Occasionally my wife likes to hear me explain my work, beyond just the outcome that I'm trying to accomplish. Whenever this has involved web UI work, the conversation has broken down into her lecturing me not to be so negative. This is not because I'm feeling any negative emotion at the time, but because virtually nothing in the modern web stack can be described in terms of a positive intention coming to fruition. Every time she asks "why?" the reason is some historical mistake, some failure that can never be undone. Even when it's an aspect of web technology I personally enjoy and admire, I can't explain why it exists without telling a horror story. I manage to frame other areas of computing, when I want to, as a story of progress, a heroic sequence of invention and improvement (with some mistakes and backtracking) leading to a better and better future. Web programming always comes off as a descent into hell. And it's a malevolent God's hell, where every mistake anyone has ever ever made, every injury anyone has ever done to another person, is revisited on you and everyone else every day for eternity.

I forget this, because I take all the history for granted and am excited and grateful that I can use create-react-app to summon a vast technological apparatus to mostly paper over the damage for a putatively-full-stack-but-really-back-end weeny like me. But when I have to explain it to somebody, yeesh. It's like explaining the Vietnam War (or, at this point, the war in Afghanistan) to a younger relative. You forget how awful it was until you have to put it into words, and then you feel depressed the rest of the day thinking about it and realizing that everything we could learn from it to prevent it happening again is something we already knew before we did it.

James Mickens is a national treasure.

"To Wash It All Away" was the last of his columns for the Usenix magazine. Here are all the others:

2014-03: To Wash It All Away: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1403_02-08_mickens.pdf

2014-01: This World Of Ours: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

2013-11: The Night Watch: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

2013-09: The Slow Winter: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1309_14-17_mickens.pdf

2013-07: Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/01_mickens_02-04_1.pdf

2013-05: The Saddest Moment: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_micken...

"The Night Watch" is a personal favorite as I identify as a systems programmer. The phrase "I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I'VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS" resonates with repeated personal experience.

Strange, I have always found IKEA instructions to be fairly straightforward and descriptive, in contrast to instructions from other furniture vendors.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365615

This man's hatred for javascript only matches my own. He's after my own heart.

If you have never read Mickens out loud, I highly recommend it, the humor is even more visceral on performance.

SIDE NOTE: curious -- it says 4 comments but I only see one at time of me writing this. Thanks.

(2014)