🗞️ Blogosphere Rundown

For better or worse, keeping up with software trends is an exercise of filtering through people's social media feeds and press releases. Here's what caught my eye throughout the last couple weeks or so from the developer blogosphere.

• Fabien Sanglard gives a history lesson on a rogue "iPhone Dev Team" unlocking the original iPhone for international use. The story is interesting but I was intrigued with how the team communicated progress through a simple, but elegant status bar. I think a lot of open source projects would benefit with a similar status bar.

• This is an oldie, but I'm a sucker for view transitions. Adam Argyle, Chrome CSS Developer Advocate at Google, gave a great talk on it during SeattleJS Conf 2023 and his demo app is awesome. (Note: view transitions isn't available on all browsers quite yet so YMMV on the demo.)

• Jack Herrington has his own version of one of those Learn X in 10 minutes video that are so common now. Well, when it's of the format Non-React-thing for React developers, I tend to click nowadays. His recent HTMX for React developers in 10 minutes video was helpful in getting HTMX added to my ever growing personal Learn these things so you can use less React list.
• A simple question: Where have all the websites gone?
• FlightControl's Brandon Bayer runs through the pros and cons of their Next.js router migration. The conclusion?

All of the above leads us to the conclusion that Next.js is overly complex and complicated. When something goes wrong, there’s no way to work out why or how to fix it.

We have certainly wasted a lot of company money wrestling with it.

• For the sake of making sure this doesn't turn into a React-bashing newsletter, Herrington offers a counterpoint with is Are RSCs and NextJS really that bad? video. I still disagree. But it's important to call out that some neutral parties are pretty jazzed for this stuff.
• How about this title for a clickbait-y headline that was tailor made to get a product-minded dev like myself to click: Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers. Lot's of good stuff to back up the title - I personally love the What you intend to be not clickable will be clicked law - but don't lie. You just had a mini anxiety attack thinking about how big your backlog is. Get away from your IDE and go talk to some customers!
• Awww. Come on Itamra. I was having a little fun with this talk-to-your-customers thing and you had to come in and add a bunch of great nuance as to why you shouldn't do that blindly. Party pooper. 😤
• Have you too tried to use AI to write up some code only to spend just as much time afterward correcting all the bugs? Where's here's a title that'll leave you "astonished": Coding on Copilot: 2023 Data Suggests Downward Pressure on Code Quality.

• In all AI seriousness, I've been following the consequences of it probably more than the average. I'm less interested in the "it's going to take our jobs" takes and more into the day-to-day consequences. Gita Jackson points out that Google search results suck even more than they used to. Why did they start sucking? "Because instead of surfacing websites, Google now grabs snapshots of pages in a drop down menu." Even if that wasn't originally a AI automation, it was an automation in a spot where a human was needed. And that starts a version of the enshittification process we all hate.
• A great breeze through on some AI learnings from Simon Willison, Django co-creator. Alright that's enough about AI for one day. Go and get out the house and talk to real people!