Is magic real? - 123dev #17

Posted on September 22, 2021  •  3 minutes  • 525 words

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I still don’t know how this works

I was at Disney Animation when they first showed us the animatronics for the new Beauty and the Beast ride for Tokyo Disneyland. I never saw this transformation and still don’t understand how it works.

Honestly a lot of code I write feels the same way. The fact that I can tell transistors what to do with any resemblance of English language is pretty magical.

User experience

A lot of times we talk about how software should delight users and if it doesn’t then it’s a bug. There are lots of different ways to say this but really it comes down to user empathy. You should know where your users are coming from and have some ability to help them through their current struggles of learning something new or fixing a production outage.

In reality we’re only looking at a small slice of the person’s life to try and make it better. The COVID situation in India right now breaks my heart. There are too many people directly or indirectly affected by loss of life from the spreading virus. Software cannot fix this directly, but UX plays a critical role for people making vaccination appointments, doctors and volunteers getting people the medical attention they need, and even people far away making donations. Having empathy for users in these dire situations makes me think about the importance of UX in a much more critical light.

Links

This week I learned that you can use .mp4 files as a source for <img> in HTML (depending on the browser). I’m sure a lot of people knew this already, but I didn’t so I wanted to share. It has solved some problems for me with the new 123 dev site [WIP].

No, this link preview doesn’t count as a gif in the newsletter. ;)

Embed MP4 in HTML Tags for Improved GIF-Like Experience By embedding MP4 in HTML tags, Safari Technology Preview is improving the terrible performance and quality costs associated with GIF files.

There has been a lot of discussion online about open source licenses because multiple projects have re-licensed in recent weeks. This is a good talk laying out some of the basics in open source licensing if you’ve never understood why there are so many or how to use them.

All Things Open 2020: The Basics of Copyright and Licensing for Software Developers : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive — archive.org DescriptionWhether you realise it or not, copyright flows through every element of the software that you build and use. Every line of code or documentation you…

I first read an article based on this talk but then saw the talk and liked it better. It discusses how lots of engineering has changed to building on top of vendor APIs and how that’s different than traditional engineering practices. Some good things to consider in the new world of “vendor engineering.”

Glue Work Makes the Dream Work — www.youtube.com DevOpsDays Texas 2021 Opening KeynoteToday, our systems are made up of a patchwork of tools and services from different companies. We no longer need to be ex…