Rebuilding our tech stack for the new Facebook.com

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From Facebook Engineering Blog:

When we thought about how we would build a new web app — one designed for today’s browsers, with the features people expect from Facebook — we realized that our existing tech stack wasn’t able to support the app-like feel and performance we needed. A complete rewrite is extremely rare, but in this case, since so much has changed on the web over the course of the past decade, we knew it was the only way we’d be able to achieve our goals for performance and sustainable future growth. Today, we’re sharing the lessons we’ve learned while rearchitecting Facebook.com, using React (a declarative JavaScript library for building user interfaces) and Relay (a GraphQL client for React).

Tons of great nuggets in here, and a lot that I can relate to in what’s we’ve been up to at my job.

Facebook reduced their CSS by 80%, added code splitting and added code budgets to help deliver what’s needed only when it’s needed. They also moved to GraphQL to modernize their data fetching.

It’s a shame Facebook makes products that are so terrible for society, because they really do build world-class software.

The Senate just voted to let the government keep surveilling your online life without a warrant

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From Recode:

the Senate voted on Wednesday not to protect Americans’ internet browsing and search history data from secret and warrantless surveillance by law enforcement. The measure needed 60 votes to pass. It got 59.

I barely recognize this country anymore.

It’s also worth noting, this is yet another reason to use DuckDuckGo as your search engine (they don’t save your searches or track you), and reconsider using browser history sync. A VPN will also help if you’re worried about your ISP selling or otherwise turning your data over.

‘Vintage’ Apple Products

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From Apple:

Vintage products are those that have not been sold for more than 5 and less than 7 years ago. Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Apple TV vintage products continue to receive hardware service from Apple service providers, including Apple Retail Stores, subject to availability of inventory, or as required by law.

Crazy to think that a laptop I bought in late 2015 is going to be considered vintage soon.

How the Novel Coronavirus is Speeding the Scooter Apocalypse

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From The Verge:

There are some early signs that shared mobility could survive the crisis, even come out looking better than before; one of those “it’s always darkest before dawn” kind of things. But before that happens, the scooter industry as a whole will need to shrink, as it already was doing before COVID-19. And a lot of people will probably lose their jobs.

In what seems like a lifetime ago, I would walk past a local MARTA train station after work every day and it looked like the rapture happened without me. Scooters were flung about in every which way, and it made walking down the sidewalk a real pain. Every time I needed to use a scooter, it seemed like I never had the correct app and couldn’t find a scooter for the one that I already had credit with. First world problem to be sure, but it rarely left me feeling positively about the experience.

You never like to cheer for the downfall of any company, but I’m not all that upset to see this industry shrinking. Ideally there’s only one or two of these companies that work with local public transportation to fill the gaps in their service, rather than the streets being a wasteland littered with a dozen different scooter brands at any given time. Consolidation could be a good thing, with more predictable service and fewer apps to navigate.

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs scraps its ambitious Toronto project

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From Ars Technica:

But Sidewalk Labs’ vision was in trouble long before the pandemic. Since its inception, the project had been criticized by progressive activists concerned about how the Alphabet company would collect and protect data, and who would own that data. Conservative Ontario premier Doug Ford, meanwhile, wondered whether taxpayers would get enough bang from the project’s bucks. New York-based Sidewalk Labs wrestled with its local partner, the waterfront redevelopment agency, over ownership of the project’s intellectual property and, most critically, its financing. At times, its operators seemed confounded by the vagaries of Toronto politics. The project had missed deadline after deadline.

I’m always torn when I see these sorts of smart city initiatives pop up. In reality, it’s about how I feel about smart home stuff in general. On one hand, I’m excited about the promise of an efficient and “always learning” city that can help planners optimize. In a world that will be increasingly affected by climate change, finding ways to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of the existing infrastructure is obviously a win.

However, rarely do these things come without hidden complexity or tradeoffs. In this case it’s cost overruns, privacy implications and half-baked solutions.

Direct Support & Subscription Fatigue

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As I mentioned recently, I’ve been listening to even more podcasts than ever that I’m mostly tooling around the house and doing yard work with all of this spare time. As a result, seeing some of the shows and sites I love start to feel the pinch of reduced ad spending have sparked me to start directly supporting them via membership or donation. Recently, I’ve started to support the sites and podcasts that give me the most joy in these fairly monotonous times: Pewter Report, Relay.fm, Macstories, The Athletic, Stratechery and a few others. All told, it’s about $25/month but I feel like I’m doing my part to keep these folks going.

I’m no behavioral economist but I’ve always wondered what the average difference between the increased brand affinity a subscriber/member feels and the subscription fatigue associated with yet another monthly fee is. I feel like the $5 or so a month I pay to these services, podcasts or sites that give me a ton of joy has an outsized amount of real estate in my head. I love knowing that I’m helping directly support podcasts, apps, websites but I also find myself sweating the relatively small amount that I’m giving them. I know they’re in a bind too – going subscription-only reduces their addressable advertisement market and overall reach, while relying only on “donations” makes that support super elastic.

I’ll be curious to see how much the pandemic-induced ad spending changes the podcasting revenue game. The most positive effect could be additional creativity around revenue generation, ad reads and membership programs, with the least being consolidation, paywalls and more invasive tracking. Let’s hope there’s more innovation in the “positive” areas.

11-inch iPad Pro Experiment

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From Ryan Christoffel at MacStories:

This is probably too general of advice, but I’d recommend that if you expect to regularly use your iPad Pro as a tablet, the 11-inch will likely be your best option. If, however, you expect to use it almost entirely with a Magic Keyboard attached, the 12.9-inch is a good bet. Both devices can work in both modes, but the 11-inch is a better tablet, and the 12.9-inch is a better laptop.

I really enjoyed this article, as it captures a lot of my feelings regarding using the iPad as your primary computer. As my personal laptop begins to age, I find myself using my work issued MacBook Pro for most of my “computer” tasks, and an iPad for nearly everything else. The iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard combo is a very versatile (albeit expensive) solution for almost anyone now. If you’re going to go that route, the biggest decision is how much you want to use it as a traditional tablet.

Restarting Safari

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I use Safari as my primary browser for privacy, cross platform sync and performance reasons. It’s got it’s problems like any browser but overall I love how simple and fast it is. But man, Apple makes it a pain for us sometimes. A few years ago, Apple made the move to deploying Safari extensions as tiny apps through the Mac App Store which was mainly done for privacy reasons. By controlling what sort of access extensions have and reviewing them as part of the app review process, the likelihood of a rogue extension causing havoc is greatly reduced.

However, by plugging these apps into Safari it has caused an issue where any extension update triggers a dialog asking me to restart my browser. Now, I only use a few extensions (Bear, Instapaper, 1Password and 1Blocker), but it’s enough to show me the dialog once a week or so.

What is this, Windows 98? As far as I know, no other web browser does this as it’s highly disruptive to users. Apple, you can do better.

You’re Not Going Back to Normal Office Life for a Long, Long Time

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From VICE:

And even if an employer does everything right, a COVID-19 outbreak at the office will remain a distinct possibility. Considering what it will take to get everyone back to the offices—what with the masks, the empty offices, the staggering, the uncertainty, and the overarching anxiety—perhaps the question isn’t when the WFH-ers will return to work again, but when they’ll head back home.

Reading this article makes it abundantly clear that it’s going to be a while before folks who are able to work remotely should even think about going back to the office. I’ve started to mentally prepare myself for many, many more months working from my house. Taking the bus to work, riding an elevator up 23 floors to go work in close proximity to tons of other team members, bouncing between meetings all day sounds like a recipe for spread of the virus. Even if my office opened up today, I doubt I’d be very interested in going back until there’s good treatment options or a cure.

I’ll be honest though – the remote work part has actually been pretty good for me so I’m not super excited about going back anyway. I’m certainly tired of being so isolated, but I’ve always been a homebody and introvert, so this only feels a little abnormal to me. The general slower pace has been really good for me though.

How Apple reinvented the cursor for iPad

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From Matthew Panzarino, at TechCrunch:

The new iPad cursor is a product of what came before, but it’s blending, rather than layering, that makes it successful in practice. The blending of the product team’s learnings across Apple TV, Mac and iPad. The blending of touch, mouse and touchpad modalities. And, of course, the blending of a desire to make something new and creative and the constraint that it also had to feel familiar and useful right out of the box. It’s a speciality that Apple, when it is at its best, continues to hold central to its development philosophy.

This was a really neat deep dive into the process around developing the new cursor UI/UX for iPadOS. I’ve given a spin on my 9.7″ iPad and a Magic Trackpad and left very impressed … at least, when it was in an app that was using native controls. The cursor changing shape and magnetically attracting to targets is a magical feeling the first few times you see it. Especially give its Apple’s first attempt at bolting a new interaction model to the iPad I’m very hopeful about their ability to make their most versatile computer even more so.

I also really dig these types of articles and wish I’d see more of them. I feel nowadays everything is either a 10k word review or clickbait hot takes. Techno-optimism is something that has died in the past few years, and I appreciate authors who still can still write as if they’re excited about tech, not permanently skeptical of it.