Links, August 9, 2024

Can we please move past git?

Mercurial is a distributed VCS that’s around the same age as Git, and I’ve seen it called the Betamax to Git’s VHS, which my boomer friends tell me is an apt analogy,

Hey, I’m on the tail end of Gen-X and even I know this one.

I’ve been using git for going on 20 years now, and it’s very much of the worse is better philosophy of software design. It has a justified reputation for being obtuse, despite plenty of great materials for learning how it works.

And yet, like with C++ or Go, it’s got inertia and great tooling, so people stick with it, and perhaps a bit of Stockholm Syndrome develops such that experienced users question why anyone would want anything better.

Public Work (a search engine for public domain content)

This is a beautifully implemented site, and perhaps the best visually-oriented search engine I’ve seen, eclipsing Pinterest. I especially love both the primacy of the visuals over any metadata (putting the content first), and the two-dimensional scrolling plane for the results.

Decker, a multimedia platform for creating an sharing interactive documents

I’m not really into the mimicry of the classic Macintosh aesthetic, but I was talking with a friend recently about the state of computing and how it feels like everything is centered around apps now, even web pages, how this feels so backwards to me, and how we really lost something with the demise of Hypercard and OpenDoc.

JSR and Deno: Final Review 🚮

Deno has gone from a fun community focused project to a commercial product-driven business. With Deno Land Inc. you have a VC-backed company keeping their cards held close. I finally understand what Dahl meant by saying JSR is “Not Another Package Manager” — JSR is just another product aimed at driving growth and vendor lock-in.

I started playing with Deno a little while back, and while both it and JSR feel well-designed especially compared to NodeJS, I’ve come to the same conclusion and am abandoning it.

Which is sad, because there’s a lot of room for improvement over NodeJS. JavaScript has always been a moving target, but it increasingly feels that the NodeJS maintainers are bitter over how the language has moved away from their initiatives — things like fetch, Promises, Modules, and so on have all won-out over the orignal alternatives in Node, for the better. I also feel their choice to eschew a robust standard library has caused way more problems than it solved.

But this makes doing simple things in NodeJS less than simple. With Deno and JSR, I can put a simple script in a single file, take advantage of robust built-ins, a robust standard library, and capability permissions, and it’s a lot less friction than messing with node, or what python or ruby have become.

But as JavaScript is an evolving target, ecosystems using it require a stewardship that Deno seems unable or unwilling to provide.

Phenominal

The more I hear the phrase “imposter syndrome,” the more I worry we are recreating the very thing we are trying to eliminate

You don’t have imposter syndrome, you’re experiencing a phenomena.

Atmos: Everything you need to create color palettes

I recommend this highly if you work with color in any technical sense, and I don’t give this recommendation lightly — in fact I have been so otherwise dissapointed in the state of color tooling that many years ago I registered colorsheet.app for a similar tool I wanted to build which I was calling a spreadsheet for color palettes, but never quite nailed down, and eventually realized there probably wasn’t much of a market for it.

Atmos does a lot of what was in my original vision: derived colors, okLch color picking, tools to help ensure consistency and equivalence. I’ve already used it to help a client derive a color palette from brand colors for comparative data visualizations, and to build out a palette for a cross-app color scheme I’m working on. This is a tool for power users who care about details, and I’d love to see it succeed.