Marginalia 2

I started at my new job this week, so there's a little less reading in this edition of Marginalia. Not very long ago, I though maybe I wanted to move out of libraries and become a software developer. Since I know virtually no software languages beyond HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I started looking at junior developer positions in frontend and web design. I even applied for one, but the only thing that came out of that was that they lost my details as part of the PageUp hack. In retrospect, I should have known better, because I'm much more attracted to the kind of minimalist, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin kind of approach to web design and software development that I've been reading about in the last couple of weeks. In January this year Ed Summers wrote a great article about building offline sites with React. I love this because it takes the new(ish) hotness - React and then uses it in situations where internet access is flaky or nonexistent. Summers explains that his project was inspired by the Minimal Computing movement:

We use “minimal computing” to refer to computing done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors.

I was particularly struck by this project because a few months ago I decided I needed to learn React, bought a book about it, built a couple of things, and then decided it was massively over-complicated for my needs and probably most other people's. Everything you're likely to read about building sites with React will take you on a tour of pre-compilers, bundlers, CSS-in-JavaScript, JSX, and a bunch of other stuff that you now need to know about just so that you don't have to use XMLHttpRequest and CSS3. See? I'm totally unsuited to commercial web development. David Bryant Copeland similarly thinks maybe everything's started to get a bit out of control and has decided to go back to basics with Brutalist Web Design:

The term brutalism is derived from the French béton brut, meaning “raw concrete”. Although most brutalist buildings are made from concrete, we're more interested in the term raw. Concrete brutalist buildings often reflect back the forms used to make them, and their overall design tends to adhere to the concept of truth to materials.

A website's materials aren't HTML tags, CSS, or JavaScript code. Rather, they are its content and the context in which it's consumed. A website is for a visitor, using a browser, running on a computer to read, watch, listen, or perhaps to interact. A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.

If you can't wait for the whole web design world to embrace Brutalist Web Design, Browsh has you covered. It's a web browser that takes your fancy JavaScript-heavy web page with 200 background API calls and 3MB of images, and turns it into a few kB of text and maybe a pixelated image. Awesome for when you're barely in range with only your smartphone.

Some people who have done a lot of thinking about how to make things simple in a different way are Fog Creek Software. They're the people behind Trello and Stack Exchange, but they wanted to create something that's a bit more beginner-friendly, rewards good behaviour, and makes complicated things seem simple. They ended up making Glitch. In a Code Newbie podcast interview I listened to a while ago, Fog Creek CEO Anil Dash explained how the tech behind Glitch is quite complex and clever (when someone wants to edit code from a project, Glitch quickly spins up a new Docker image and associates it with that user's account - in a couple of seconds) - but also how the whole project was designed from the beginning to be friendly to newbies and people who may ordinarily feel unwelcome or oppressed using something like Stack Overflow or GitHub.

I phrased that last sentence quite deliberately, because Donna Lanclos has convinced me that maybe we shouldn't talk about diversity anymore. She also refers to a couple of things I already had in my Pocket list but hadn't got to yet. Chris Bourg's 2018 code4lib keynote For the love of baby unicorns was surprisingly banal, once I read it. I remember the furore on Twitter, when Bourg had to essentially batten down the hatches and disappear for a little while while some kind of Reddit mob descended upon her,