SitePoint Weekly – 18 August, 2020

🍓 The freshest resources, stories, and exclusive content for web developers, designers, and digital creators.

Pointed Advice

🦾 A selection of our latest articles and tutorials

Platform Problems

🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web

Vuely Noted
Web development, design, and tooling

• Vue 3 is coming — find out what to expect and how to prepare.
• The Linux Foundation announces new initiative to secure open-source software.
• Polkadash is a mobile-friendly starter kit for developing your own UI for a Substrate-based chain. Substrate is "like Express or another web application framework, but for building distributed or decentralised systems."
• Here's how you can create reusable Bash scripts.
• Eleventastic is a simple Eleventy Starter Kit that you can use as a base for new 11ty projects.
• Learn all about gradient angles in CSS, Figma & Sketch.
• Speaking of trillion-dollar companies, Amazon's Machine Learning University is making its online courses available to the public.
• Find out what's coming in Python 3.9 this October.
• Here are some of the things you should be aware of before migrating to TypeScript.
• Learn how to build a Visual Studio Code theme!

The Faintest Notion
Computing, productivity, personal automation, and desktop customization

• When is that Notion API coming? Actually, pretty soon.
• ActiveDock 2 promises to give you all the power you knew the macOS dock was.
• Pop Shell is a keyboard-driven layer for GNOME Shell which allows for quick navigation and window management.
• This Awesome list of CLI apps is not a new release, but it is both good fun and regularly updated.
• Fluent wants to help you learn languages — starting with French — by browsing the web.
• The Newsletter Virtual Mall is intended to showcase the power Google Sheets, but it's also a fun concept with good recommendations.
• wnr is a timer app that claims to produce a better balance between work and rest than pomodoros.

Log In to Facebook, Sheeple!
Technology news, society, and culture

• QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show.
• This pro-China propaganda campaign used AI-generated fake followers to create the illusion of momentum.
• A college student used GPT-3 to write fake blog posts and ended up at the top of Hacker News. Please stop this kind of thing at once. — Regards, Content People.
• Kashmir Hill tried to live without the tech giants. She found it impossible.
• Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data.
• Mozilla and Google renew the Firefox search agreement that ships Google as the default search engine.
• "Looking at Mozilla’s finances, it’s reasonable to conclude that Google is keeping them on life support to keep the anti-trust hounds at bay." – Alan Gibson
• Mulan’s move to Disney Plus proves how quickly the pandemic forever changed entertainment.
• Most importantly, this is the secret to the perfectly cooked chip.

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After a short delay, the new Twitter API has arrived. It's a complete rebuild, and it focuses on improving the underlying architecture of the API as well as adding new features (conversation threading! poll results! pinned Tweets! spam filtering!)

This is very good news, and Twitter is one of the more interesting platforms to develop on when a sufficiently powerful API is available. And if you're interested in building on Twitter, I encourage you to do it. Hit reply when you've got something for me to look at! 

There are issues to consider, though. Jack is certainly a better Twitter CEO than his predecessor and less sociopathic than the other guy at Facebook, but developers may be reticent to jump on his call-to-action straight away. By 2011, Twitter had become a real-time data juggernaut on the back of its incredible ecosystem, which was in turn powered by Twitter's incredible API. 600k developers, 900k apps, and 13 billion API requests a day — these were far more eye-watering numbers a decade ago than they are now. And even then the company was in DevRel-repair mode, to quote a younger me:

Twitter hired Costa in April after the company burned through most if its developer goodwill by telling developers to stop making Twitter clients and revoking UberMedia’s API access for two days. The #devnest event was set up by Costa after the larger Twitter developer conference, Chirp, was discontinued.

Costa must have pulled out a great deal of hair during his tenure in this role — one of the earliest developer relations roles (evangelists in their earlier form aside), I believe, and not one made easy by a culture of consistent developer enablement. Twitter would repeatedly go on to set fire to everything developers made and then shortly thereafter coax them back again, and is perhaps the most notorious Boy Who Cried Wolf in the business.

But it works, because a real-time firehose of humanity's* collective consciousness is too good of an opportunity to pass up. And not just because of the advertising value that can be extracted. Some of the most interesting experiments of the Web 2.0 era took place on the back of the Twitter API.

Only time will tell where we end up this time.

* The hardly-representative sample that uses Twitter, at least.

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You have most likely seen the news that Epic Games has coordinated an assault against monopolistic app store policies by way of courtroom. Last week it baited Apple and Google into pulling Fortnite from their app stores, and after this occurred as planned, immediately filed suits and posted a 1984-themed video clip showing a Fortnite character throwing the seminal hammer (pickaxe, actually, in this case).

You don't need me to tell you that 1984, Fortnite Edition is a dig at the Apple 1984 commercial and a criticism of the company as underdog-turned-rentseeker. There are plenty of pro-monopolists telling you that Apple is still all about the Crazy Ones, really, we promise, and nobody is stupid enough to say that Epic Games is a perfect company. But it's nice to see them throwing resources behind a wild, probably-doomed gamble that applies pressure to create better conditions for all mobile developers, small and large.

And while I don't expect to find many pro-monopolists in this developer-heavy audience, it's important to remember what the platform-building business strategy is all about. It involves making a milkshake that brings all the developers to your yard so that the diversity and quality of choice in apps and services makes your platform a place worth being.

The tired line that Apple should stand to benefit — to the tune of 30% of a company's revenue, in the case that they are all-in on iOS! — because of services provided is lazy PR spin under the most kindhearted interpretation. Developers do Apple the service of building on its platform; it's no surprise that it is hard to recall that reality when you are in a position as fortified as Apple's, but it is the case regardless.

Apple has indeed forgotten. The company's latest response has been to warn Epic that it'll terminate all of its development tools and accounts on Mac and iOS, regardless of their relation to Fortnite, unless it complies. This is significant because Epic Games is also behind Unreal Engine, one of the predominant game engines alongside Unity. Fortnite is already off the App Store — how is this anything other than blackmail and retaliation?

There are some key differences that I'd like you to overlook for simplicity, but this is similar to Apple turfing React out of its platforms over a dispute with Facebook — the ultimate effect is that it would disenfranchise developers en-masse far more than it would affect Facebook, and impede the Apple user's ability to access the expected content and software. This is the kind of decision-making that we've seen undo platforms in the past. Even and especially those that were too big to fail.

It should be noted that Apple has, in the past, shown a capacity to war with one side of a business while proceeding as normal with another. It is surprisingly motivated to retain its 30% of V-Bucks sales via Fortnite for iOS.

Cory Doctorow provides the key reminder about the bargain Apple strikes with its developer community:

Some of the criticism directed at Epic accuses it of similar misdeeds, attracting developers to its platform with timed exclusives — and while you are welcome to take issue with that, the criticism only really shines light on what Epic has done to re-enliven competition in the open PC space which had previously long been dominated by a complacent and sluggish Valve Corporation. Epic's entrance into that market has undeniably made life better for the game developer and the gamer, even if you never use the Epic Games Store or play any Epic game.

As Mark Gurman says, Google Play escapes the worst of the criticism because its similar rules are softened by the ability to use other stores and other payment methods. The comparison being made between Apple and Epic suffers from similar flaws. Apple milks its developers by force, crushes them when they resist, and still pretends to be the quirky, fun-loving, creatively-empowering trillion-dollar tech company.

As always, Ben Thompson has a very good analysis of the situation, and of why the App Store deal has become less fit for purpose over time. Though he faults the specifics of Apple's setup, he's a fan of the one App Store model — I think there's room for the ability to opt-in to side-loading or alternative stores for those of us who believe we have the power user competencies to manage the risks — but it's a good read no matter which side you stand on.

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Mozilla reduced its workforce in key areas last week as 2020 has continued to wander astray of everyone's intentions. This includes all of the writers on the MDN — a resource we all depend on. Simon Mackie, whose fine work is responsible for our books, courses, and all the knowledge contained within Premium, brought this comment from Rachel Andrew to my attention:

Take it from us when we tell you that the expense — whether in time, cost, or pursuing other opportunities — in writing solid technical content is far greater than that needed for the work you'll find on Wikipedia for a much narrower audience. As knowledgable as the expert contributors there may be, it is another kind of content.

How Mozilla gets its house in order is one thing. For MDN specifically, this is a tragedy-of-the-commons sort of situation. It's a great loss, and while we encourage you to contribute what time you can, it's nearly certain that MDN will lose its gold-standard status over time.

There's already been a great deal of discussion about the perils of our increasing over-reliance on the Chromium-WebKit Complex (can we make that a thing?). I won't rehash it here. What I will tell you is that you should use browsers with alternative engines, like Firefox, even if it's just part-time. The health of the web is at stake.

You should support Firefox when you build things at a bare minimum. But if or when you don't, try to have more shame than Sonos, which dares to claim that its lack of browser compatibility is the browser's fault:

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• Despite booming consumer demand, VC interest in e-commerce startups falls in 2020.
• The cult of the free must die, according to Peter-Paul Koch.
• Automattic brings its internal collaboration tool, P2, to the masses — for the second time, but in a more polished-and-productized fashion.

• Tara claims to help teams deliver on planned release cycles more predictably.

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