Charles Harries

Posts Stream Books Walks

• Monday, 21 Nov 2022 7:46 pm | Stream

  Personal website design archetypes

  In my line of work (making applications on the web) and in adjacent lines of work (designing applications for the web, managing folks who design for the web, making money on the web), everyone's got a personal website. Most of these personal websites are just for personal branding, but some of them (like this one) also feature blogs, where the owner of the website can write down their thoughts about, usually, the Industry.

  Most personal websites of this ilk can be categorised into one of a few design archetypes:

  • The Plain Jane: simple, probably Python or handcrafted static HTML on the backend, "undesigned". Dan Luu, Patrick McKenzie, Robert Heaton
  • The Hypebeast: lots of webGL, overdesigned, wins lots of Awwwards, spins my CPU up to 80%. Rauno Freiburg
  • The Testbed: like the Hypebeast, but restrained and with a bit more focus on content. Robb Owen, Lynn Fisher, Sophie Koonin
  • The Minimalist: tons of whitespace, system fonts, "simplify, then add lightness" Caterham philosophy. Tom MacWright, Frank Chimero
  • The Bookworm: beautiful typography, classic design. Robin Sloan, Simon Collison

  I think there's also a sort of non-category of folks who get design but who aren't designers, whose websites generally look alright and work well and evince a personal branch but which aren't that much to write home about. (This website's a good example of that.)

  Design Web

• Saturday, 19 Nov 2022 2:22 pm | Stream

  Launch

  This post from Jeremy Keith, about seeing the Artemis 1 launch from a hundred or so miles north of Cape Canaveral puts me in mind of rocket launches, of which I've seen two.

  The first time was in 2009: I traveled out to Titusville for the express purpose of seeing the launch. It was scrubbed twice, and then launched on the third try. Seeing a video of a rocket (or Shuttle) launch is very different from actually being there—even from 3 miles away, it's a visceral experience. Like live music. I wrote a bit about it back in 2014.

  The second time was a year later, from 60 miles away in Orlando. I hadn't known it was happening. I was on a walk with my girlfriend, just wandering around in her neighbourhood in the dark, when we saw the sky go orange off to the east. Our befuddlement turned to awe as the tiny candle of the Space Shuttle rose over the houses and the treetops and disappeared into the clouds.

  Space

• Saturday, 19 Nov 2022 11:46 am | Stream

  The Mountain Goats

  

  Back in Manchester for the Mountain Goats show at The Albert Hall (no not that one). I said it last time and I'll say it again: Manchester is probably the best city in the UK. The best one in England at least. It has the busy feeling of something happening everywhere that you get in the big cities—which I love—but there's always a little nook that you can escape to if you feel overwhelmed. You get the sense that through every door, there's a fractal of interior life waiting to be explored and experienced.

  Anyway, after dinner we made our way over to the venue (by foot; Manchester is very walkable) and found a spot. The Albert Hall has a regular pit-type area, level with the stage, but it also has a horseshoe-shaped mezzanine above the stage, with tiered seating. No assigned seats—everyone just sort of plonked down wherever space could be made—so we had to meander about for a little while before we found a spot to park ourselves. I haven't been to a seated gig for a while, but it was a welcome change of pace!

  The Mountain Goats, predictably, have a sort of mid-2000s indie energy that's very catching for people of Sam & my vintage. Think: bootcut jeans, crumpled sport jackets, glasses, bouncing up and down while playing an acoustic guitar. John Darnielle has a commanding stage presence—he's got such a distinct voice and vibe that you can't help but look in his direction, even if he sort of looks like Death Cab meets John Oliver.

  I think the real standout of the night was multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, who filled out the sound with keyboard, saxophone, electric guitar, and backing vocals. The Mountain Goats have a very distinct sound, courtesy in no small part to Darnielle's voice, but Douglas did a fantastic job of adding complexity and surprise throughout.

  Music Shows

• Tuesday, 15 Nov 2022 7:52 pm | Stream

  On Mastodon

  So I'm on Mastodon now.

  It's nice!—it feels quiet in a good way. A lot of my toxic feelings about Twitter revolve around the sense that something is always happening and that if I'm not constantly watching, I'll miss some fantastic joke or some cultural meta or the rise and fall of some meme. I don't even really get anything out of it beyond a sick sense of satisfaction when an ePiC bUrN is delivered, or a gut-wrenching inadequacy at not being the one who came up with it. Mastodon, by virtue of being a smaller community (for the minute), doesn't really evoke those feelings.

  On the flip side, because Mastodon isn't driven by hype, likes, and retweets (again, for the minute), it feels like a much better fit for folks that are looking for some community online; for that reason, Mastodon seems to get lumped in with Discord as representative of the "new generation" of social media platforms^[1]. (Fittingly, their apps even look similar.) In that sense, I'm not sure that Mastodon'd be a good fit for the Wes Boses and Adam Wathans of the world: people who produce valuable content in the name of selling a product. Even the best devrel folks—people like Adam Argyle or Jhey Tompkins or even Lee Robinson, who do a great job at creating a community around the products they're hawking—would feel the smallest bit out of place^[2].

  Joining Mastodon has also led to a corresponding decrease in my Twitter use. I've deleted the app from my phone, and only use the web app now. There's just enough jank in the web app, and just enough friction in accessing it, to prevent me from reaching for it whenever I have 10 seconds of downtime (running tests, e.g.). I don't miss it.

  On the other hand, I'm not sure that I'm quite a member of the web development community at this point—and certainly not on Mastodon specifically. I try to put Content out but I'm awful at self-marketing, so I think a lot of it just sort of goes out into the void. Maybe that's okay: maybe I'm just writing for me. I've always wanted to be famous but I don't know what I'd do with it. So I'm not sure to what extent Mastodon's really going to do it for me. But I'm gonna give it the old college try.

  ---

  1. Fittingly, their apps even look similar.
  2. As of writing, only Jhey Tompkins is on Mastodon.

  Mastodon Twitter

• Saturday, 12 Nov 2022 6:47 pm | Stream

  Server-sent events

  Ryan Florence posted this tweet the other day, showing real-time updates in Remix, and I thought at first that he'd built some slick websockets stuff into Remix. Alright, that's pretty cool. But it's not websockets.

  It's server-sent events.

  Websockets are terrific for opening and persisting a connection with a server that you're going to regularly communicate with. You send data up the line, and data comes back down the line to you. It's two-way.

  Server-sent events, on the other hand, only send data down to the client (the browser). As the name implies, the server can't receive events—only send them, over an open HTTP connection. But for 80% of use cases, that's fine^[1].

  The benefit of this is that you don't have to spool up a whole nother server just to handle the websocket connections. It's all just HTTP, using some clever Content-Type headers. This makes client-side interactivity based on server-side events trivial to implement—another way that traditional "multipage" applications are closing the gap to single-page applications.

  Server-sent events, MDN

  Web Code Browser

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