Dispatches From The Internets

This megapost contains notes, slides, and a screencast version of Christian Heilmann’s MunichJS talk. There are lots of great bits in here. This section particularly resonated with me:

The fundamental truth of the web is that the user controls the experience. That’s what makes the web work: you write your code for the Silicon Valley dweller on a 8 core state-of-the-art mobile device with an evergreen and very capable browser on a fast wireless connection and much money to spend. The same code, however, should work for the person who saved up their money to have a half hour in an internet cafe in an emerging country on a Windows XP machine with an old Firefox connected with a very slow and flaky connection. Or the person whose physical condition makes them incapable to see, speak, hear or use a mouse.

Our job is not to tell that person off to keep up with the times and upgrade their hardware. Our job is to use our smarts to write intelligent solutions. Intelligent solutions that test which of their parts can execute and only give those to that person. Web technologies are designed to be flexible and adaptive, and if we don’t understand that, we shouldn’t pretend that we are web developers.

Amen!

A scary fiction:

With perfect algorithmic efficiency, Facebook found you a beautiful wife who was practically guaranteed to produce a sickly child. Nothing too bad, mind you, but just ill enough to make you spend a little bit more than you would otherwise.

…

There’s no malice here. No human ever decided to profit from your misery. The constant A/B testing with billions of reactions just so happened to engineer a situation to help you breed a better human. More profitable human.

View content minus the jargon. ’Nuff said.

This is a treasure trove of software development resources—Web and otherwise—compiled by Jeff Petty.

Chris Coyier put together a nice overview of ways to reduce user frustration when dealing with dropdown and flyout menus because, you know, some people still use a mouse.