Connections by James Burke 4⁄5 Burke’s Connections TV series is magnificent stuff. I love the way he manages to wrangle disparate topics across science and history to show how much of innovation and advancement is non-linear. The book sets out to do the same thing and does a pretty good job. At times I didn’t quite see how the dots connected, but I enjoyed the ride.| timkadlec.com
The first day of the first ever Google AMP conference was today in New York. I would have loved to have been able to participate, but I had to settle for listening to bits and pieces from afar (thanks to Google for always doing such a good job of live streaming all of their events).| timkadlec.com
Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education by Ken Robinson 4⁄5 Ken, as you would expect if you’ve read his prior books or watched his fantastic TED talk, is excellent at discussing complex topics in a compelling and memorable way. The book doesn’t go particularly deep in any one area (something Ken makes clear early on), but he does include ample notes and references to books and research if you would like a more detailed look at any one specific point. ...| timkadlec.com
It starts with a voice. Your voice. Your ideas. Your opinions. Your thoughts. Your learnings.| timkadlec.com
One of the very first projects I ever worked on as a professional was a relatively large site with tons of legacy code. Legacy code brings many headaches. My favorite example was opening a few pages to find that these pages used not one, not two, but three different JavaScript frameworks!| timkadlec.com
I remember sitting around with a few friends at Chrome Dev Summit last year. The conversation eventually turned to security. We all agreed about how massively important it was, but we also each acknowledged that it’s not trivial to do correctly. It’s not the most accessible topic and the tooling and standards can be a bit unwieldy.| timkadlec.com
I head out of the airport in San Francisco and grab a taxi. I consider myself an outgoing and social person, but I’ve just spent six hours or so crammed next to a bunch of strangers in a combination of airports and planes. All I want to do right now is hang in the back seat of this taxi, enjoying 45 minutes of quiet.| timkadlec.com
I enjoy reading and one of the rules of all well-behaved reading enthusiasts—much like vegans, cross fitters and people who eat gluten free—is to never stop telling everyone we know (and even some people we don’t know) about it.| timkadlec.com
Incentives are fascinating. Dangle the right carrot in front of people and you can subtly influence their behavior. But it has to be the right carrot. It has to matter to the people you’re trying to influence. Just as importantly, it has to influence the correct changes.| timkadlec.com
On May 11th, I’ll be joining Akamai. I would be lying if I said it was an easy decision. I waffled a lot (For the sports enthusiasts out there, it’s not entirely unlike Favre and retirement. For the rest of you, insert some clever Waffle House pun here.). The past few years of working for myself have been amazing! I’ve gotten to work on some great projects with some great people and have had a ton of fun doing it.| timkadlec.com
The Pointer Events specification just became a W3C Recommendation. For those unfamiliar, it’s an intriguing attempt to unify pointer events regardless of the input device in use.| timkadlec.com
I remember going as a kid with my parents when they would pick out a new car. My parents didn’t want to spend a ton so we usually looked for something basic that would work.| timkadlec.com
Time for my annual look back at what I read in the past year. Keeping in the same format as last year, each book has a rating (on a simple 5-star scale) as well as a very short review to give you (and me when I look back at this in a year or so) some idea of why I enjoyed each book.| timkadlec.com
That time of year again! Here are the five most popular posts of 2014, in order.| timkadlec.com
I worked out all the time in high school, back when my teenage brain thought it was totally plausible that I could eventually become a professional basketball player (ahem).| timkadlec.com
I often come away from novella’s and short stories feeling a little underwhelmed. I suppose it’s just not my format. I struggle to get into the story and to connect with the characters.| timkadlec.com
I have never liked the term “expert”, and I’ve not been shy about it. So when a friend recommended The Business of Expertise I bristled a little. Still, the reviews were great and moving past the term, using my experience and the knowledge I’ve gained to help organizations is how I make a living so there was no denying the topic was relevant.| timkadlec.com
Inclusion has become a borderline buzzword that many companies like to throw around but few know how to actually prioritize. Mismatch attempts to fix that by helping to provide a framework for how to design and build more inclusive experiences. At less than 200 pages, Mismatch is a brisk read and it’s not going to cover everything you need to know. It does, however, do a very good job of tearing down the blinders we wear and helping to expose designers to the impact of what we create.| timkadlec.com
I absolutely loved The Bear and the Nightingale and The Girl in the Tower so as soon as The Winter of the Witch came out, it jumped immediately to the top of my list to read.| timkadlec.com
A deftly crafted murder mystery and robots: what more could you want?| timkadlec.com
I’ll be honest: I had never heard of this book, or the lectures they’re based on, until Ethan Marcotte started referring to them frequently in his posts. Ursula Franklin herself was someone whose name I had heard, but that was the extent of it. It’s an absolute shame that she and her ideas aren’t more broadly known. Not only were many of her ideas prescient, but they’re just downright important.| timkadlec.com
Colson Whitehead had the idea for The Underground Railroad about 15 years before the book was actually written. When he finally convinced himself to write it, he immersed himself in research, determined to do justice to the difficult topics the book explores.| timkadlec.com
Reading A Man Called Ove is an awful lot like what it’s like to meet and get to know a person in real life.| timkadlec.com
It has never been easier to build animation into our sites and applications. New standards have emerged enabling us to build animations with a few lines of CSS or JavaScript. But as Val points out in this book, this is a relatively new thing for us and we have a lot to learn. Animation right now is still largely considered eye-candy, and it’s treated like that on most projects.| timkadlec.com
The story Masaji tells is not one for the faint of heart. Masaji was born in Japan, shortly after World War II. His father was Korean, his mother was Japanese. That simple fact stacked the odds against his family from day one. The Koreans in Japan after the war “…belonged to neither the winning nor the losing side, and they had no place to go.” In Japan, his family constantly battled poverty and discrimination. When his father was approached to move to North Korea with the promise of a ...| timkadlec.com
Accessibility is one of those topics that can be very intimidating to folks. There is a lot to know and a lot you can get wrong. Plus, since accessibility is felt so personally by many, the reaction to accessibility mistakes online tends to be…unpleasant. It makes a lot of people I’ve talked to feel stuck, not sure how to proceed.| timkadlec.com
Here’s a good litmus test for whether or not you will enjoy Giulia’s book: watch her TED talk, “The surprisingly charming science of your gut”. The style of her presentation is pretty much what you can expect from the book. If you enjoy her talk, you’ll love the book.| timkadlec.com
You might think a book about sleep couldn’t possibly be that interesting, but you would be wrong. Why We Sleep is a comprehensive, fascinating and entertaining look at sleep. Generally speaking, most of us are probably already convinced that sleep is a good thing, but we may be fuzzy on why that’s the case. Walker carefully goes over the mental and health benefits that sleep provides (and there are many), explaining what exactly is happening behind the scenes to trigger these benefits.| timkadlec.com
I produced a decent amount of content in 2017. In fact, I wrote more blog posts than I have since 2013. Just not here.| timkadlec.com
The five most read posts of 2015, in order.| timkadlec.com
34% of US adults use a smartphone as their primary means of internet access.| timkadlec.com
It took me all of four paragraphs before I was hooked on Educated. Tara’s writing is vivid and beautiful, and from the earliest pages she sets the scene for the telling of an incredible| timkadlec.com
Exit West focuses on a young couple—Saeed and Nadia—and their life together first in a city overrun by militants. It follows them as they flee and try to find new lives in a world that seems to neither want nor welcome them. It’s not the most encouraging picture of humanity, but it’s too important to overlook and the novel is incredibly timely.| timkadlec.com
I had heard more than a few friends talk glowingly about Lonesome Dove, a book that ends up at or near the top of any list you’ll ever find of “best western novels”. When I stumbled across Lonesome Dove on a list of books Roxane Gay said she would have students read, were she to teach a course on modern fiction with a focus on diversity of voice, I decided to pick it up.| timkadlec.com
Last year I read “Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy” by Tim Hartford. My favorite question that he raised repeatedly was about who benefits from what we build, and more importantly, who loses.| timkadlec.com
Recently I taught my daughters some extremely basic cryptography, and it was a great reminder of how critical it is for security to be usable.| timkadlec.com
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our biases and their influence on what we build and how. We’re all biased in some way—it’s an inevitable side-effect of living. We experience certain things, we live in a certain environment, we have certain interactions and over time all of these experiences and factors add up to impact the way we view ourselves and the way we view others.| timkadlec.com
It’s no secret that I have reservations about Google’s AMP project in its current form. I do want to make it clear, though, that what bothers me has never been the technical side of things—AMP as a performance framework. The community working on AMP is doing good work to make a performant baseline. As with any framework, there are decisions I agree with and some I don’t, but that doesn’t mean the work isn’t solid—it just means we have different ways of approaching building for t...| timkadlec.com
I recently gave the Let’s Encrypt client a try and wrote up how that went. One of the follow-up questions that popped up was about HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) and whether Let’s Encrypt’s helps with it. Since the question came up several times, I thought it would be worth writing up.| timkadlec.com
The End of Absence by Michael Harris 4⁄5 I found myself nodding my head in agreement quite frequently while reading this meditation on the way technology is slowing but surely filling in anything that vaguely resembles a void in our “busyness”. There was one point early on in the book where I worried the author was about to get a little too over-the-top in his critique and concerns, but as it turns out, he comes to a pragmatic conclusion at the end arguing that while every technology ca...| timkadlec.com
A lot of folks have been very vocally pushing for “HTTPS Everywhere”, and for good reason. The fact that the lack of HTTPS makes you miss out on shiny new things like HTTP/2 and Service Workers adds even more incentive for those a little less inspired by the security arguments.| timkadlec.com
The web has always evolved fairly quickly but as of late it sure feels like the pace has picked up substantially. There are a plethora of new standards and techniques emerging that range from incremental improvements to potentially giant leaps forward.| timkadlec.com
I did a bunch of research on proxy-browsers for a few projects I worked on. Rather than sitting on it all, I figured I’d write a series of posts sharing what I learned in case it’s helpful to anyone else. This first post looks at the general architecture of proxy browsers with a performance focus.| timkadlec.com
Getting a website successfully delivered to a visitor depends on a series of actions. My server must spit something out. That something must be passed over some network. That something must then be consumed by another something: some client (often a browser) on some device. Finally, the visitor views that something in whatever context they happen to be in.| timkadlec.com
Facebook just announced a new feature they’re calling “Instant Articles”. Facebook is positioning this as a way for publishers to have their stories displayed, within Facebook, “instantly”:| timkadlec.com
As our understanding of performance on the web improves, we are starting to shift from the traditional metrics we’ve focused on. Things like load time and page weight are rightfully being given less focus as we move to more mature metrics like SpeedIndex that provide a better understanding of perceived performance.| timkadlec.com
Over the past year I conducted performance audits on a handful of sites that all used client-side MVC’s, typically Angular but not always. Each site had their own optimizations that needed to take place to improve performance. Yet a pattern emerged: client-side MVC’s were the major bottleneck for each. It slowed down the initial rendering of the page (particularly on mobile) and it limited our ability to optimize the critical path.| timkadlec.com
Yesterday, Chris Coyier pondered aloud the best metric to use for a performance budget:| timkadlec.com
Yesterday Guy Podjarny published his analysis of the use of responsive design among the top 10,000 websites. He found that adoption jumped from 10.8% to 18.7% over the last year. Another recent survey showed that a hefty 90% of publishers are looking at implementing responsive design. However you want to slice it, responsive design is an increasingly popular technique.| timkadlec.com
Those smart and clever folks at The Filament Group formally announced yet another useful tool yesterday: a “lightweight, simple DOM utility” they call Shoestring.| timkadlec.com
I work in a room in my basement. It works well enough, but it’s small and quite dark. The only source of external light is a small window that looks out underneath our front porch.| timkadlec.com
At Velocity NY, Daniel Espeset of Etsy gave a great talk about how Etsy profiles their JavaScript parse and execution time. Even better, after the talk, they released the tool on GitHub.| timkadlec.com
Myths are powerful things. They certainly have the ability to destroy—we’ve seen that many times. But put the right spin on a myth and you can use it to build up; to create something new and better.| timkadlec.com
Before I gave my first ever talk at a conference, I read any post I could find from other speakers about their process for preparing. Some of the steps I incorporated into my own process, others I decided probably didn’t really fit. But they were all helpful and gave me a little more confidence.| timkadlec.com
It seems like the idea of performance budgeting has been gaining quite a bit of traction over the past year. This is awesome! The best way to improve web performance is to prioritize it from the get-go, and that’s exactly what a performance budget helps you do.| timkadlec.com
At long last, it appears we have our much-needed markup solution for responsive images thanks to srcset, sizes and picture. Implementation is already happening in Chrome & Opera (Blink) and Firefox (Gecko). Soon, the Blink implementation will be ported to WebKit. This is fantastic news—we’ve needed this for so long!| timkadlec.com