Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch
So now I have this space I built for me. A place I can feel proud of because I made it. A place that represents me and the way I want to present myself to the world.
A place for my voice to shine through. A real home.
#blogging · #digital-sovereignty · #indieweb · #programming · #web
Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow
You may save time by not having to type the code in from scratch, but you will need to step through the output line by line, revising as you go, before you can commit your code, let alone ship it to production. In many cases this will take as much or more time as it would take to simply write the code—especially these days, now that autocomplete has gotten so clever and sophisticated. It can be a LOT of work to bring AI-generated code into compliance and coherence with the rest of your codebase. It isn’t always worth the effort, quite frankly.
Generating code that can compile, execute, and pass a test suite isn’t especially hard; the hard part is crafting a code base that many people, teams, and successive generations of teams can navigate, mutate, and reason about for years to come.
The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend
I keep noticing those of us in the frontend field being treated much the same as nurses, paralegals, and executive assistants. Our work is seen as important, certainly, but just not the same as, or as important as, the "real" work.
A simple(ish) guide to verifying HTTP Message Signatures in PHP
Mastodon makes heavy use of HTTP Message Signatures. They're a newish almost-standard which allows a server to verify that a request made to it came from the person who sent it. This is a quick example to show how to verify these signatures using PHP.
What is the average size of JavaScript code downloaded per website? Fuck around and find out!