markjgsmith

home > archives > everything > 2022 > 02

2022/02/26 #

Today’s links:

  • 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Saturday 26th February, 2022 - Branding, marketing, the future of tech and cyberwarmarkjgsmith.substack.com #

  • 🚀 Update to my poem: “This poem will be the last that I ever write so as to try to avoid even more abuse than is currentky beibg inflicted upon me. Cruelty should not be encouraged. Cruelty in the world is very real, I am absokutely certain if that now.”blog.markjgsmith.com #

2022/02/24 #

  • The Mirror (A poem of cruelty)

    They: Be the mirror!

    I: I won’t be the mirror!

    They: we hate that you won’t do what we say, so we hate you!

    [some time passes]

    [everybody is a bit sad]

    They: what do we do?

    I: I don’t know

    ...

    [some time passes]

    ...

    They: Be the mirror!

    I: I’m the mirror!

    They: we hate the mirror, so we hate you!

    [some time passes]

    [everybody is a bit sad]

    They: what do we do?

    I: I don’t know

    ...

    [some more time passes]

    ...

    I: I guess I’ll go then, again. Maybe some others have food that I can eat and water that I can drink, so that I don’t die

    Update: This poem will be the last that I ever write so as to try to avoid even more abuse than is currentky beibg inflicted upon me. Cruelty should not be encouraged. Cruelty in the world is very real, I am absokutely certain if that now.

    Update: Lots of very unnusual internet connectivity issues today

2022/02/23 #

  • Next generation tools and workflows for the creator economy

    There was an Interesting Smashing Magazine piece earlier in the week, Thoughts On Markdown. It does a really good review of the transformative effect Markdown has had in tech, especially by developers, but also by creators.

    Markdown unlocked a whole ecosystem of workflows, that have been generally centered around git version control platforms such as Github. Reason being that they now all offer CI/CD tools, i.e ways to run shell programs that can do things to and with the files in your repository when you do different actions like push/commit/merge files.

    I wrote about this trend a little over a year ago in my piece about Github Actions for custom content workflows. I later wrote about Mozilla MDN Docs are going full Jamstack, which was a high profile example of the trend. I was seeing in my own work how the combination of automation, git version control and a simple authoring format were transformative in what I was able to do. I think the fact that Mozilla went all in on such a workflow is a big sign of things to come.

    Along with the praise about the impact, the Smashing piece’s thesis is that although good things have come about because of markdown, that it isn’t well suited for editors, writers and creators. They go into a lot of depth in their article, it’s really worth the read.

    I’m sympathetic to their point of view because although it’s fantastic for quickly writing documentation for coding projects, I have found it a bit tedious for writing, but especially editing essay style pieces.

    I love how easy it is in Markdown to add URLs, lists, for boldening/italicising text, and for adding titles and sub headings. Guess what you can also just add HTML directly in the file for those situations where the syntax falls short. All that is great, and it doesn’t bother me that you end up with some slightly ugly syntax scattered through the text. I’m fine with that, in fact for URLs you get used to it very quickly, and it’s actually, in my opinion, argusbly better to be able to see the full URL text, so you can easily spot mistakes before publishing, and it encourages you to favour well written URLs. It’s often overlooked because it’s somewhat subtle, but structured and nicely formatted URLs make browsing and sharing on the web a much nicer experience.

    The biggest annoyance for me is in the editing, because the way corrections are displayed in a Github PR are sort of close to unreadable. Each paragraph is one line in a markdown file, and if you change 1 word, the entire paragraph is highlighted in a way that you lose the flow of the whole document. I’m constantly having to preview, commit, review. It’s that feeling where you can’t see the woods for the trees, and it makes writing prose much more difficult than it should be.

    The topic came up in a recent Shop Talk Show. Dave is keen on exploring Markdown editors when he's old and Chris is bullish on block editors from his mostly very positive experience with Wordpress’s newish Gutenberg editor. He’s always going on about it (in a good way), so there must be something to it.

    And that’s were the Smashing piece ends up, talking about the concept of block editors, which I am totally unfamiliar with. It sounds interesting, though I wonder how much of the automation and collaboration features of a Github+Markdown workflow you would lose by moving to block editors. Also, and this is a big one: portability. I personally am willing to put up with some of the annoyances of Markdown because, I know it works everywhere that supports git repos. Where is the portability in block editors?

    There are signs that some of the benefits of modern webdev blocks and components are making their way into Markdown, with for example Mdx, which is a markdown variant that makes it possible to embed React and Vue components directly in your markdown files. So maybe we will get both markdown and block editing in the new embedable web that the folks at Smashing envision.

    It’s a topic that I’m watching closely because it will have a big effect on what I like doing. I’ll finish with a Markdown Pro/Cons list as I currently see it:

    Markdown Pros:

    • Portability
    • Collaboration
    • Git friendly
    • Compatibility
    • Huge ecosystem of tools
    • Being able to stick it in a PR, then stick it into a workflow

    Markdown Cons:

    • Not the best writing experience
    • Lousy editing experience

Today’s links:

2022/02/22 #

  • Changes to the blog and newsletter

    Towards the end of last year, I stopped posting to the linkblog. It wasn’t by choice, I still enjoy reading and curating content, but life configured itself for me in such a way that it was basically impossible to do in any meaningful way. I had just reached the 10 year anniversary. I’m glad I made it that far, but the world said no, loud and clear.

    I have no way to post privately using the linkblog tool. I never had the chance to build that feature. It was on the roadmap, but there were always more important features that popped up, and I had made the decision to implement that feature later to try to make things a bit easier. There was already so much to worry about, and it seemed to me that storing less private data would eliminate a whole class of security concerns for my little sass web application.

    With no links, I didn’t have any material for the newsletter, so that had to be put on hold. I eventually did send out a short new year’s edition. It was fun putting it together, and to be honest I quite liked the brevity. I put out another, and another. I also started adding a short unique one line title to each edition. The idea was to have something memorable, a sort of virtual hook to hang it on, so it doesn’t just fade into obscurity of time. I’m liking the new format.

    I also have a bit of a goal of writing more blog posts, but I want it to be fun, and not get too stuck in crafting the perfect post each time. I might check out some writing tools I keep hearing and readibg about like Grammerly and Hemingway at some point. Until then though I’m just going to try writing and editing quickly. So expect the posts to be a bit rough around the edges, with spelling mistakes, and annoying repeated bits. Sorry. Those bits annoy me too, but I think quantity and general narrative is more important than minutia at the minute. Hopefully my writing will get better over time. It’s a somewhat different way of thinking to writing code, and my brain just doesn’t do it all that well yet.

    I’m still liking the idea of publishing on Saturday, but I’m going to be more flexible. I might sometimes do a week day issue, and I’m not commiting to every Saturday, life is too darn complicated at the minute. I’d love to have a consistent schedule, everyone says that’s the best way to increase readership, but it’s just not realistic for me right now. It’s the "if the world allows" attitude, I’m going to try but I’m not going to kill myself over it.

    Ok that’s it, nothing Earth shattering but I’m feeling good about the changes. I hope you like the sound of them.

    Update - Wow I just noticed how many 2s there are in today's date. Hello world! 🤷‍♂️

    TODO add links when world allows

Today’s links:

2022/02/09 #

  • Component and configuration based UIs

    The past few days, following on from my investigations into the rendering process of modern javascript frameworks, I’ve had component and configuration based UIs on my mind. I’ve been wondering what the big deal is, why all the fuss, when it seems to just boil down to co-locating your templates and code together.

    I kept thinking there must be more to it. But then I thought, what if that really is all there is to it, there are probably other reasons, but what if it is just about co-locating the templates and the code, would that be so bad?

    One major annoyance with templating is making sure all the functions you are using in your templates are in the render context at render time. If any of them aren’t there, the rendering is going to bomb because the template library will do exactly as you have written in your template logic, except some of the functions you told the library to call just aren’t there, and when your template reaches one of those, it results in a runtime error. If you don’t use many functions in your templates, this is likely a non-issue. On the other hand if you do, then it is a pain you face.

    The way it’s done with regular template rendering, is that you have to look down your entire template hierarchy, note down which functions get used, and pass these into the top level template, as part of the data object, and you have to make sure that each time you include a template/partial, to pass the right functions into the render method invocation for that template/partial. So again, if you don’t use many nested templates, it’s probably a non-issue. But if you do, then welcome to code bombsville.

    For people that write highly nested, highly functioned templates, collocating code would perhaps be beneficial, just to make preparation of render contexts less error prone.

    With all that in mind, I decided to just try adding component rendering to my ssg in a feature branch. Worst case is that it doesn’t work and I could just delete the feature branch.

    I thought about it for a few hours, looking at my code, looking at javascript’s implementation of classes, which bundle functions, over and over again. It's still very new code, so I wasn’t totally sure about it, but I think I could see a way to modify the ssg that would result in component rendering.

    It was simple enough, just add a renderComponent method to the renderer, and that method would grab all the functions from the passed component, merge them into the data object, and pass that into the regular render method. Could it be that simple?

    {% highlight javascript %} renderComponent(component, data) { // Add component functions to render context const templateBody = component.getTemplate(); const templateData = Object.assign({}, component.getData(), this.getComponentFns(component));

    return this.render(templateBody, templateData); }

    getComponentFns(component) { return Object.getOwnPropertyNames(component) .reduce(function(acc, current) { acc[current] = component[current]; return acc; }, {}); } {% endhighlight %}

    In the javascript community such implementations are often referred to as syntactic sugar. Might be the same in other language communities, I don’t know (update - turns out it is the same in other programming languages). Essentially the underlying process remains the same, but a new structure is available which is useful in many situations. Examples of this approach are Classes, syntactic sugar on top of prototype based inheritance, and Async/Await which still uses traditional callbacks underneath, but via promises.

    It’s pretty clear to me that if you can write your template alongside the functions it uses, and be sure that at render time, all the functions will be available, then that’s a net positive. And it might very well be that there are other, more frontend centric reasons to use components.

    Anyway, guess what, it worked!

    It seems sort of obvious now, but sometimes when you are in the fog of technology, mental models, implementations, buzzwords, build tools, peoples opinions, and just the complexities, mutilations, humiliations, thirsts, hungers, dirtyness, impossible situations, contradictions, blocking, pain, starvation, cruelty and madness of life, it totally doesn’t seem obvious!

    In the end I added about 10 lines of code, and a very simple Component class, and it worked, the component I included in my template rendered! And since my ssg has a way to define custom renderers, most libraries that support partials/includes should now be able to render components. It's early days and I havent done much testing, but it seems as though it is possible.

    It was quite a moment, when I ran the code, I sort of knew it would work, but it was still a pretty big wow moment. I was like, "wow it worked". That doesn’t happen very often in programming, at least not at that scale.

    Regular template rendering still works as before, and for templates that don’t use lots of functions, that’s probably going to be the better, simpler way to go. But if you do write templates that use lots of functions, using components is a neat way to bundle them with your template, so that at render time the functions are right there in the context, no need to do any special preparation.

    The only current limitation is that your top level can’t be a component, it has to be a template. The ssg renders components inside templates. There might be a way to have top level components in the future, I haven’t figured out an easy way to do that yet.

    One other thing, not related, but related, if there is one thing I have learnt here in Vietnam, it's that the people are cruel, and their cruelty will only increase over time. This is my opinion that has been formed after living here several years. They aren't all cruel, but when all is said snd done the net cruelty only increases. I really feel I have to say that now, while I still am able.

    They should consider renaming it the People's Cruelty of Vietnam. It would be a much more accurate description of the place.

Today’s links:

2022/02/08 #

  • What’s up with templating in modern javascript frameworks?

    I’ve been writing a static site generator recently. It’s a rewrite of a utility that I use to build my statically generated linkblog. That utility has been working well, but it’s implementation isn’t exactly very elegant. It was, after all, my first attempt at building the linkblog statically, which had previously been a typical MongoDB backed Express app.

    I’ve been really delighted using many of the latest javascript features. Specifically Classes, Array functions (especially map and reduce) and Async/Await. That combination IMO has dramatically improved the development experience. The code is massively easier to reason about, and just looks so much better.

    class Dispatcher { constructor(app, cfg, renderers, collections, srcDir, outputDir) { this.app = app; this.cfg = cfg; this.renderers = renderers; this.collections = collections; this.srcDir = srcDir; this.outputDir = outputDir; this.renderersByName = undefined; this.renderersByExt = undefined; this.outputPaths = []; } async init(templatePaths) { debug(`Initialising dispatcher with templatePaths: [${templatePaths}]`); // Arrange things for easy selection this.renderersByName = this.getRenderersByName(); this.renderersByExt = this.getRenderersByExt(); for (var i = 0; i < templatePaths.length; i++) { // ... do some rendering ... } } getRenderersByName() { const renderersByNameReducer = function(acc, current) { acc[current.name] = current; return acc; } return this.renderers.reduce(renderersByNameReducer, {}); } // ... }

    The latest ssg tool now has all the basic features I need to rebuild my linkblog. It uses what I call "old school templates" to render all the pages. In my case it’s EJS, but it could work equally well using any of the many other template libraries like handlebars, liquid, mustache etc. I wanted to get that working before venturing into rendering pages using some of the more "modern" component based javascript frameworks like React, View and Svelte.

    This past week, I’ve been looking at these frameworks more closely, trying to figure out how the rendering works. I’m trying to get a sense of what modifications I’ll need to make to my ssg so that it can generate component based websites. I’ve read so much about these frameworks over the years, it all sounds so wonderful, but also quite mysterious.

    With old school templating rendered server-side, though there are lots of peripheral features, it essentially boils down to passing a template string together with an object containing data to the templating library. The library takes the data and the template string and gives you back an HTML string, a.k.a the rendered page. You write that to a file. Rinse and repeat, upload all the files to your CDN / hosting provider, and that’s your site live.

    debug('Renderer fn - ejs: rendering template'); const renderedContent = ejs.render( templateBody, context, options ); return renderedContent;

    The template libraries have lots of neat features to make it easier to create your pages. One such feature is the ability to include templates inside templates. You create templates for small pieces that you can reuse across all your pages. On my Jekyll based blog for example, I have among others, includes for the Google analytics snippet, as well as messages promoting my development services that appear on each page. I can update the included templates and the messages update across all the pages that use those templates. The feature is sometimes called partials, it’s been a standard feature of ssg’s for many years. Each library has a syntax for describing the include that you insert directly into the template HTML, and you often additionally pass the include a data object which is used by the library to render the included template. 

    <h1>Hello World!</h1> <h2>Some included content:</h2> <%- render(includes.helloIncludes, locals) %> <h2>Some regular content:</h2> <p><%= locals.loremipsum.content1 %></p>

    It’s worth noting that in most implementations you can pass functions in the data object, and use those functions directly in your templates. The libraries execute these functions as part of the rendering of the page.

    The templates contain the logic for creating the HTML files, your javascript code which you use to fetch and prepare template data is in separate files. What about the modern frameworks, what are they doing?

    Well there’s a lot of buzzwords and fancy sounding terminology, but after reviewing several component based projects, it seems to me they are doing essentially the same thing, except the template code has been moved into the javascript files inside a return statement, components are essentially the same thing as includes, and even props, which is one of the key concepts are really just the same as the data object that you pass to includes. All this mystery, and really it’s just another template library. I’m probably missing some crucial detail, but after a few days of digging, that’s what I’m seeing. 

    class ShoppingList extends React.Component { render() { return ( <div className="shopping-list"> <h1>Shopping List for {this.props.name}</h1> <ul> <li>Instagram</li> <li>WhatsApp</li> <li>Oculus</li> </ul> </div> ); } } // Example usage: <ShoppingList name="Mark" />

    There must be something else that’s useful over and above collocating related code together. At the present moment I personally find that sloping everything together causes me more confusion, because it’s difficult to conceptualise where the boundaries of the app are located. It’s just this vast amorphous everything code, instead of code that’s divided into rendering logic and data preparation logic.

    I’m aware that I’m coming at this from a very server-side way of thinking about things, and probably component based websites make a lot more sense once they are running in a browser environment, with event handlers and the like, but nonetheless, I find these observations interesting, even if no one else does.

    What’s the major advantage that you get from sticking the template into the javascript?

For enquiries about my consulting, development, training and writing services, aswell as sponsorship opportunities contact me directly via email. More details about me here.