Tags: code

Looking back on ten years of codebar Brighton, I’m remembering how much I got out of being a coach.

Something that I realised very quickly is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to coaching. Every student is different so every session should adapt to that.

Broadly speaking I saw two kinds of students: those that wanted to get results on screen as soon as possible without worrying about the specifics, and those who wanted to know why something was happening and how it worked. In the first instance, you get to a result as quickly as possible and then try to work backwards to figure out what’s going on. In the second instance, you build up the groundwork of knowledge and then apply it to get results.

Both are equally valid approaches. The only “wrong” approach as a coach is to try to apply one method to someone who’d rather learn the other way.

Personally, I always enjoyed the groundwork-laying of the second approach. But it comes with challenges. Because the results aren’t yet visible, you have to do extra work to convey why the theory matters. As a coach, you need to express infectious enthusiasm.

Think about the best teachers you had in school. I’m betting they displayed infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter.

The other evergreen piece of advice is to show, don’t tell. Or at the very least, intersperse your telling with plenty of showing.

Bret Viktor demonstrates this when he demonstrates scientific communication as sequential art:

This page presents a scientific paper that has been redesigned as a sequence of illustrations with captions. This comic-like format, with tightly-coupled pictures and prose, allows the author to depict and describe simultaneously — show and tell.

It works remarkably well. I remember how well it worked when Google first launched their Chrome web browser. They released a 40 page comic book illustrated by Scott McCloud. There is no way I would’ve read a document that long about how browser engines work, but I read that comic cover to cover.

This visual introduction to machine learning is another great example of simultaneous showing and telling.

So showing augments telling. But interactivity can augment showing.

Here are some great examples of interactive explainers:

• Cameras and Lenses by Bartosz Ciechanowski,
• An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid by Josh W Comeau,
• CSS :has() Interactive Guide by Ahmad Shadeed,
• Pizza Exchange Rate by Nathan Yau, and
• just about everything by Nicky Case.

Lea describes what can happen when too much theory comes before practice:

Observing my daughter’s second ever piano lesson today made me realize how this principle extends to education and most other kinds of knowledge transfer (writing, presentations, etc.). Her (generally wonderful) teacher spent 40 minutes teaching her notation, longer and shorter notes, practicing drawing clefs, etc. Despite his playful demeanor and her general interest in the subject, she was clearly distracted by the end of it.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a 5 year old’s short attention span, but I could tell what was going on: she did not understand why these were useful, nor how they connect to her end goal, which is to play music.

The codebar website has some excellent advice for coaches, like:

• Do not take over the keyboard! This can be off-putting and scary.
• Encourage the students to type and not copy paste.
• Explain that there are no bad questions.
• Explain to students that it’s OK to make mistakes.
• Assume that anyone you’re teaching has no knowledge but infinite intelligence.

Notice how so much of the advice focuses on getting the students to do things, rather than have them passively sit and absorb what the coach has to say.

Lea also gives some great advice:

1. Always explain why something is useful. Yes, even when it’s obvious to you.
2. Minimize the amount of knowledge you convey before the next opportunity to practice it. For non-interactive forms of knowledge transfer (e.g. a book), this may mean showing an example, whereas for interactive ones it could mean giving the student a small exercise or task.
3. Prefer explaining in context rather than explaining upfront.

It’s interesting that Lea highlights the advantage of interactive media like websites over inert media like books. The canonical fictional example of an interactive explainer is the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age. Andy Matuschak describes its appeal:

When it wants to introduce a conceptual topic, it begins with concrete hands-on projects: Turing machines, microeconomics, and mitosis are presented through binary-coding iron chains, the cipher’s market, and Nell’s carrot garden. Then the Primer introduces extra explanation just-in-time, as necessary.

That’s not how learning usually works in these domains. Abstract topics often demand that we start with some necessary theoretical background; only then can we deeply engage with examples and applications. With the Primer, though, Nell consistently begins each concept by exploring concrete instances with real meaning to her. Then, once she’s built a personal connection and some intuition, she moves into abstraction, developing a fuller theoretical grasp through the Primer’s embedded books.

(Andy goes on to warn of the dangers of copying the Primer too closely. Its tricks verge on gamification, and its ultimate purpose isn’t purely to educate. There’s a cautionary tale there about the power dynamics in any teacher/student relationship.)

There’s kind of a priority of constituencies when it comes to teaching:

Consider interactivity over showing over telling.

Thinking back on all the talks I’ve given, I start to wonder if I’ve been doing too much telling and showing, but not nearly enough interacting.

Then again, I think that talks aren’t quite the same as hands-on workshops. I think of giving a talk as being more like a documentarian. You need to craft a compelling narrative, and illustrate what you’re saying as much as possible, but it’s not necessarily the right arena for interactivity.

That’s partly a matter of scale. It’s hard to be interactive with every person in a large audience. Marcin managed to do it but that’s very much the exception.

Workshops are a different matter though. When I’m recruiting hosts for UX London workshops I always encourage them to be as hands-on as possible. A workshop should not be an extended talk. There should be more exercises than talking. And wherever possible those exercises should be tactile, ideally not sitting in front of a computer.

My own approach to workshops has changed over the years. I used to prepare a book’s worth of material to have on hand, either as one giant slide deck or multiple decks. But I began to realise that the best workshops are the ones where the attendees guide the flow, not me.

So now I show up to a full-day workshop with no slides. But I’m not unprepared. I’ve got decades of experience (and links) to apply during the course of the day. It’s just that instead of trying to anticipate which bits of knowledge I’m going to need to convey, I apply them in a just-in-time manner as and when they’re needed. It’s kind of scary, but as long as there’s a whiteboard to hand, or some other way to illustrate what I’m telling, it works out great.

I went to codebar Brighton yesterday evening. I hadn’t been in quite a while, but this was a special occasion: a celebration of codebar Brighton’s tenth anniversary!

The Brighton chapter of codebar was the second one ever, founded six months after the initial London chapter. There are now 33 chapters all around the world.

Clearleft played host to that first ever codebar in Brighton. We had already been hosting local meetups like Async in our downstairs event space, so we were up for it when Rosa, Dot, and Ryan asked about having codebar happen there.

In fact, the first three Brighton codebars were all at 68 Middle Street. Then other places agreed to play host and it moved to a rota system, with the Clearleft HQ as just one of the many Brighton venues.

With ten years of perspective, it’s quite amazing to see how many people went from learning to code in the evenings, to getting jobs in web development, and becoming codebar coaches themselves. It’s a really wonderful community.

Over the years the baton of organising codebar has been passed on to a succession of fantastic people. These people are my heroes.

It worked out well for Clearleft too. Thanks to codebar, we hired Charlotte. Later we hired Cassie. And it was thanks to codebar that I first met Amber.

Codebar Brighton has been very, very good to me. Here’s to the next ten years!

Popover API Sliding Nav

Here’s a nifty demo of popover but it’s not for what we’d traditionally consider a modal dialog.

New Web Development. Or, why Copilots and chatbots are particularly bad for modern web dev – Baldur Bjarnason

The paradigm shift that web development is entering hinges on the fact that while React was a key enabler of the Single-Page-App and Component era of the web, in practice it normally tends to result in extremely poor products. Built-in browser APIs are now much more capable than they were when React was first invented.

Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow

People act like writing code is the hard part of software. It is not. It never has been, it never will be. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle.

The present wave of generative AI tools has done a lot to help us generate lots of code, very fast. The easy parts are becoming even easier, at a truly remarkable pace. But it has not done a thing to aid in the work of managing, understanding, or operating that code. If anything, it has only made the hard jobs harder.

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

A very thought-provoking presentation from Maggie on how software development might be democratised.

“Just” One Line - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

There’s a big difference between the interface to a thing being one line of code, and the cost of a thing being one line of code.

A more acute rendering of this sales pitch is probaly: “It’s just one line of code to add many more lines of code.”

And as Chris puts it:

Every dependency is a potential vulnerability

Futuristic Progressive Enhancement - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

We’re all tired of: write some code, come back to it in six months, try to make it do more, and find the whole project is broken until you upgrade everything.

Progressive enhancement allows you to do the opposite: write some code, come back to it in six months, and it’s doing more than the day you wrote it!

SCALABLE: Save form data to localStorage and auto-complete on refresh

When I was in Amsterdam I was really impressed with the code that Rose was writing and I encouraged her to share it. Here it is: drop this script into a web page with a form to have its values automatically saved into local storage (and automatically loaded into the form if something goes wrong before the form is submitted).

Prototypes, production & fidelity layers | Trys Mudford

I’ve always maintained that prototyping and production require different mindsets. Trys suggests it’s not as simple as that.

I agree with much of what he says about back-end decisions (make it manual ‘till it hurts—avoid premature optimisation), but as soon as you’re delivering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to real people, I think you need to meet certain standards when it comes to accessibility, performance, etc.

I was in Amsterdam last week. Usually I’m in that city for an event like the excellent CSS Day. Not this time. I was there as a guest of Vasilis. He invited me over to bother his students at the CMD (Communications and Multimedia Design) school.

There’s a specific module his students are partaking in that’s right up my alley. They’re given a PDF inheritance-tax form and told to convert it for the web.

Yes, all the excitement of taxes combined with the thrilling world of web forms.

Seriously though, I genuinely get excited by the potential for progressive enhancement here. Sure, there’s the obvious approach of building in layers; HTML first, then CSS, then a sprinkling of JavaScript. But there’s also so much potential for enhancement within each layer.

Got your form fields marked up with the right input types? Great! Now what about autocomplete, inputmode, or pattern attributes?

Got your styles all looking good on the screen? Great! Now what about print styles?

Got form validation working? Great! Now how might you use local storage to save data locally?

As well as taking this practical module, most of the students were also taking a different module looking at creative uses of CSS, like making digital fireworks, or creating works of art with a single div. It was fascinating to see how the different students responded to the different tasks. Some people loved the creative coding and dreaded the progressive enhancement. For others it was exactly the opposite.

Having to switch gears between modules reminded me of switching between prototypes and production:

Alternating between production projects and prototyping projects can be quite fun, if a little disorienting. It’s almost like I have to flip a switch in my brain to change tracks.

Here’s something I noticed: the students love using :has() in CSS. That’s so great to see! Whereas I might think about how to do something for a few minutes before I think of reaching for :has(), they’ve got front of mind. I’m jealous!

In general, their challenges weren’t with the vocabulary or syntax of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The more universal problem was project management. Where to start? What order to do things in? How long to spend on different tasks?

If you can get good at dealing with those questions and not getting overwhelmed, then the specifics of the actual coding will be easier to handle.

This was particularly apparent when it came to JavaScript, the layer of the web stack that was scariest for many of the students.

I encouraged them to break their JavaScript enhancements into two tasks: what you want to do, and how you then execute that.

Start by writing out the logic of your script not in JavaScript, but in whatever language you’re most comfortable with: English, Dutch, whatever. In the course of writing this down, you’ll discover and solve some logical issues. You can also run your plain-language plan past a peer to sense-check it.

It’s only then that you move on to translating your logic into JavaScript. Under each line of English or Dutch, write the corresponding JavaScript. You might as well put // in front of the plain-language sentence while you’re at it to make it a comment—now you’ve got documentation baked in.

You’ll still run into problems at this point, but they’ll be the manageable problems of syntax and typos.

So in the end, it wasn’t my knowledge of specific HTML, CSS, or JavaScript APIs that proved most useful to pass on to the students. It was advice like that around how to approach HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

I also learned a lot during my time at the school. I had some very inspiring conversations with the web developers of tomorrow. And I was really impressed by how much the students got done just in the three days I was hanging around.

I’d love to do it again sometime.

I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind - Josh Collinsworth blog

Products of all kinds are required to ensure misuse is discouraged, at a minimum, if not difficult or impossible. I don’t see why LLMs should be any different.

A dozen thoughts about AI | daverupert.com

I often wonder if the future of my job is just cleaning up all the robo-barf on the ship.

Dave ponders the pros and cons of large language models.

Eliminating tedious work seems worthwhile. Humans getting to do more of the fun stuff. That famous “augmented work” everyone talks about.

But what is considered tedious? Email? Writing documentation? Blogging? Design? Making music? Hiring? Working with junior developers? How come management never comes up in these conversations?

I’m quite sure this is of no interest to anyone but me, but I finally managed to fix a longstanding weird issue with my website.

I realise that me telling you about a bug specific to my website is like me telling you about a dream I had last night—fascinating for me; incredibly dull for you.

For some reason, my site was being brought to its knees anytime I syndicated a note to Mastodon. I rolled up my sleeves to try to figure out what the problem could be. I was fairly certain the problem was with my code—I’m not much of a back-end programmer.

My tech stack is classic LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. When I post a note, it gets saved to my database. Then I make a curl request to the Mastodon API to syndicate the post over there. That’s when my CPU starts climbing and my server gets all “bad gateway!” on me.

After spending far too long pulling apart my PHP and curl code, I had to come to the conclusion that I was doing nothing wrong there.

I started watching which processes were making the server fall over. It was MySQL. That seemed odd, because I’m not doing anything too crazy with my database reads.

Then I realised that the problem wasn’t any particular query. The problem was volume. But it only happened when I posted a note to Mastodon.

That’s when I had a lightbulb moment about how the fediverse works.

When I post a note to Mastodon, it includes a link back to the original note to my site. At this point Mastodon does its federation magic and starts spreading the post to all the instances subscribed to my account. And every single one of them follows the link back to the note on my site …all at the same time.

This isn’t a problem when I syndicate my blog posts, because I’ve got a caching mechanism in place for those. I didn’t think I’d need any caching for little ol’ notes. I was wrong.

A simple solution would be not to include the link back to the original note. But I like the reminder that what you see on Mastodon is just a copy. So now I’ve got the same caching mechanism for my notes as I do for my journal (and I did my links while I was at it). Everything is hunky-dory. I can syndicate to Mastodon with impunity.

See? I told you it would only be of interest to me. Although I guess there’s a lesson here. Something something caching.

LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024

What strikes me about my personal experience with LLMs is that I have learned precisely when to use them and when their use would only slow me down. I have also learned that LLMs are a bit like Wikipedia and all the video courses scattered on YouTube: they help those with the will, ability, and discipline, but they are of marginal benefit to those who have fallen behind. I fear that at least initially, they will only benefit those who already have an advantage.

The subjective experience of coding in different programming languages (Interconnected)

I love the analogies Matt uses to describe the vibes of different kinds of coding:

When I’m deep in multiple nested parentheses in a C-like language, even Python, I feel precarious, like I’m walking a high wire or balancing things in my hands and picking my way down steep stairs.

I haven’t done much Haskell but what I did felt like crawling underground through caves and tunnels.

Opening a terminal window to a distant server is like reaching through a hatch with my arm, but a long way; ssh tunnel is well named.

Writing code with GitHub Copilot and Typescript in full flight feels like, well, flying, or at least great bounding leaps like being on the Moon.

Revealing ‘back to top’ button

Such a clever minimalist use of CSS!

Losing the imitation game

The hard part of programming is building and maintaining a useful mental model of a complex system. The easy part is writing code. They’re positioning this tool as a universal solution, but it’s only capable of doing the easy part. And even then, it’s not able to do that part reliably. Human engineers will still have to evaluate and review the code that an AI writes. But they’ll now have to do it without the benefit of having anyone who understands it. No one can explain it. No one can explain what they were thinking when they wrote it. No one can explain what they expect it to do. Every choice made in writing software is a choice not to do things in a different way. And there will be no one who can explain why they made this choice, and not those others. In part because it wasn’t even a decision that was made. It was a probability that was realized.

This post also has a really good explanation of how large language models work.

There may be real, productive uses for these kinds of tools. There may be ways to build and deploy them ethically and sustainably. But that’s not the situation with the instances we have. AI, as it’s been built today, is a tool to sell out our collective futures in order to enrich already wealthy people. They like to frame it as being akin to nuclear science. But we should really see it as being more like fossil fuels.

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft | The New Yorker

GPT-4 is impressive, but a layperson can’t wield it the way a programmer can. I still feel secure in my profession. In fact, I feel somewhat more secure than before. As software gets easier to make, it’ll proliferate; programmers will be tasked with its design, its configuration, and its maintenance. And though I’ve always found the fiddly parts of programming the most calming, and the most essential, I’m not especially good at them. I’ve failed many classic coding interview tests of the kind you find at Big Tech companies. The thing I’m relatively good at is knowing what’s worth building, what users like, how to communicate both technically and humanely. A friend of mine has called this A.I. moment “the revenge of the so-so programmer.” As coding per se begins to matter less, maybe softer skills will shine.

w/e 2023-11-05 (Phil Gyford’s website)

On the one hand I still really enjoy writing code and making something work and look good (ish) and put it online where anyone in the world can see it. It’s still like magic. And is still some kind of personal affirmation, a way of saying “here I am!”, of enjoying that it’s noticed by someone, somewhere.

True.

On the other hand, the maintenance. It’s not like this is new to me, keeping things going for years, decades. And I try to make things as easy as possible – keep things up to date, make things in similar ways, stick to reliable and boring technologies, don’t start too many things, etc. But, especially when several things aren’t quite working right, it’s such a weight.

Also true.