vanadium

Their search index was great back in the 90s simply because it was so localized to a specific interest, location, theme, etc. Wayfinding was a hell of a lot nicer back then, but didn't scale in the face of Google. I do miss the intimacy of search on Yahoo from back then.

And it was easy to control _how_ and _where_ you wanted your site to appear in the index. It's naive to think something similar would survive endless spam nowadays, but damn, I liked and really miss it.

"Let me duck that for you" might get a few doubletakes.

Both have their pluses and minuses.

It was delightful when auditing the experiences from a potential new client in Firefox Dev Tools the other day, and realizing that I could see, inline to the target DOM element, JS events tied to them while looking through the source. Saved me a good amount of time.

When I'm looking for pure-play performance auditing, Lighthouse integrated into Chrome's Dev Tools are an obvious win.

So yeah, each have their strengths and weaknesses.

> i think websites/pages, like for example movies, should have age restriction in their metadata.

A few friends and I had an idea for voluntary rating back in '97, not long after the CDA of 1996 ("Black Ribbon") debacle.

To be fair, while when we envisioned it, it was something more facetious to get a laugh, but thinking retrospectively about it 21 years later actually made (and still makes) a hell of a lot of sense (now) as the father of a young boy.

Accessibility is one place where you'll invariably be forced to pay at some point because the 800lb gorilla of screenreaders (JAWS) is also what's used most often in both home and in most corporate environments.

https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/

I definitely know this pain (and glory) from experience and can relate. It all began when Ontario started enforcing AODA and the brand I was working with at the time had to be compliant due to their business operating in the province despite primarily being a U.S. company.

I've done enterprise-level a11y projects for major brands, and the problem isn't always understanding the WCAG Success Criteria or WAI-ARIA, it's the _how_ that gets you. Multiple times, I literally had IBM's a11y practice and that of another major accessibility vendor (both of whom were hired for validation of approach and certification of the product coming from my team) disagreeing on which UX direction actually fulfilled the Success Criteria. The grey area of accessibility integration is _vast_ and in many cases, outright subjective.

Oftentimes folks believe that just because you plunked ARIA roles and other a11y-specific best practices into a framework or design system, it actually works out to be a11y-compliant. While it gets you closer to the endgame, the complexity of the actual User Experience (e.g., running it through screen readers and other assistive devices, and not relying solely on static analysis like aXe or pa11y) is where the magic (and pain) actually happens. Accessible responsive patterns, contrast ratios, UX metaphors, affordances, etc.; all of that is yet another level of abstraction that'll keep a team with work for a very long time.

(For those that really specialize in a11y to the point of becoming a consultant, though, it's a very lucrative career path for the above reasons.)

This assumes that both your and the the subsequent site's use either pulls an evergreen version (bad practice) or the exact same version (not altogether likely). Doing enough front-end performance auditing for potential clients, it's clear the latter case is as varied as can be.

We pulled everything in-house onto our own Cloudfront CDN and saved a bunch of time on DNS/TLS negotiation, as each unique third-party request is extremely expensive over middling 3G, on the order of nearly 1 second apiece according to WebPageTest. Leveraging 'preconnect' with that CDN saved just a bit more time on top of that.

I've talked with several companies in the past 6-8 months where this tenure-based model of elevating engineers to management positions has broken down quite a bit.

What generally happens is, once in management, they end up on a track of being more business-facing and the breadth of their role continues to expand (while reducing hands-on code time) to the point where the organization has to relent and hire from the outside anyhow when the promoted manager finally admits they'd have rather remained hands-on.

I try to identify engineers on my team with an interest and early aptitude for management early-on, and mentor in that direction while mentoring those who wish to remain hands-on in the other. I always need a right-hand person to handle the higher-order organizational aspects while I'm away, and likewise, I need a left-hand person to lead the day to day technical execution. So usually I'm not lacking for support while at the same time elevating them to the next level (and without needing to hire someone from the outside).

Having a kid during my transition to management (in the absence of existing management) brought me to the exact same thought process, and it's a dead-on observation I live every day six years later. It becomes much less about the executional skill, and much more about the aspects you listed above. The skills involved in parenting and managing are one big feedback loop of sorts.

Having someone that can see the forest for the trees and chart/change course as a team is, additionally, crucial. It's just that, at home, it's not just me.

Watched this on NHK earlier in the year, and it's worth every minute. Fantastic documentary and really gives you a thorough sense of who he is and how he operates.

I have a personal Slack instance of all the people I've worked with and/or managed--and have earned my trust--over the past 7-8 years. We're close-knit and look out for one another in the Chicago market. We've landed each other new gigs, swarmed to help when someone's in need, etc.

That and we're always bouncing news, advice, and helping one another in said Slack instance. Safety in numbers.

I haven't updated my resume since ~2005; when I re-entered the market looking for a new gig in 2010 and ever since, it's been LinkedIn curation and getting opportunities passed to me from my network 100%.

> There are companies that take this the other way. Companies where everyone is over 40 and has kids. And stability of the prod systems is highly prized. Nobody wants hackathons , we all leave at 5:30pm each day. These companies exist in Bay Area.

I'm in Chicago at an agency, and our company is more or less just like this. Moreover, the average age on the team I direct is ~43--not by intention or design; it just happened over the course of inheriting the team and hiring since then. We have safe, risk-mitigated times for deployments, solid production systems, and unless something unexpectedly tanked or you're on flex time, we're all out at 5:00pm.

They're out there, but they're not always easy to find.

I remember helping the WU team as a PWS operator since about 2007, and I found the existing XML feeds lacking back then. I gave them some new data models to implement for the XML feeds, and they were thoroughly open and awesome for the help from a PWS owner. Ended up a Lifetime member.

Definitely haven't been the same in the last 3-4 years, though. In the last 6 months, even the platform has become a bit touch and go.

Chalk it up to where we're at in 2018, I suppose.

UXPin (based in both SV and Poland) does just fine for our organization. Been using it for a year and a half with only fairly minor issues now and then. And it has Sketch integration.

They're much less a hardware business anymore.

No question.

While the central topic still makes sense, a lot of the technical prescriptions in there are pretty well outdated and even contradict best practices today. I'd be curious to know just how long ago this was written.

Edit: March 2016, and their dateline has since been removed: https://web.archive.org/web/20160311072848/https://www.imagi...

Bing is now serving AMP pages (since the new Governance Model was unveiled), so...

Something like XKCD 927.

Not to mention Firefox Developer Edition in general: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

If by "limit" JavaScript you mean "no custom JavaScript can be written, nor other JavaScript used other than what AMP gives you (except for AMP-supported analytics packages)", you'd be right.

I'll contribute this from Redfin's Engineering practice, July 13, 2018:

"Google Doesn’t Have the Guts to Make Page Speed Actually Matter" https://redfin.engineering/google-doesnt-have-the-guts-to-ma...

Google did just add a "Mobile Speed Score" to each URL in Adwords with a 1-10 scale of unknown composition/weighting that media folks and marketing managers can see, but developers can't really dig into (other than using...Google's Lighthouse for correlations). https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-introduces-the-mo...

Oh, yeah, it also upsells AMP. Even if you're opposed to or otherwise not going to adopt it as an engineering team, they're clearly going after the non-technical stakeholders to make it happen.

Referencing the AMP URL controversy seems somewhat relevant in this context.

This is where the whole fight over what "separation of concerns" in the front-end means scores a clean point for the traditional definition.

It would follow then that an engineer having to look at a React project in the future might have an initial reaction not foreign to an engineer having to deal with a legacy Angular 1.x codebase today: recoil.

It's a collision between half the industry telling designers they need to know HTML and CSS to do the CSS work themselves (instead of Software Engineers, because they apparently don't want to deal with it) while the other half of the industry makes it ever harder to do so.

Consistency isn't exactly a high point when it comes to industry signaling vs reality.

I remember those days very, very well.

Having started my career at the start of the dot-com boom (and later bust), that was damn near every startup I came across.

Our little agency ended up moving into eTour's space in Atlanta (VaHi) when they departed. Nice movie theatre built into the space.