Do you know the muffin fairy?

Hello, world. It’s your internet friend, Jerod Santo, and I am excited for JS Party today. I have three of our regular panelists here with me. Amelia, how are you?

I’m good. Thanks for asking.

You’re welcome. Thanks for being good. If you would have said “I’m bad”, I would have felt awkward…

[laughs] You’re welcome.

So I’m glad you’re good, or at least willing to lie about it. Kball, what’s up, man?

I’m bad.

Bad to the bone.

You just set me up for that.

[laughs]

No, I’m happy to be back on. Excited to be here.

Well, that’s how it works around here - I set them up and you knock ‘em down, Kball. We also have b0neskull, who is a fan of knocking things down. What’s up, Chris?

What’s up?! Here I am…

[laughs] See? He’s already knocking things down, and we’re just getting started. So we have a couple of awesome recurring segments for everyone today, and we’re gonna start off with story of the week.

Story of the week is one of our recurring segments where we just take turns sharing what we believe is the most important or the biggest story of the week, or recently, or maybe just the one that we’ve found before the show started… So take it for what you will. Some of these are newsy, some of these are just cool things that we think are interesting. Here we go! Let’s start off with Kball. What’s your story of the week?

[04:14] Yeah, so the story I picked up is not JavaScript-specific, but it was a study that came out recently, looking at the impact of the dramatic shift to remote work, looking at a whole bunch of Microsoft employees that apparently gave access to all sorts of tracking info about how they work, and who they meet with, and all these other things. So these researchers dug into it, and found a couple of interesting things about the impact, and how generalizable this is to remote work globally is an interesting question, because we all have seen working in a pandemic is not the same as just working remotely… But one of the things that stood out to me is how communication across different parts of the company changed. And what they said is they’ve found that the networks kind of ossified and shrunk. So people communicated as much or more with the people they were really, really close to, but those kind of weak connections across different parts of the organization went away, and there was a lot less communication across kind of outside of your immediate team, or beyond your department.

It got me thinking a lot about remote work practices… I’m somebody who worked remotely long before the pandemic… I spend a ridiculous amount of time just scheduling random meetings with people. Having seen this, I’m like, “Oh. That’s why.” Because when you’re remote, you don’t get those casual connections; you have to be extremely deliberate about it.

Right.

I thought it was interesting, I thought it was worth considering for, both as individuals, like “How do we make sure that if we’re still working remotely, we’re maintaining those connections?”, but then also for folks who are running teams, to say “Okay, check in with your team. Are they still connecting to people outside their team?” How do we make sure that we maintain those diverse connections? Because that’s where – I mean, for me, that’s where the fun stuff is. I know what my team is working on. It’s neat to learn about what other teams are working on, and often, those conversations generate new ideas and breakthroughs.

Yeah, absolutely. Amelia, you joined GitHub, and you probably have never been – I mean, did you go to the HQ? I’m guessing you’ve been remote-only since you joined…

I actually had a full job during the pandemic before GitHub, where I met one of my co-workers really briefly, but I basically still haven’t met any of them… And it’s strange. And I definitely get that my team is really small, we’re four people, and we hang out with each other a lot, and we hang out with other people very much not a lot.

It’s also interesting - in a physical office there’s proximity between teams; there’s other teams who you sit near… So I wonder what the remote proximity is like. Is there anyone who’s closer than anyone else, like, digitally? Probably not.

You need a study. You need to perform a study to find the answers to these things.

It’s too much work.

Yeah. [laughs] We’re not gonna study we write code. Chris, what about you? Were you remote the entire time, or you went remote? I can’t recall.

I’ve been remote for like a decade now. I don’t really remember what it’s like to work in an office.

Yeah. Same. So one thing I’ve read which ties in with what you’ve found, Kball, is interesting, about the culture changes in and around Apple because of their adoption of company-wide Slack. I think it’s a Verge article which maybe I can find and link up… And I’m not sure if the move to Slack coincided with the remote or came before that. Whatever it is, still, you’re using mostly these chat and digital tools to communicate company-wide… And how that changed dramatically the relationships cross-functionally, or even vertically inside the company, because now you have direct access to folks that you otherwise would have had to go upstairs and talk to if you were at HQ. There’s lots of things that change, and change quite dramatically, because so many people went remote in dramatic fashion, thinking it was temporary, and now kind of having pushback by employees saying “No, no, no. This is better.”

[08:13] So we can find that one as well, but I think things are changing inside of organizations due to this. Some for the better, and some for the worst.

Apple is a really interesting example too, because they are historically so incredibly private and siloed.

Yeah. Not so much anymore. In fact, I just saw today that Tim Cook made some sort of statement that people who leak are not Apple people. And that information came from a leak out of Apple. [laughter] It was a private thing that leaked… So the irony there is quite thick.

Well, let’s get to some other stories. Definitely, the remote work thing is an ongoing and very important story and aspect of our lives… Amelia, yours are a little bit more technical and nitty-gritty. Do you wanna share your story of the week?

Yeah… I couldn’t think of anything that happened recently, so I just picked two things. The first one is a little bit newsy, but it’s CSS container queries are in the Chrome Canary. Super-exciting. This is like – so you know how you can have viewport units like viewport width viewport height in CSS, and you can say something is 10% of the width? Well, now in (only) Chrome Canary you can base it on its container. So you can say “I want this image to be 10% of the width”, but you can also do more complicated things, like stack things differently… I haven’t totally read into it yet, but it’s very exciting. I’m excited to read about it, I’m excited to use it sometime in the future.

The other thing that’s not newsy, that I think is really cool is Harry Roberts - he did some talk that you can’t listen to, but you can see the slides, and he released this CSS snippet where it basically turns all of the links and scripts and things in the head of your document into visible things. Basically, they exist, they’re just not visible. With a little bit of CSS, you can make these things visible. And if you use it on any web page, you can see things that are maybe not as performant as you want them to be. It’ll highlight if your title is blocked by some blocking JavaScript that has to execute before crawlers might get the title and, like there’s green orange and red blacks and, I don’t know, I think it’s super-cool that you can just use a litlte bit of CSS and get this kind of performance report.

That is cool. So it provides a bookmarklet; drag and drop the following link in your bookmark bar. So you can do that on any website, right? You just click that and it’s gonna show you that.

Mm-hm.

That’s spectacular. This is very cool. And it gets an award for Pun of the Day, because it’s called Check your Head. Get it? Check your Head…

Yeah, he’s got a ton of puns in his slides. If you like puns, you should go through the slides. I don’t remember them though.

I like the Beastie Boys…

[laughs] There you go. If you like puns or if you like the Beastie Boys, this is an article for you. Well, since yours aren’t exactly news, I think it’s fit to share mine, because mine’s not newsy at all. In fact, mine is an article that wasn’t even posted recently. It was posted in July.

Hey, that’s recent… Isn’t it?

Actually, that’s gonna be a part of this conversation. Very poetically so, months later I’m reading this… And it’s by Rach Smith, and her article says “I completely ignored the frontend development scene for six months. It was fine.” And it’s not the “It was fine” with the dog and fire who’s saying that everything’s fine; this is like actually okay. So if you don’t know who Rach Smith is, she is a long-time developer. She works at Codepen, and has been publishing on the web for many years, so I’ve read her stuff over the years. In fact, she says in this post she first started coding professionally – it was with Adobe Flash. Then Steve Jobs decided to kill Flash, and it forced her to learn how to animate things with JavaScript, CSS 3 and HTML Canvas.

[12:20] She goes on to talk about a long progression in her career in which things moved fast and she was always trying to keep up… And then nine years passed, she took six months off, and as many of us do, we think if we’re taking six months off from the frontend scene, or heck, from the web scene in general, that you’re gonna be light years behind when you come back. But she found that not to be the case… So she says what she learned through this experience is that the number of languages she’s learned, or the specific framework she’s gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is her ability to upskill quickly and effectively.

I appreciate Rach for sharing this, because it’s something that – I think it’s a nice reminder that things do move fast, and the list of technologies on any given job post are changing all the time… And many times they’ll want you to have ten years experience, and I think this has been out for eight years, or such monstrosities as that… But our fear of missing out, our fear of falling behind isn’t not real, but isn’t always well-placed. The technologies change, shift, but the foundations, the fundamentals and the skills that you’re building transcend those technologies… So you’re gonna be just fine. You’re gonna be okay. I thought that that was a good story for this week, even though it was a story for a week in July. What do you think, Kball?

I’ve spent 2,5 or 3 years publishing a weekly frontend development newsletter… And I stopped doing that a few months ago. One, I wanna say that I’m so much happier not keeping up on what’s happening every week… [laughter] It’s so stressful to feel like there’s this constant churn, and you’ve gotta constantly keep up, and do this, and do that.

So I’m personally happier not trying to keep up with everything all the time. I like to catch up every now and then, but if something’s big it’ll get to me eventually. I don’t have to keep pulling. But the other thing that I learned from doing that is even though there’s this sense of constant churn, and I could find tons of articles every week, all the time… Like, the amount of actually new content is pretty low. A lot of times I’d be linking something and I’m like “Oh, this is another take on that thing. That’s pretty well done. Maybe this one will work for you.” But after doing that for three years of like “Okay, I’m just seeing all the content that’s coming through in this space”, actual legitimate, new, interesting changes - they’re not as frequent as they feel like. We’ve just got this industry of churn, and this feeling of “I’ve gotta keep publishing, and I’ve gotta keep reading, and I’ve gotta keep doing all these things to keep up.” And at the core, it’s like - no, there’s change, but it’s built on the same fundamentals.

Where do you think this sort of fear comes from? I see a lot of junior developers lamenting on Twitter that it’s hard to keep up, or on Reddit, and they’re complaining about it… So is it just you wanna keep up to maximize your career potential, or is it something else? What is the root of that fear of not keeping up with JavaScript?

Yeah, I think it’s fear of irrelevancy. I used to say that tongue-in-cheek, that my greatest virtue as a software developer is fear of irrelevancy, because that means I’m always abreast of what’s new and shakin’. And I said that kind of tongue-in-cheek, because it’s true, but it’s overstated. And as a person who has been in the news for many years - I’m always logging with Changelog News what’s fresh and new in open source; it’s kind of what we do at Changelog - so I see a lot of things come and go… And I will say that in the last - let’s just call it 10 years, the pace of releases and the announcements and the blog posts have multiplied exponentially at the merger of, let’s just say, capitalism and open source.

[16:28] When everybody jumped on open source as a way of getting ahead for whatever your goals are, waaaay more things came out. I remember when Rails took over back in ‘04, it was like THE big announcement of the year. There’s other projects, but it wasn’t like now, where there’ll be 5, 6, 7 credibly awesome new things that actually launch on a weekly basis, that you’re like “This is a whole world that is really interesting, and is powerful, and it’s legit…” And there it is. And you see that across your feeds. So I think social media, to a certain degree, drives that; the FOMO, the feeling that other people are shipping things and you aren’t, and then other people that you respect are also liking those things that are being shipped, and maybe you should jump on that ship…

I don’t know, there’s a lot of just hype, and it’s gotten louder and louder and louder. So disconnecting is a nice way to appease those fears… But that’s what I’m seeing. Amelia, what do you think about why people have this fear of not catching the next wave, or whatever it is?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m talking through this, I don’t actually believe this, but I think there’s a lot of ground to cover; more and more things are possible on the web, and there’s more and more types of applications, and corporate websites, and marketing websites, and they have to do all these things… Like, you can’t just publish a website that doesn’t have any CSS on it, even though that’s a perfectly functional website.

So I wonder if – joining the industry, there’s just so much to learn, and people don’t specialize, at all. When you’re just learning, you’re not like, “Oh, I’m gonna be a developer for marketing websites.” You’re like, “I have to learn everything.” And then it takes years, five years to get your feet down and actually figure out “Oh, okay, I don’t need to know everything. I can only pay attention to things in my own niche”, and figuring out where your niche is.

I think really experienced developers probably have all gone through a period where they’re really stressed out, and then have hopefully found some sanity and found their own niche they can pay attention to, and not to other things… I wonder if that’s just learning what’s important. We don’t have any tracks, but hopefully in the future we’ll have “I wanna be this kind of developer.” But I don’t know. Maybe not.

I also wonder how much of this is that – like, getting your first job in tech is hard.

Yeah.

Getting your second, your third, your fourth - not so hard. Once you’re kind of in and you have a little bit more of a track record, it becomes a lot easier to find those jobs. And some of that is problems in our hiring practices, and the fact that companies don’t wanna hire entry-level folks, because they’ve gotta invest in them… Some of it is we’ve got a glut of folks coming in from bootcamps, so there’s just a way larger number of entry-level… But getting that first job is hard. So people are kind of looking at these job rec lists and they’re like “Oh, this one wants these five things. Well, maybe if I learn those things, I’ll have an opportunity there.” And “Oh, this one over here - this wants these other five things”, and they’re trying to bridge across all the different things, so they can apply to all the different jobs to get their first job… Because it’s hard, and they’re getting a lot of rejections along the way.

[19:53] This is pure speculation, because it’s been a long time since I was in that boat; I won’t date myself on that, but… I have this feeling like the way that we hire junior folks is contributing to the FOMO. Those of us who are more senior or who are helping make hiring decisions or things like that - there are things that we can do, that would reduce some of that FOMO.

I think so. I think focusing in on individual technologies is one of the things. I was just also, I guess, thinking about the fact that this blog post comes from a very experienced developer, so it’s kind of a mature thought, and why is that… And I think it’s because when you just get started, maybe you only know one thing. If you’re just like, “I learned React, sorta, and I can do stuff with it”, something else coming and replacing React is existential at that point. Maybe that’s where it comes from. I mean, if all I knew was Ruby on Rails, and all of a sudden Django was all anybody was hiring for, I need to learn something else, or get a different career.

So I think maybe over time, as you realize you can kind of collect to yourself these different technologies – but as I said earlier, and as Rach says in that post, the underlying, foundational understanding of software is what really transcends and matters, then you can kind of chill out and relax. But when you don’t know any better, you don’t know any better. And when the jobs are so focused on these hiring practices that target these specific things, then something replacing that is legitimately scary, with regards to career at least.

Lots of thoughts there… A couple of good things coming out in the chat. One thing that Matt said which I thought was good is it’s a good idea to wait to see what sticks, too. The other thing you see over time is how many things come and go, and jumping onto something too early, that’s gonna fail, is gonna end up being a waste of time as well. So yeah, not following so closely, or at least not investing too much in brand new things, and waiting to see how it shakes out before you decide “Yeah, that’s something worth investing my time in.”

Yeah, it’s like these job postings that list all these technologies - you know, React, or AWS, whatever they want you to do… And then you get to the interview, and the interview is like whiteboard questions. It has nothing to do with any of that stuff.

Right.

So maybe you weren’t really prepared for it, maybe you’re not good at that stuff… It’s like, “Okay, I went out and I learned React so I could get jobs like this, but now I can’t get jobs like this because I’ve gotta go back and do lead code” I don’t know, it’s busted.

It’s busted. Well, let’s turn briefly to something that is still kind of busted, but gets better every single time a new release comes out. Chris, you wanna talk about iOS 15, right?

Well, yeah. So I’ve been heads down on a thing that I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks, and I saw there was some sort of announcement about iOS 15… But I am completely ignorant, and I have no idea what’s in it, and I have no idea what that means, especially for the mobile web, and Safari, and iOS. Can anybody help me, please?

Well, I heard that it does some bizarre design change to where the address bar is. Like, it moves it to the bottom instead of the top, which is just messing with my brain here…

Yes. So I actually like it on the bottom. I did not run the betas, but I know there’s a lot of discussion around the betas, because it moved a lot, throughout. It was a very dramatic redesign, which has been changed throughout the betas, and finally settled; it still is at the bottom. You can put it back at the top. This is the address bar and the tabs. So the nice thing about it on the bottom is that it’s easier to get with your thumb, and just to swipe, and stuff… So there are some virtues to having it there.

There are other aspects of the browser which the UI also has thrown people for a loop, but in terms of web development, I guess – I’m not sure how relevant that topic is for us web devs. I think in web developer world the main thing is it’s still one rendering engine to rule them all, and Apple has not released their grip on WebKit-only-based browsers in iOS 15. That would be an amazing change and boon for web developers, to allow the Chromes and the Firefoxes and the Edges and the mobile Brave browsers to bring their own rendering engine. That didn’t change. In fact, JS Party panelist Feross has taken to Twitter and started posting these very interesting and fun browser-ban tweets with some memes he’s created to try to convince Apple to release their grip on the browsers inside of iOS. But that has not changed. That would be huge.

[24:44] There are a few things that are new. I think the biggest one is probably the web extensions. Apple brought web extensions to Safari and macOS last year, and now they’re bringing it to iOS, so people can write extensions for Safari, with web technologies, and they will run inside of Safari to do various things. That’s pretty cool.

So you can run any sort of extension on mobile Safari?

Yes, you can run extensions on mobile Safari.

Like uBlock Origin?