It has been very frustrating watching the rise of cryptocurrency (which, forgive me cryptographers, I will be calling "crypto" from here on) because a whole bunch of smart people in tech seem to be very, very excited about it. When good new things show up in tech, I've generally found them intriguing. I'm by no means an early adopter, but once the train is leaving the station I am generally on board.| Seldo.com
I've been a web developer for 25 years now. In the last 10 years, at two different companies, my focus has increasingly shifted to working with what is somewhat eye-rollingly referred to as "big data" but I will just be calling "data". In the last 18 months, since I joined Netlify, I feel like I have really leveled up from "just do whatever works" to feeling like there's a Right Way to do it.| Seldo.com
I think it's code that does what you need it to do and is ready when you need it. Those are the two iron requirements. If it doesn't do the job or isn't ready when I need it, it's not good code. Testability, maintainability, extensibility, the mythical "elegance": all great qualities of code. Sacrificing them entirely to ship faster is lazy hacking. Do as much of them as you have time to do. But they're not more important. If the code is wonderfully tested and six weeks late it| seldo.com
There's been a whole lot of discussion recently about the impact of AI on the market for web developers, for programmers in general, and even more generally the entire labor market. I find myself making the same points over and over, and whenever I do that it's time to write a blog post about it, so this is that. Doom and utopia are not our only options There are two extreme takes on the impact of AI on programmer jobs:| seldo.com
I recently left my job at Netlify and have been looking at what's next. At Netlify I became very interested in the power of ML, AI and LLMs in particular, and that's the area I've been looking in. But there's a lot of hype and buzzwords around, so I wanted an explainer I can point people to when they ask "but what is all that stuff really?" It's intended to be short, and so it simplifies a lot on purpose. | Seldo.com
Nine months ago I gave a talk about how there is no such thing as the fundamentals of web development. It's a thing Ihavebeensayingforyears but keep getting pushback on, and when that happens it's time to write a proper blog post about it rather than just arguing with people one at a time. | Seldo.com
On this day in 2001, an astonishing 20 years ago, I set up my blog. My first post was not particularly enthralling. It wasn't my first website; that was in 1995 and is lost to the mists of time. It wasn't even my first website called seldo.com; I had created several versions that predated the word "blogging", I was just adding a blog feature to a site that had been around for a ye| seldo.com
I started writing a post called "how to write AI apps" but it was over-reach so I scaled it back to this. Who am I to tell you how to write anything? But here's what I'll be applying to my own writing of AI-powered apps, specifically LLM applications. A battle I've already lost is that we shouldn't call LLMs "AI" at all; they are machine learning and not the general intelligence that is implied to the layman by the name. It is an even less helpful name than "serverless", my previous can| seldo.com
Today I read Alex Russell's post The Market for Lemons and I found myself compelled to write a rebuttal. I am a big fan of Alex's work in general but not of this post in particular, which is very long, so allow me to attempt to summarize it: JavaScript-heavy single page apps (SPAs) are very popular The web is mobile-first and Android-dominated JavaScript-heavy apps do not perform well on mobile Android| seldo.com
or, Career Advice For The Working Web Dev I have been thinking a lot about the thing we call "the stack", one of many vague concepts web developers use when describing themselves. People call themselves "frontend", "backend" and "full stack" but there's no real consensus on what any of those mean. What is the stack? Part of the problem is that the "stack" is enormous: it includes at a minimum HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But how deep do you go? There are many server-side languages, ther| seldo.com