Debugging is one of the things I enjoy about programming. It’s like a little puzzle to solve. But as code gets more complicated, the little bugs can hide themselves in ways that make them very, very, annoyingly hard to find. This one, minimally reproduced in this Codepen, got me this week:

It seems obvious —  an empty input calculates an invalid date. But then imagine the calculated date was never visible, an empty input is considered valid data, and the system that reported this being an issue was 3 microservice hops away.

And the real issue, it turns out, was ever using 

 can do the calculation just fine with strings.

A minimal reproduction of a bug that took too long to find.

An obvious bug

. Chapter 2 is about online writing and blogging, and Clive Thompson mentions how there’s more writing going on now than ever before in human history:

As the historian David Henkin notes in The Postal Age, the per capita volume of letters in the United States in 1860 was only 5.15 per year. “That was a huge change at the time—it was important,” Henkin tells me. “But today it’s the exceptional person who doesn’t write five messages a day. I think a hundred years from now scholars will be swimming in a bewildering excess of life writing.”

What’s wild to me is that I got an English degree between the years of 2000 and 2004, and… no one saw this coming. A few weeks before graduating someone suggested I should sign up on some “Facebook thing, it just opened up outside of Harvard, you can see other people from other schools”, and no one I knew had ever blogged anything. So it wasn’t a miss of what was happening, but it was a miss on what 

Also, any English program could have ditched Hemingway for some basic communication writing and maybe we could have replaced the E in STEM.

There’s more writing going on now than ever before in human history.

The most writing in human history

 days. I still prefer it over other front-end frameworks because it’s 

 a framework, it’s just a library. That said — these days I prefer to use it 

 a framework. When I first started using React it was as part of an MVC app (usually) or a truly single-page application. Once we moved to handling routing client-side, and handling all data fetching and state management client side, and handling authentication client side… it’s a lot. There’s a lot of cases where you would have been better of using AngularJS or Vue or an MVC whatever backend and some web components than trying to glue together React + React Router (no wait, Reach?) + Redux (no everyone uses MobX now, wait, now it’s just React Hooks WAIT, no, now we’re using state machines) + the CSS-in-JS library of the day.

You see the problem. Still, I think the React combination of JSX and parent/child rendering updates, and prioritizing functional JavaScript without a lot of magic is great. Do I care about most of the updates in React 18? Not really. I’m glad Next, or Remix, or some other great framework is going to do magic with them.

React 18 [is now available on npm](https://reactjs.org/blog/2022/03/29/react-v18.html).

React 18

. Lots of nice updates to performance and quality of life for the Canvas API. I have a soft spot for the 

 tag — when I was (re)learning web development I spent a lot of time at my non-development related job spinning up little web projects that required no libraries or compilation steps to run in the browser pre-installed on my laptop. The canvas element was the most readily available but also 

  web API that runs locally, so I built all kinds of interfaces and animations in it while learning.

 has shifted a lot in the last decade. The Verge wrote about how  

  on how files and folders work - or they have a very good understanding of the norms of storing information in the cloud, but not on their local computers. The web contains all sorts of things that we never think of or use as files: is your email an  

  that are the native format of Apple Photos? Or consider any rich text on the internet, like a Notion page - does it have a defined file type and an option to download? And think of the mobile web. You can download a file from mobile Safari, but do you?

Worth noting, I suppose, that I’m writing this in an application which does not use files. But I generally prefer the workflow of “don’t make me think about this as a file, but give me the file if I ask for it”, so it’s nice to see this API coming together.

And I enjoyed this bit from that article:

Working with the web platform is dealing with history, with the accumulated matter of  

  and good-enough standards. In exchange for the ability to deliver instantly-updating software directly to customers with no middlemen and no installation, you have to absorb a great deal of nearly-useless information that’s entirely about dodging meaningless traps.

Web links worth reading on Canvas2D and the File System Access API.

Two articles on web APIs

I have a thing for cheap, powered speakers, it seems. In November I picked up an Apple Mini and a Sonos Symfonisk. I noted then that 

 but neither blew me away. The Sonos was being used in the basement with an old Apple TV for workouts, but because it required selecting it as the output 

 the TV turned on I wanted to find a better solution.

I’ve read many good things about Edifier speakers so I picked up a pair of 

. I put them in the office to compare them to the speakers I was using, the 

Edifier R1280T compared to the JBL 104, Apple Mini and Sonos Symfonisk.

Another set of speakers for the $100 speaker shootout

Some people were a bit ambitious in their choices and might be occupied by this project until Christmas 2022. 8.5″ x 11″ is a good size. Excited to add this to the rotating art wall behind my on Zoom calls.

All we need is just a little patience

Throughout the week I throw interesting articles in my 

 inbox, to either file or re-read on the weekend. I’m clearing it out, but these are some I thought you, dear reader, might enjoy.

There’s a broad pattern these days of mobile sites being much worse and more restrictive, since they’re trying to push you towards logging in or downloading the app. Ironically, being conscious of my struggle, these moments of friction actually help push me towards closing the site instead. For that, I’m grateful for Reddit’s mobile UI.

My advice to people when they are thinking about instituting a new process is to go to a whiteboard2 and write down the answer to this question: “If you could only get one thing done this year, what would it be?”. If that answer is “institute some new process”, go for it. But if it’s something like “increase market share from 30% to 60%” or “launch this new product that will 2x our TAM”, don’t waste your time on anything else. Just take your best person (up to and including the CEO), make them responsible for solving that problem, and give them everything and everyone they need to make it happen.

In my conversation with Nicole, I tried to explain the idea of “progressive enhancement” and why, I believe, the website my Mom was trying to access should’ve still been accessible.

Please-please-please, don’t let the voice of cynicism stop you from sharing what brings you joy. Instead, let us say to one another: Hey! Fellow humans. I welcome your beautiful performance!

‘Performative sharing’ is a small, fascinating window into who we are, what we love, and what’s possible. It takes us out of our own heads, and it challenges our limited view of the world. Sometimes, it’s about nothing but fun, or the base human desire to walk up to another upright ape and show them this thing we found. Isn’t it cool? And what’s wrong with that?

Throughout the week I throw interesting articles in my Things inbox, to either file or re-read on the weekend. I’m clearing it out, but these are some I thought you might enjoy.

Interesting reads from the last week

Really nothing I love more than figuring out why a random config option got added 2 years ago by a dev, with no comments, and removing or changing it causes thousands of seemingly unrelated errors.

My favorite part of TypeScript is debugging the config

I reorganized my office recently and — there’s too many books! So I made a filter on my 

. They’re all good books, I just don’t want them any more! Drop me a line 

I reorganized my office recently and — there’s too many books!

Take my books, please

 we got to our current world of computers and programming. If you want the < 30 minute version, 

built with coffee