For me, and the places I've worked, "Front-of-the-Front-End" is usually described as "UI Engineer". However, I am fully aware that can and does mean something different to other people.
Honestly, the article that you link to has a few h1s and only one of them is for the article itself, while the rest seem like ads and not equally important content. I can continue pointing contradictions in what the author says, but the article is rather long.
No, it's an presumed expert deep diving on a subject vs MDN reference material. MDN is extremely inadequate for explaining anything that isn't mere reference, like how things are practically used in the wild or their practical impact.
A good example of this would be https://css-tricks.com/ vs MDN. MDN doesn't even try to be the resource that css-tricks is.
Anyways, why not respond to the author's actual content? What tutsplus.com's CMS is doing to their content is irrelevant.
Honestly, I have limited time and writing extended counterpoints to every argument is rather tiresome.
Regarding the article given, what made impression to me was that it states that if a document have a few important articles, all of them deserve to be h1. Well, put h1 as the topic that binds together those articles like "The blog of an expert" and each article can move to h2. Simple, semantic, and does not need to break convention.
I'm not against a few h1s in a document, but each of them must be important in a different way like name of the website, name of article, important warning in the footer/sidebar/wherever. It is like mail, if each email is marked "important", none of them is or at least you can't make your mind without reading everything and deciding for yourself which makes the "important" label meaningless.
Edit: adding a counterexample.
I've visited news websites which have sidebar with most recent or most read or the like articles. Each item in the list is marked h1 and skipping them wastes time and money.
Same with a few sidebars that are h1 titled though I don't care about their existence and their presence just shadows the h1 of the article that I'm interested in.
> 4) Requirements are conveyed verbally, not through written documents.
I can't even begin to imagine the sheer amount of meetings and "chats" that would need to take place on a regular basis just to keep things moving along.
I admit to knowing very little about XP but this sounds like my own personal hell.
I would say ease of use and cost. A friend of mine has been using Google Sheets for years to power some small bits of data on his website. Maintaining and running his site costs nothing but the domain since he uses Netlify for CI w/Github and hosting with Google Sheets for dynamic data.
> I may be in the minority, but the older I get the more I want to be alone. I love my wife and kids, but there is almost too much pressure anymore to do this, do that. There are too many hands on my time.
Do you think that could at all be attributed that you are actually more alone now?
What I mean is, most families aren't interacting much with people outside their immediate family, whereas in the past the extended family was around and built a support system for those immediate families. If you had your parents, siblings, cousins, etc... around, you might actually have more time to recharge because child rearing wouldn't exclusively be put on the shoulders of the parents.
The way that our kids are raised now is incredibly different than the way I was raised. Although predominately raised by my parents, my grandparents, aunts, great aunts, etc... all had an influence and played a part in that upbringing due to the geographics of where everyone lived.
It might depend on the culture, but for a lot of people socializing is considered relaxing, and the more people you have around the higher the chances for any of them to have that belief.
Aside from going out and physically isolating yourself, having family around usually doesn’t help.
Now family could help looking after the kids when you take time away, but once your kids can stay aline for a few hours, having more people taking care of them might not help that much (now you’re managing a fleet of care givers, creating a “too many cooks” situation)
Often when I hear about the older generation of my family, who immigrated and lived in Brooklyn for years before moving to the "burbs", I think they had good intentions but didn't do any favors for the subsequent generations.
My parents grew up and stones throw away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - a lot even lived in multi family, multi generational homes. When my mom had kids she had a support system that included people from 3 different generations, all willing to lend a hand. Their social lives revolved around interacting with all different family members, and get together were happening almost daily just because of the inherent (lack of) distance between them all.
Now, we all live in the burbs, with long distances between each other. The grandparents see the kids a few times a year and we all have to make concrete plans to have get togethers. Interacting with most extended family is reserved for weddings or funerals and the lack of true support systems takes it toll on all of us.
I could possibly be romanticizing the past, but when compared to the current lifestyle, I truly believe it wasn't for the best.
My parents lived around all of their siblings. They're close, they make a point of seeing each other regularly. My generation? We all live in different states. I worry once my parents are gone, that the fabric of my family will no longer exist, because nobody puts the work into keeping us all together. When we do see eachother, it's because we have a meeting point (parent's home) and a holiday (e.g., Christmas) or something.
The hustler culture indicts us to a life of packing up and moving across the country just for a marginally better job offer or degree or cheaper mansions. You see this even on comment threads here discussing where to live in the US. People "shop" for the best city right now to move to because it has cheaper housing or taxes or whatever. Scan the entire thread and you don't see being close to family or community roots ever mentioned.
I'll also mention that when much of the population is transient like that, it'll even affect the people who aren't.
Most everyone I knew growing up doesn't live where we grew up anymore. They're scattered everywhere. Much of my family that used to live there has moved on too.
I was one of the last to officially leave (around 25) and there wasn't much left in my "hometown" for me when I left, because few people I knew were still nearby anyway.
To be clear, I'm not talking about rural Kansas. That's a story from suburban New Jersey, about an hour outside of NYC.
It’s a consequence of our inability to predict the future and measure certain gains and losses. It’s easy to measure safety, comfort, convenience of single family detached homes with garages. It’s difficult to measure benefits of community and family, except perhaps the cost of babysitting versus leaving with grandparents. Not only is it hard to measure, but the trade offs are hard to compare and so we end up going with the easy, obvious choices.
I think a lot of people here are under the assumption that voice commands, on any device, have the potential to be human reviewed. I am not sure whether or not the general public has that same assumption.
That being said, my biggest concern is the fact that many of these device don't have a hardware microphone kill switch. I feel better when I know I can control when a device is listening in. I've read reports that some Alexa devices have them, but I don't own any so I am unable to verify that.
I want all of my devices with microphones to hardware based kill switch for the mic; that's my phone, laptop, tablet, everything.
> I think a lot of people here are under the assumption that voice commands, on any device, have the potential to be human reviewed. I am not sure whether or not the general public has that same assumption.
That's because we, as an industry, have fooled them into thinking that AI is real, and that people who don't know it's real are idiots. We don't think students deserve a proper tech education, so unless they are professionally techies, they have to learn from marketing materials (designed to convince them to buy things.)
Those who are very pleased to hear they will be backpedaling on their updated keyboard designs.
Those who "don't understand" because they actually like the new keyboards (and the TouchBar even).
No matter where you stand, the new keyboards are highly controversial and divisive, and that's not good. The old keyboards didn't put people into opposing sides, they just were there. Sure people compared them to other manufacturer keyboards, sometimes for the worse and other times for the better, but it wasn't a hate or love relationship by the user base. There was no "getting used to it," it was just a keyboard.
I look forward to a return to a non controversial, highly usable and widely accepted as "fine", keyboard. I hope that's what we get.
> The old keyboards didn't put people into opposing sides, they just were there.
Have you ever spoken to a thinkpad advocate re: chiclet keyboards? The previous mac keyboards were absolutely controversial. It took years for the previous keyboard to be 'just a keyboard', which I do acknowledge happened.
> I look forward to a return to a non controversial, highly usable and widely accepted as "fine", keyboard.
Honestly, this will never happen for two reasons:
1) people's needs are diverse enough where that's simply an impossible job. I happen to _really_ like the current apple keyboards, but the reliability is bad enough for me to want a change. The consensus where I work (100ish mac laptops) is that the keyboard is awful. Someone is going to be unhappy, and it sounds like it might be me :(
2) There's some segment of the technology world (non-unix people?) that will latch onto any criticism of apple - fair/deserved or not - and shout it endlessly.
> The previous mac keyboards were absolutely controversial. It took years for the previous keyboard to be 'just a keyboard', which I do acknowledge happened.
I would dispute that people stopped caring about the keyboard shortcomings. They're ergonomically bad keyboards, just not bad enough to keep complaining for this many years. If all Apple cares about is what people are currently chattering about, they're missing an opportunity to improve the product, because I still regard the MacBook keyboards as a reason to buy something else. When I think of the painful adjustment that I'll have to make if I ditch Apple laptops in favor of something else, there's a voice in my head saying, "Remember when a laptop keyboard could feel good to type on?" Banging my fingertips into a hard surface all day never became "just a keyboard."
Most of the technology works just hates any sort of change. Apple’s core base is different, they embrace change regardless of its utility. So that makes it hard to evaluate this kind of tech online.
I’m also noticing that the article suggests that apple’s real reason for change is poor yield and reliability. Those are objective measures, so I think we can agree that the current keyboard is bad.
> Apple’s core base is different, they embrace change regardless of its utility.
I really don't know how one can come to this conclusion. Apple people bitch about _everything_ that changes. I think the one and only exception might be any time that they added retina screens to something.
Well, IMO it depends on what you get used to. After typing for one day on my mechanical keyboard, even the Thinkpad feels like typing on cardboard. Conversely, using the mechanical keyboard, after spending a few days on my laptop, feels like an old typewriter. I can say that I enjoyed my 2016 Macbook keyboard after getting used to it and I was even faster than on the old macbook. Also, another example, the 2014 model had shorter travel and crisper feeling than the 2011 model. I guess, after a while you get used to something and it feels ok. Until it breaks that is.
This is the real point. A keyboard IS AN INTERFACE. The point of it is to move information between two things: the computer and me. It is a means. If I notice it at all, that’s a negative.
Regardless of who likes the current keyboard, there is a large reliability issue. I don’t mind the small travel but I have had to constantly air duster my keyboard and finally completely replace it (through apple) because the e key would sometimes register nothing and sometimes register twice - that’s not a subjective keyboard taste thing, that’s just a reliability problem I have never had with any other keyboard, certainly not in under just 8 months of use.
What about we who like the new keyboards (sans Touch Bar, personally) but understand (being intellectually mature adults) that people's preferences differ, probably at least in part because their typing styles also differ?
To be honest I expect this group greatly outnumbers your number 2), but being quietly satisfied with a thing is not a state of mind as conducive to jumping into an internet flame war as one of contempt for those who don't agree with your own subjective opinion of a thing or things.
The big problem I have with the new design is the reliability. I haven't personally had a key stop working, but it seems to be a real problem, and I do think the keys on my machine that has them (12" Macbook) have gotten fairly mushy after just a few years of use. That shouldn't happen—a really good keyboard will last for decades and/or tens of millions of strokes per key.
I'm in the former camp and I don't really know a lot of people that own Apple products that actually have anything positive to say about either the keyboard or the touchbar. So the other camp is probably pretty small. I know a disturbingly large number of people that already had keyboard replacement (multiple in several cases) and the only reason I haven't gone in myself yet is that not having a laptop for a week plus is very inconvenient so I've been living with a flaky command key for a while now.
This isn't what Apple does. There are many examples of them making changes that people dislike initially, but then over time emerge as 'the way'.
It seems in this case they may have gone too far and have not managed to convert enough people over to thinking the new keyboard is actually better than the old one - though this is certainly compounded by the reliability issue and might have been true otherwise.
But what they don't do, and shouldn't do, is drive for non controversial and fine. There are plenty of laptop manufacturers that use this strategy, and we can all agree that Apple make vastly, vastly superior laptops to those brands. Mistakes might be made, but they're part and parcel of what make Apple, Apple. Without the risk of mistakes, we also wouldn't have all the other great features that the MacBook has.
> You're alienating the product that makes you big. But that's okay, all companies do that eventually, giving rise to the competition that appeals to the alienated user base.
Tschallacka is right, it seems the be part of the normal lifecycle of most online sites/apps. Perhaps SO's expiration date is near, for those users who made it popular enough to be "ruined" by the devs.
This is a natural consequence of the "build an audience first, figure out how to monetize it later" business model.
At the beginning, the service does all sorts of nice things in order to attract users. These things all cost money, but nobody cares at that stage because they're burning other peoples' money and building the userbase is Priority 1.
Eventually the other peoples' money runs out and the service has to be sustainable on its own. That means it suddenly matters a lot that all those nice things the service did to attract users cost money. The nice things get cut, of course. But the users have all now gotten used to having them, so when they disappear, people start screaming.
As long as we build our businesses around the idea of getting big first and worrying about how to make them sustainable later, this pattern will continue repeating itself.
As with most American enterprises, they must continue to grow -- indefinitely. They cannot be content to exist statically, even with whatever profit margins they currently have (if any).
I'm no economist, but this precept is obvious nonsense in the sense that nothing can grow indefinitely. And so things are subsumed by other things which therefore grow, or they morph into things that can continue to grow indefinitely.
SO is morphing into some other thing -- a quasi social/hiring/Q&A/team thing. Something, no doubt, that they can more easily monetize.
Most American companies are just normal small to mid-size businesses that happily exist for decades. Growth at all costs is the venture capital path and it's choice that requires the (completely expected) payoff for the investment.
The worst thing about this is that I'm _so completely uninterested_ in SO's stupid social/team/hiring product that will supposedly forever revolutionize the tech world.
I'm sure there are little teams of product managers and marketers just brimming with enthusiasm about it, but I have nothing but fatigue for these things anymore. It's not innovation, it's just more suckling at the enterprise teat.
It seems you could make a law out of this - something like, "The amount a site values its community is inversely proportional to the community's size."
Anywho, seems it's time to look at federating Q&A.
Or maybe rather "to the accumulated value the community has created"? I don't even think the community at SO is that large, or has grown that much recently. At some point, the users are committed having sunken so much time and effort into making the site great, and the company knows it and wants to squeeze more money out of the user contributions.
I wouldn't be that surprised if they introduced a "pro user, only $7,99 per month" package in 2020 that gives some small perks ("your questions cannot be downvoted", "add a 100 points reward to three questions per month", "animated avatar", "special highlighting of your very important questions").
Stack Overflow was born of Web 2.0. Providing the hosting and letting the community do all the work to generate the page views which in turn brings in the revenue.
How many people are investing in new Web 2.0 companies? How many feel that it is a viable business model on its own?
I've seen a dozen attempts at creating a new Stack Overflow (often based on some perceived need that SO isn't providing for - https://www.askquestions.tech was the most recent that I'm familiar with one that was created when two twitter groups clashed).
The challenge is in the curation of the material. Its easy to do when it's small and focused. Unfortunately, in today's world there are some that perceive the curation as being a slight on how they write and their personal identity is tied up in what they write and their own code (I recall one SO user who insisted on writing with the start of the sentence and proper nouns and pronouns being lower case).
I believe that much of the technical world is disappearing into slack and similar. Particular technologies are being answered on Slack where it is understood that there is no history to search and others are disappearing to private invite only communities where the material doesn't need to be curated or moderated because it is only that small social group.
Is the slackhole of knowledge a good thing? Probably not. But it's easier to moderate and curate than having a website with a long tail and a small core group. There is less friction around asking questions or providing answers. People aren't inspired by gamification to the degree that they are on SO. There isn't any resume growth when helping people - and so that incentive is gone. It is just people helping others when they need it.
