Articles tagged “links”
🔗 Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails
Wednesday, 25 July, 2018 — development links
I remember thinking that Rails was focusing on the wrong target when DHH announced Turbolinks in 2012. My conviction back then was that offering an instant response time to user interactions was key to excellent UX. Because of network latency, such interactivity is only possible if you minimize your dependency on it and, instead, manage a lot of state on the client.
I thought this was necessary for the kinds of apps I was working on. And with that in mind, I tried many approaches and frameworks for implementing the same pattern: Single-page applications (SPA). I believed that the SPA wagon was the future™. A few years of experience later, I am not sure what the future is, but I really want to have an alternative.
This piece really spoke to me. There’s a wide world of possibility with JavaScript, front-end frameworks and Single Page Apps these days. JavaScript’s maturing and growth over the past few years are a fantastic story. What I’m less enthusiastic about is the complexity that seems to pervade front-end development work.
I think a lot of it is getting used to having these rich tools available to solve problems. I also think, in many cases, we’re over-applying these tools when simpler solutions would fit many problems better than the full framework Single Page App approach.
🔗 2017 Police Violence Report
Monday, 1 January, 2018 — links civics
The team at Mapping Police Violence has released their 2017 report. The report covers general statistics behind the 1,129 people killed by police across the United States in 2017 with some effective visualizations.
Of note, the discrepancy in the number of killings against the number of incidents where an officer was charged with a crime. Related are the number of killings where a video record exists.
🔗 Photographing Art
Sunday, 31 December, 2017 — links photography
Photographing art turns out to be very difficult. You would think that you could just point a camera on your phone at a piece of art and it would come out correct. In fact if you’re at a museum it might actually work because the museum controls the light that is on every painting. In my house though I do not have high quality museum lights. What I have are crappy, yellow, florescent, warm, and plain terrible lighting. So when I take a photo of my paintings it usually comes out looking kind of like I took the photo under a streetlamp.
I like this post as an example of explaining a problem by writing through the thinking process to solve a problem. It’s not written as a professional photographer, it’s written as a painter who needs to solve a photography problem.
🔗 2018 Student Camera Project, Part I
Saturday, 30 December, 2017 — links photography
My friend Magnus Hedemark is starting to assemble a $300 learning camera kit. Besides budget, the key is that it’s a student camera, which he explains thusly:
A student camera is a camera that someone learning serious photography can use to effectively develop their knowledge and skills while creating images that are pleasing enough to make the whole experience worthwhile. They don’t require a lot of features.
Here are some of the things I would require out of a student camera:
- Easy manual aperture control.
- Easy manual shutter speed control.
- Easy manual ISO control.
- Interchangeable lens system with a common mount.
- A prime lens in a “normal” focal length (effective focal length between 40-58mm).
I’m very interested with where this goes.
Dev Links for August 25, 2012
Saturday, 25 August, 2012 — links macosx development devops
- Why Blacksmiths are Better at Startups than You
- Amy Hoy compares traditional craftsmanship with startup culture and human nature
- Interesting new UNIX commands in Mountain Lion
- The GUI gets the vast majority of the attention with each new OS X release, but there are some nifty new utilities on the command line, too
- Startup Piston Cloud says it’s built a better OpenStack installer