried writes in his post “Knives and battleships”: Specific tools and familiar ingredients combined in different ratios, different molds, for different purposes. Like a baker working from the same tight set of pantry ingredients to make a hundred distinct recipes. You wouldn't turn to them and say "enough with the butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, and eggs already!" Getting the same few things right in different ways is a career's worth of work. Mastery comes from a lifetime of putting together the basics in different combinations. I think of Beethoven’s 5th and its famous “short-short-short-long” motif. The entire symphony is essentially the same core idea repeated and developed relentlessly! The same four notes (da-da-da-DAH!) moving between instruments, changing keys, etc. Beethoven took something basic — a four note motif — and extracted an enormous set of variations. Its genius is in illustrating how much can be explored and expressed within constraints (rather than piling on “more and more” novel stuff). Back to Jason’s point: the simplest building blocks in any form — music, code, paint, cooking — implemented with restraint can be combined in an almost infinite set of pleasing ways. As Devine noted (and I constantly link back to): we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what we can do with less. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
Conrad Irwin has an article on the Zed blog “Why LLMs Can't Really Build Software”. He says it boils down to: the distinguishing factor of effective engineers is their ability to build and maintain clear mental models We do this by: Building a mental model of what you want to do Building a mental model of what the code does Reducing the difference between the two It’s kind of an interesting observation about how we (as humans) problem solve vs. how we use LLMs to problem solve: With LLMs, you stuff more and more information into context until it (hopefully) has enough to generate a solution. With your brain, you tweak, revise, or simplify your mental model more and more until the solution presents itself. One adds information — complexity you might even say — to solve a problem. The other eliminates it. You know what that sort of makes me think of? NPM driven development. Solving problems with LLMs is like solving front-end problems with NPM: the “solution” comes through installing more and more things — adding more and more context, i.e. more and more packages. LLM: Problem? Add more context. NPM: Problem? There’s a package for that. Contrast that with a solution that comes through simplification. You don’t add more context. You simplify your mental model so you need less to solve a problem — if you solve it at all, perhaps you eliminate the problem entirely! Rather than install another package to fix what ails you, you simplify your mental model which often eliminates the problem you had in the first place; thus eliminating the need to solve any problem at all, or to add any additional context or complexity (or dependency). As I’m typing this, I’m thinking of that image of the evolution of the Raptor engine, where it evolved in simplicity: This stands in contrast to my working with LLMs, which often wants more and more context from me to get to a generative solution: I know, I know. There’s probably a false equivalence here. This entire post started as a note and I just kept going. This post itself needs further thought and simplification. But that’ll have to come in a subsequent post, otherwise this never gets published lol. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
More in programming
“Earth to Dave.” Brian rapped his knuckles lightly against Dave’s head. He snapped back into it. “This nice lady wants to know what kind of bagel you want” It was so like Brian to call the woman at the counter a nice lady. At some point, he’d watched American Pie and thought Stifler was how people should be. Or maybe he was just always like that and the movie made him think it was acceptable. He called himself a gentleman, but not in the creepy Elliot Rodger way, or in anything resembling the real meaning of the word. I think he just thought it was funny how that word got a rise out of people. Dave replied, “uhhh a cinnamon raisin…with uhh…butter…yea butter.” Even the nice lady knew Dave was high, Brian and I ordered normal bagel sandwiches and here was Dave ordering dessert. Brian paid for the bagels with his mom’s credit card and told us we could Venmo him later. His mom’s credit card and we Venmo him. That’s the type of guy he was. “He didn’t leave last night. Passed out right where he was sitting,” Brian spoke about Dave like he wasn’t there. This would happen sometimes. Like we would smoke and get high, but for Dave it was a different thing. He would smoke till he was catatonic. He was also the first one in our friend group to start smoking. Dave’s older brother killed himself when we were freshmen, and that’s around when it started. A coping strategy. It wasn’t just the loss of his brother, his mom was never the same afterward. I don’t think I saw her out of the house after that; Dave said she barely left her room. The overall downer atmosphere was too much for his sister and she moved to California as soon as she could. He was all that was left. Dave got quiet after that. Maybe it was the weed, maybe it was the pain, but he started riding his bike to school every day and doing really well in classes. His brother was some kind of wunderkind; maybe he thought if he was like that his mother would stop moping. He graduated valedictorian and she never did. Maybe that wasn’t enough? “I thought we were gonna have a party last night,” I mentioned offhandedly. Brian’s parties weren’t the Met Gala, but it was usually more than just the three of us. I was hoping Ari was going to be there. “Hoping Ari was gonna be there?” Oh God even when I say something so innocuous Brian knows what I’m thinking. “Nah, we found the Volcano and didn’t really want to text anyone else after that.” “Understandable” “I don’t know if Dave slept. When I came downstairs he had the bag inflated on top of the machine.” He ribbed Dave with his elbow while he said this. “I slept,” mumbled Dave. “It’s called wake and bake.” Dave and Brian both liked 2000s movies, stoner comedies, movies about high school and prom, getting laid. Something about it being a simpler time. They were closer than I was with either of them. Dave would go to dark places and Brian couldn’t be brought there. So it worked. Even though Brian was kind of an asshole, he was a good guy to have around. His dad was a trucker and he wasn’t around much. This is one of the things we bonded over. They called our name and we sat down at a table with the bagels. In the morning the visit from the cops didn’t really seem like much of a big deal, so I thought I’d tell the guys about it. Upon doing so, Brian immediately pointed out something I missed. He asked, “What’s your dad’s name?” and I realized right away. While he went by Jonathan and I went by John, it sure made a lot more sense that the cops were looking for him when they wrote “John.” Lazy cops didn’t even write his full name. He was in town, and he was on Long Island for the meeting. It wasn’t me! “Hey McFly!” Brian mocked. It was clear he’d watched Back to the Future recently and now I see where he got the knuckle rapping too. “You know you gotta stop being such a little pussy all the time.” He put on a high pitched voice that was supposed to resemble mine, “I’m a little pussy, I hide in my room when the cops come and they aren’t even looking for me they are looking for my weird ass dad.” I was too relieved to care about his mocking. Brian continued, “You know that place was into some weird shit. Where your dad worked before he bugged out. Dave’s brother worked there too.” “You mean the one who killed himself?” Immediately I regretted how I said it and looked over at Dave. He was too transfixed by the swirls of cinnamon in his bagel to register anything. Brian scolded me, “dude” and I felt embarrassed. I was so giddy from realizing the cops weren’t looking for me that this crossed over in my head to a true crime podcast, where I was more interested in the mystery than the characters, forgetting that these were real people with real lives. I felt distant enough from my father to view him that way. I don’t know how Dave felt about his brother anymore. I came back at Brian, trying to move past my faux pas. “Well at least my dad did something. Your dad doesn’t even drive the truck! He sits there and watches it drive. A real union man.” Dave now had finished his bagel and put his head down on the table. Brian smiled at the retort, “At least my dad isn’t some kind of Kaczynski freak.” This was the nature of our friendship. Last night I thought my world was closing in, now I realize this just all isn’t my problem. My dad was sort of a Kaczynski freak. Maybe he mailed bombs to people and the cops caught him. Maybe he has some lame manifesto about why he did it. I love reading manifestos. I took out my phone and venmoed Brian for my and Dave’s bagel. We’d venmo him about half the time; Brian’s mom was rich from the settlement and we knew she didn’t care. My mom still wasn’t back when I got home.
Here on a summer night in the grass and lilac smell Drunk on the crickets and the starry sky, Oh what fine stories we could tell With this moonlight to tell them by. A summer night, and you, and paradise, So lovely and so filled with grace, Above your head, the universe has hung its … Continue reading Dreams of Late Summer →
The first Rails World in Amsterdam was a roaring success back in 2023. Tickets sold out in 45 minutes, the atmosphere was electric, and The Rails Foundation set a new standard for conference execution in the Ruby community. So when we decided to return to the Dutch Capital for the third edition of the conference this year, the expectations were towering. And yet, Amanda Perino, our executive director and event organizer extraordinaire, managed to outdo herself, and produced an even better show this year. The venue we returned to was already at capacity the first time around, but Amanda managed to fit a third more attendees by literally using slimmer chairs! And I didn't hear any complaints the folks who had to sit a little closer together in order for more people to enjoy the gathering. The increased capacity didn't come close to satisfy the increased demand, though. This year, tickets sold out in less than two minutes. Crazy. But for the 800+ people who managed to secure a pass, I'm sure it felt worth the refresh-the-website scramble to buy a ticket. And, as in years past, Amanda's recording crew managed to turn around post-production on my keynote in less than 24 hours, so anyone disappointed with missing out on a ticket could at least be in the loop on all the awesome new Rails stuff we were releasing up to and during the conference. Every other session was recorded too, and will soon be on the Rails YouTube channel. You can't stream the atmosphere, the enthusiasm, and the genuine love of Ruby on Rails, though. I was once again blown away by just how many incredible people and stories we have in this ecosystem. From entrepreneurs who've built million (or billion!) dollar businesses on Rails, to programmers who've been around the framework for decades, to people who just picked it up this year. It was a thrill to meet all of them, to take hundreds of selfies, and to talk about Ruby, Rails, and the Omarchy expansion pack for hours on the hallway track! I've basically stopped doing prepared presentations at conferences, but Rails World is the one exception. I really try my best to put on a good show, present the highlights of what we've been working on in the past year at 37signals, and transfer the never-ending enthusiasm I continue to feel for this framework, this programming language, and this ecosystem. True, I may occasionally curse that commitment in the weeks leading up to the conference, but the responsibility is always rewarded during and after the execution with a deep sense of satisfaction. Not everyone is so lucky as I've been to find their life's work early in their career, and see it continue to blossom over the decades. I'm eternally grateful that I have. Of course, there's been ups and downs over the years — nothing is ever just a straight line of excitement up and to the right! — but we're oh-so-clearly on the up-up-up part of that curve at the moment. I don't know whether it's just the wind or the whims, but Rails is enjoying an influx of a new generation of programmers at the moment. No doubt it helps when I get to wax poetically about Ruby for an hour with Lex Fridman in front of an audience of millions. No doubt Shopify's continued success eating the world of ecommerce helps. No doubt the stability, professionalism, and execution from The Rails Foundation is an aid. There are many auxiliary reasons why we're riding a wave at the moment, but key to it all is also that Ruby on Rails is simply really, really good! Next year, with RailsConf finished, it's time to return to the US. Amanda has picked a great spot in Austin, we're planning to dramatically expand the capacity, but I also fully expect that demand will continue to rise, especially in the most prosperous and successful market for Rails. Thanks again to all The Rails Foundation members who believed in the vision for a new institution back in 2022. It looks like a no-brainer to join such a venture now, given the success of Rails World and everything else, but it actually took guts to sign on back then. I approached quite a few companies at that time who could see the value, but couldn't find the courage to support our work, as our industry was still held hostage to a band of bad ideas and terrible ideologies. All that nonsense is thankfully now long gone in the Rails world. We're enjoying a period of peak unity, excitement, progress, and determination to continue to push for end-to-end problem solving, open source, and freedom. I can't tell you how happy it makes me feel when I hear from yet another programmer who credits Ruby on Rails with finding joy and beauty in the writing web applications because of what I started over 22 years ago. It may sound trite, but it's true: It's an honor and a privilege. I hope to carry this meaningful burden for as long as my intellectual legs still let me stand. See you next year in Austin? I hope so!
I hadn’t lost my virginity yet. And it wasn’t for lack of trying; it seemed like the rest of my generation was no longer interested in sex. On some level, I understood where they were coming from, the whole act did seem kind of pointless. But after a few beers, that wasn’t how my mind was working. I turned 19 last week. Dad flew in from Idaho, and it was the first time he was in the house I shared with my mother. He left when I was 12, and it was always apparent that parenting wasn’t the top thing on his mind. There was some meeting on Long Island. That’s probably why he was there, in addition to the fact he knew mom wouldn’t make him sleep on the couch. He had many reasons to be in New York that weren’t me. My birthday was just a flimsy pretense. He’d worked on Wall Street the whole time he was around, a quant. He wrote programs that made other people rich. But something happened to him right before he left. A crisis of conscience perhaps; he was spiraling for weeks, cursing the capitalist system, calling my mother a gold-digging whore (which was mostly true), and saying things needed to change. Then he packed a single backpack and left for Idaho. I visited him out there once my sophomore year. He had a camouflaged one room cabin in the middle of a spruce forest, but instead of the hunting or fishing stuff you might expect, the walls were adorned with electrical test equipment and various things that looked like they were out of a biology or chemistry lab. I didn’t know much about this stuff and that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about anyway. He wanted to talk about “man shit” like nature and women and not being life’s bitch. I tried to act like I did, but I didn’t really listen. All I remember is how eerily quiet the night was, I could hear every animal movement outside. My dad said you get used to it. Brian was having a party tonight. Well okay, party is a lofty way to describe it. He’d replaced the fluorescent lights in his mom’s basement with blacklights, and we’d go over there to drink beer and smoke weed and sit around on our phones and scroll. And sometimes someone would laugh at something and share with the group. I had a case of Bud Light left over from the last party and drank two of them today. Hence the thinking about sex and not thinking that thinking about sex was stupid. People wouldn’t be going over there for a few more hours, so I laid in my bed, drank, and loosely beat off to YouTube. Celebrity gossip, internet gossip, speedrun videos, nothing even arousing. I liked the true crime videos about the hot female teachers who slept with their students. Yea yea yea terrible crime and they all act holier than thou about what if the genders were reversed, but the genders weren’t reversed. Maybe they just don’t want to get demonetized. There were never women at these parties. Okay maybe one or two. But nobody ever slept with them or much thought about them that way. They were the agendered mass like the rest of us. Fellow consumers, not providers. Fuck I should just go visit a hooker. I didn’t know much about that, were hookers real? I’d never met one, and there wasn’t a good way to find out about stuff like this anymore. The Internet was pretty much all “advertiser friendly” now, declawed, sanitized. Once the algorithms got good enough and it was technically easy to censor, there was nothing holding them back. It wasn’t actually censored, it would just redirect you elsewhere. And if you didn’t pay careful attention, you wouldn’t even notice it happening. I tried asking ChatGPT about hookers and it told me to call them sex workers. And this was kind of triggering. Who the fuck does this machine think it is? But then I was lost on this tangent, the algorithms got a rise out of me and I went back to comfort food YouTube. Look this guy beat Minecraft starting with only one block. The doorbell rang. This always gives me anxiety. And it was particularly anxiety inducing since I was the only one home. Normally I could just know that the door of my room was locked and someone else would get it and this would be a downstairs issue. But it was just me at home. My heart rate jumped. I waited for it to ring again, but prayed that it wouldn’t. Please just go away. But sure enough, it rang again. I went to my window, my room was on the second floor. There was a black Escalade in the driveway that I hadn’t seen before, and I could see two men at the door. They were wearing suits. I ducked as to make sure they wouldn’t look up at me, making as little noise as possible. Peering over the window sill I could see one opening the screen door, and it looked like he stuck something to the main door. My heart was beating even faster now. It was Saturday night, why were there two men in suits? And why were they here? It felt longer, but 3 minutes later they drove off. I waited another 3 for good measure, just watching the clock on my computer until it hit 6:57. I doubled checked out the window to make sure they were actually gone, and crept down the stairs to retrieve whatever they left on the door. It was a business card, belonging to a “Detective James Reese” of the Nassau County Police. And on the back of the card, there was handwriting. “John – call me” John was my name.
