2manyredirects

Was looking around GitHub for a nice wiki example and decided to check out projects from folk like The Guardian / New York Times / BBC, then stumbled across this page; I never appreciated that Android Browser had so little market share, given the number of Android OS devices out there. Other interesting stats in there too.

I met somebody the other day who works for a tiny start-up and said their MD frequently hires a couple of extra actors to make the office look busier when they have client meetings.

One of the unions has been quick to attribute the issue to the outsourcing to India of some of the IT responsibility, which the right wing press here has been all too eager to publish, but BA have rebuffed this and said at this stage they believe the root cause was a power supply issue - sure, that could be attributed somewhere along the lines to an 'alpha male business asshole' (as I read in one of the comments here), but it's probably best to wait and see what the post-mortem really is rather than seek to blame someone, somewhere, be it a businessman, an Indian dev team or anything else.

I am reminded of a post a while back regarding AWS' issues affecting multiple data centres (I forget the specifics), and how their post mortem didn't appropriate blame on anyone (which it really easily could have), but rather their own checks and balances, which allowed the issue to arise in the first place. I do hope that when the dust settles we see a measured response rather than a witch hunt.

We dropped npm in favour of yarn a while back, but I imagine we'll switch back once the stable release is out. Our needs are perhaps simpler than most, but the key issues we were having with npm at the time were directly solved by yarn:

  1. Dependency install was taking too long.
  2. Inconsistent builds between devs because of no lock file.
  3. Could not search the registry from the command line in a timely manner.

Having just done a quick test on a random project, I'm pleased to see that all of those concerns are now taken care of, plus the install (for this project at least) is ~30% faster than it is with yarn.

Interesting comment regarding Transit - as a Londoner who went to NYC for the first time last year I didn't even contemplate looking up another app; I just opened up CityMapper and it said "It looks like you're in New York. Switch City?", so it's pretty seamless.

A few years ago I'd definitely have trawled the App Store and I'm sure I'd have found Transit, but it just goes to show the power of a good, reliable interface and considered rollout to ensure you're always the go-to product if someone is aware of you.

> I wouldn't be surprised if it loads these images on mobile too, but I can't be bothered to check.

It does. 5+ second load time over 4G before first render and even then it took a few more seconds to fully load...

> If someone one hundred years ago would have said that we would be transporting as many passengers in aircraft as we would in trains, people may have thought , "a steam engine would never fit in an aircraft made of wood and ropes".

That's such an eloquent way of highlighting the need for conceptualisation in engineering but also the struggle to convince others (investors perhaps) that you're not a complete nutcase when you think outside the box.

That's super-awesome advice @brudgers, thank you.

I was so fascinated with the survey results being statistically significant (and therefore thinking the more respondents the better) that I failed to realise that 5 people willing to take the time to respond, and 4 willing to share their emails is such a good starting point to get the ball rolling.

I like the idea; more and more I'm finding myself hosting static sites (maybe with a CMS back-end hosted elsewhere that generates and publishes to S3) and this is a good solution.

However... the website simply doesn't work. I get the feeling from it I should be able to simply enter my email address and copy the generated code, yet when I do so nothing happens, and unless my access token really is `abc123`, something's not right here!

Perhaps some wisely chosen (i.e. clear) SVGs - either inline or as part of an icon font - could be used instead?