A Bookshop on Memory Lane

Yesterday I was part of something very small, but very special—something that feels like what’s best about the internet. I follow someone online named Lisa Melton, who is well known in a certain niche of the online tech/Apple nerdery community. Lisa is trans, and she came out in 2023. But in 2018, she figured prominently in parts of the book Creative Selection, by Ken Kocienda, in which Kocienda parlays insider stories about the development of the Safari web browser and the iPhone into lessons about software engineering based on Apple’s processes and culture. Lisa was Kocienda’s manager and collaborator, both at Apple and at their previous company Eazel.

One of Lisa’s old blog posts, “Memories of Steve” was reposted by John Gruber yesterday, and in it she mentions Ken Kocienda several times. While I was walking home, it all of a sudden occurred to me that Creative Selection probably uses Lisa’s deadname and old pronouns, and for some reason, I decided this must not be permitted to continue.

As soon as I got home, I found my copy of Creative Selection, located “Melton” in the index, and began turning to all the pages where she was mentioned, redacting her deadname and pronouns with a black pen and writing the correct name and pronouns into the leading or the margins. It took about 50 minutes. (She’s mentioned a lot.) When I was done, I selected a page that had a high-ish number of mentions, snapped a picture of it with my phone, and posted it to Mastodon. Within a few minutes, Lisa had seen it and boosted it to all her followers, which are much more numerous than mine. She replied to the post to thank me, which felt very nice. I put Creative Selection back on the shelf.

Later in the day, the post got another reply. It so happened that the page I captured in my post mentions Lisa taking Ken Kocienda to a specific book store called Computer Literacy Bookshop, which, decades later, is now closed. Rachel Unkefer, one of the founders of the bookshop, is also on Mastodon and had seen my post. She was delighted to discover that Lisa had been a customer:

OMG this page image! Clicked on it out of curiosity and saw Computer Literacy Bookshop—I was one of the founders/owners of this store(s). So happy to know you were a customer. We appreciated our customers so much

I can’t tell you how warm this made me feel inside. It’s so small, but so human. By doing something spontaneous that I thought maybe only a tiny handful of people might even notice, I created a short chain reaction that (I hope) brought a moment of joy into a stranger’s life. I can’t stop thinking about how unlikely it was that Rachel Unkefer would ever have known Lisa Melton frequented her bookshop, if not for this “accident”. The internet (and the universe) is a funny old place.

The Interactive Guide to Rendering in React

Do you find React rendering mysterious or confusing? The always funny and information Tyler McGinnis has just the guide for you over at ui.dev!

Here’s a nice bite-sized post on TypeScript generics: A great introduction if you’ve never used them before!

I’m on a roll with programming nerdery, I guess. What is “Declarative” programming?

It’s like trying to answer What came first, the chicken or the egg? except everyone seems to think the chicken did, but you don’t even like eggs, and you’re confused. Combine this frustration with the bastardization of the actual word “declarative” to basically just mean good and all of a sudden your imposter syndrome is tap dancing on your confidence, and you realize you don’t even like programming that much.

If you don’t want to read the entire “You Don’t Know JS” book series (which I highly recommend), it’s good to read occasional articles about nerdy JavaScript language stuff. You don’t need to be a CS geek to benefit from learning more about the language you use as a frontend developer.

A bit of an inflammatory title, and it’s also kind of a promotional post for a product that benefits from a “yes” answer to the question in the headline. And, on the contrary, it’s also a classic example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. From the penultimate paragraph:

NoSQL isn’t dead.

Duh.

Nonetheless, this was an interesting read. I’m not all that often called upon to make decisions about databases, but when I do, and even when a NoSQL DB might be a good fit, I always end up choosing relational databases.

Every now and then it’s worth taking a deep dive into language nerdery. Here’s a great article for anyone who’d like to understand more about the JavaScript prototype system, which is quite a thing if you’ve only seen the ES6-style class syntax.

I run my personal website on Netlify, but most of the production NextJS apps I’ve worked on have been deployed to AWS or Google Cloud. For a startup, there’s a good chance the cost savings of running directly on one of the big platforms outweighs the extra engineering effort required.