collinsworth

collinsworth, 3 days ago to random

The year is 2032. CSS is so powerful JavaScript is all but obsolete. The average website ships 500MB of JavaScript.

collinsworth, 3 days ago to random

Two truths and a lie about me:

• I am a developer
• I sometimes wear hats
• I never, ever discover leftover console.logs that I wrote which accidentally made it to production

collinsworth, 3 days ago to random

My five-year-old often wants a band-aid on any scrape, bump or bruise, even if the injury is not bleeding and wouldn't otherwise call for it.

He swears the band-aid makes it feel better, even though I know it's actually doing nothing. So I usually just give in, because although it's mostly pointless, having it there lets us both move past it and focus on other things.

Anyway, this is a story about most of the automated testing I've encountered in my dev career.

collinsworth, 5 days ago to random

Shout-out to that one random JavaScript developer, whose free confetti library bursts at the end of every user flow on every website nowadays.

collinsworth, 9 days ago to random

Another afternoon spent troubleshooting component rendering in React. (The problem was not using useMemo on the component's children! How fun! How user-friendly! How obvious!)

Once again: no other framework forces you to do this kind of micro-management.

None of them make you import a bunch of helper functions just to make stuff render the logical way you'd think it would.

None of them make you write this much code to do something this simple.

React is bad. It's very, very bad.

collinsworth, 10 days ago to random

"React is, for the vast, vast majority of organisations…objectively worse than many of the alternatives.

React meta-frameworks…are never going to outperform dedicated server frameworks or tailored front-end code.

They make hiring easier but they also make it easier for management to fire your entire team and replace you with something cheaper.

So it doesn’t matter if it’s worse. …Tech management will sacrifice technological progress if it disempowers labour."

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

collinsworth, 12 days ago to random

I tell myself I'll remember things later because I just love lying to myself, I guess.

collinsworth, 13 days ago to random

It irritates me way more than it should that the bubbles on my kid's sticker sheets are clearly just copy-and-pasted "O" characters from some basic font.

collinsworth, 15 days ago to random

Note to self: You haven't listened to OK Computer in a long time and you should do that.

collinsworth, 17 days ago to random

I hate to say it, but I miss having an algorithm.

Mastodon content is overwhelmingly non-stop variations on "everything sucks, we're all fucked," to a degree I don't feel like Twitter was even at the height of the pandemic. But at least with Twitter you got a few laughs in with your depression and despair.

collinsworth, 19 days ago to CSS

The question of whether CSS is a programming language serves only one purpose: to demote those who write it.

There is no confusion that needs to be clarified, and no other purpose to the debate beyond the most trivial kind of pedantry.

The debate itself is an act of gatekeeping, whether intentional or not. Its only meaningful effect is to elevate some work over other work, despite their nearly identical nature.

The only meaningful function of the question is segregation. #css

collinsworth, 22 days ago to random

Just read two different blog posts hyping up React 19, and almost literally every single feature the authors are excited about is a feature every other comparable framework has already had for years at this point.

React is so far behind, almost everything it's doing is playing catch-up.

collinsworth, 24 days ago to random

This is why I hate Safari/iOS.

It's the exact same page, with the exact same code, on both sides. But on the left (Safari on MacOS), the arrow shows above the item as it should, and on the right (Safari on iOS), the arrow is inexplicably behind the circle.

Note there's no z-index involved anywhere here. This is all just default browser stacking order.

One browser shouldn't have two separate implementations of stacking order.

collinsworth, 24 days ago to random

A Chrome extension that just replaces all AI icons with a hand that has two thumbs

lzg, 24 days ago to random

i’m trying to figure out what annoys me about this ad, and i think it’s making the public landscape even more unintelligible for the vast majority of people.

collinsworth, 25 days ago to random

Every writer needs a good editor, because every writer loves everything they write, and will make it at least 2–3 times longer than it needs to be, in the belief it's much more interesting than it really is, without someone there to say "no, actually, a lot of this is not that great and you should just get to the point," and what I'm getting at is: Taylor Swift has needed a good editor for at least five years but especially now.

collinsworth, 26 days ago to random

Few things make me as explosively grumpy as trying to do something that seems like it should be extremely simple with my Apple account.

(Because it takes 15 minutes doing multiple searches and signing in at least 2–3 times across multiple apps and websites every single time.)

collinsworth, 28 days ago to random

Fascists do not say what is true; they say what would need to be true in order to justify what they intend to do anyway.

collinsworth, 29 days ago to random

We as developers often get to make our own technology decisions.

But have you ever imagined what it would be like if our users could vote on how they wanted the things they use to be built?

Have you ever stopped to think what a massive privilege we enjoy, being allowed to pick what we think is best for us, over what any user might pick for themselves, given the requisite understanding?

collinsworth, 1 month ago to random

PC Gaming is a ruthlessly difficult game where your reward for beating it is getting to play an actual video game.

collinsworth, 1 month ago to random

I think we're focused on the wrong thing when we look at what tech works for a company like Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.

We should be looking at what tech works when you don't have a small army of staff engineers optimizing it. I want to know what I can scale without paying someone a half million dollar salary to do it.

There should be more case studies on things that don't have a billion-dollar company propping them up, humming along quietly on a cheap-ass VPS somewhere.