Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2024

A yearly ritual by people used to thinking about the future, in a virtual space that is also a time capsule of the early web. The Well’s UI is clunky like old mailing lists archives, but the ideas are rich, the analysis sharp, if also bleak.

Stop saying “technical debt”

I used to love the “technical debt” metaphor. Now I’m very suspicious whenever someone uses it. At the very least, I ask them if they really mean technical debt, or rather technical waste. (I’ve shared this blog post a lot in the recent years – once more thing to thank Avdi Grimm for.) For now on, I’ll probably share this article, too.

Alchemy

“Component” is probably my most loathed word of 2023: it is everywhere and doesn’t mean anything anymore. Yet, this article lays down a great explanation of what web components are (spoiler: many different but related things at once), nicely illustrated by actual working code.

Goodbye, Clean Code

A good lesson on the difference between looking good and good-looking. “Style over substance” is great when playing Cyberpunk RED; not to much when writing real-life software.

Semantic Versioning is a terrible mistake

I agree with the feeling that some ecosystems have a careless YOLO attitude towards breaking changes. I’m really happy with the way Rails handle things in this regard; the major upgrades can be significant (ask any grognard of about their war stories of Rails 2-to-Rails 3 upgrade), and you do not want to stay behind, but they are released once a year at worst.