Rediscovering the Old Internet, Rethinking Unit Testing, and Navigating the Creator Economy

Robin talks about the perils of Unit Testing, Tris gives advice to new creators, and both reminisce about The Good Old Days and realise they never left. 📖 CHAPTERS 00:00 The old internet26:43 Unit Testing and Calcified Codebases42:35 The dangers of being a YouTuber 🔗 LINKS Ours https://robinwinslow.ukhttps://noboilerplate.orghttps://lostterminal.comhttps://modemprometheus.comhttps://phosphenecatalogue.com External Ruby on Rails37signalsHEY.comBrotli (Wikipedia)Cory DoctorowObsidianAral Balkan’s “What is the Small Web?” Note: He doesn’t call it “Web Zero” as Robin suggested. That refers to various other things, none of them good. Gemini ProtocolGopher (protocol)NeocitiesSAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment)Project Mercury (NASA)Makertube (makertube.net)KofiNicole van der Hoeven’s YouTubeCory Doctorow’s blogMC Frontalot - Titans of Industry 🧑 CREDITS Decapsulate is a NAMTAO Production (namtao.com) It is hosted by: Tristram Oaten (https://mastodon.social/@0atman)Robin Winslow (https://union.place/@nottrobin) This work is BrainMade (https://brainmade.org) Transcript The old internet Tris: [00:00:00] You know what I mean by the old internet, don’t you, Robin? Robin: Yeah. It was probably about 2005, wasn’t it? Tris: I dunno. I don’t wanna be, uh, you know, old man shouts to cloud about it. I watched the keynote to Rails World 2024 by David Meyer Hanson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. And it wasn’t intentionally a call to action, but it felt to me personally, like a call to action. Uh, DHH was saying how you don’t have to use any of the bullshit that modern web development. Is lumbered with, you don’t have to bundle and compile all of your JavaScript. You don’t have to bundle and compile all of your CSS. You don’t have to use a complex reactive framework to compose, uh, reactive HTML components and then render them out into HTML. You can just have some HTML with simple templating. Some JavaScript with native modules, native methods, and some native CSS, which now has enormous. Functionality in the actual old internet, we didn’t have a lot of the features like CSS variables and the ability to have more complex native functionality. We had to use pre-process for everything. The latest version of JavaScript hadn’t got to all of the browsers. So what DHH was saying with all this is that if you were satisfied with web development 10 years ago, all of that is now native in the browser today. You are the front end or the front ender of the two of us. Does that ring true to you? Robin: Right. After having actually watched this video, I think I remember you talking about it in our chat group and there were a bunch of things I hadn’t realized Were now native, right? The nesting of CSS. So to me that was one of the big powerful things that SAS gave you. And I, I have the impression that lots and lots of people are still doing it with SaaS under the assumption that. You can’t do it natively, but it works natively. As in if you want to have like a an H one inside a section and you want to give the section some sky styles and then you want to give the H one some styles, you can just nest the H one tag inside the section tag. Right. Tris: Yeah. Robin: Which you, you, you never used to be able to do and you needed, you needed SaaS for, Tris: this is exactly what I’m talking about. Like we’ve forgotten or we’ve not tried. The native functionality of the browser is even as web developers, we’ve just assumed that we’ve always used these meiers and bundlers and compilers, so we always will have to. Now, there are plenty of future functionality. That we still might want to use compilers and bundlers for, but DHH is like, we’ve reached this threshold, this watershed moment where you, for 99% of websites don’t need any of that. You can just write like the old days, some HTML, some JavaScript and some CSS, native CSS, his example. Was at 37 Signals they’ve recently built last couple of years. They’ve recently built hey.com, which I think is like email for people with A DHD and autism, which is why I love it, and it’s really, really good. He made a wild statement at In This Rails World keynote. He said, the JavaScript we write is the JavaScript that your browser receives. It’s a one-to-one. There’s no like line framework. Yeah, there’s no framework but there, but there’s not even any bundling up. So if you get an error on line five, it’s actually line five on the developer’s machine as well as in production. Yeah. Like it’s line five of this file. Yeah. Which is wonderful. Robin: I’ve always wanted that and I’ve always been frustrated by all of these different tricks that people use to try and optimize their their HTML putting like JavaScript at the end and all this kind of thing. And I was excited when HTTP two came along because. On the face of it, it looked like it was going to solve a lot of that stuff because, well, first of all, you can. ...