ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Random Factoids I Learned Last Year

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    In September of last year, I started recording random information I had never known about. My criteria for recording this fact was basically “will I want to be reminded about this in the future.”

    I didn’t set out with a plan for these facts beyond recording them in a notes document.

    But heck, if I find them interesting, maybe you will too.

    1. The Rule of 72.

      This is a shorthand method for figuring out roughly how long it will take an investment to double in value. It’s quite simple, you simply divide 72 by the percentage return expected from your investment. So a GIC with a 5% rate of return will double in 14.4 years.

      It turns out math is super cool.

    2. Karpman drama triangle.

      It’s like the fire triangle, except for drama.

    3. ʻOumuamua

      It is perhaps the first interstellar object observed by humans. There even seems to be some evidence that it exhibited non-gravitational acceleration.

    4. Turnspit Dog.

      An extinct dog breed that was employed specifically to turn meat spits and other cooking things.

    5. Winnipeg’s 1960s freeway plan.

      This would have destroyed some much of what makes Winnipeg great, I’m glad it didn’t happen.

    6. The first amendment to the Canadian constitution created Manitoba!
    7. Time value of money.

      One dollar today is worth more than one dollar tomorrow.

    8. Swedish drill music exists.
    9. The ancient Celtic carnyx.

      Terrifying.

    10. The UK did not have decimal currency until 1971!

      Get a load of the cash register in that article, it seems completely unusable.

    11. AWS Snowmobile.

      If you have petabytes of data to store Amazon Web Services will literally drive a literal shipping container to you in order to transfer the data. If my math correct, maxing this out will cost you a cool $209M/month, that math can’t be right, can it?

  • A Case for Webrings in a Post-Social Internet

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    How’s that for a headline for the first post of a new year!

    Webrings hold a special place in my memories of the late-90s early internet. For those who never encountered one, or weren’t around back then, webrings were an early tool for content discovery. In the pre-Google and social media era, finding content — let alone good content — was a significant challenge. DNS provider Hover wrote an insightful blog post about webrings a few years ago.

    I recommend giving it a read before continuing here.

    I found it interesting that webrings were such an integral part of the early internet that the company was actually acquired Geocities; and then when Yahoo! later acquired Geocities they found it worthwhile enough to attempt to monetize it with ads. Go figure.

    I ran a webring. Any tech-savvy teenager with an internet connection could set up a webring and recruit members. This early exposure to a “democratized” internet piqued my interest in blogging, podcasting, and WordPress later on.

    Find a niche in the post-social, post-Google Internet

    Restate my assumptions:

    1. As everyone has noticed by now, Google is starting to suck.

      I don’t want to say that finding quality things on the internet is as bad as it was before Google even exists; but I can’t recall the last time I’ve found something delightful via a Google search.

      Most of my delightful finds come from reddit, newsletters, or TBH the kottke.org RSS.
    2. Social networks are decentralizing and fragmenting.

      This is a good thing (but that’s a different blog post) but it’s making discovery more difficult. A various points in the past, Twitter’s algorithmic feed and Facebooks newsfeed have both surfaced genuinely good relevant-to-my-interests content.

      With all my contacts fanning out across different mastodons, if not different apps entirely, it’s becoming more difficult to casually stumble upon good stuff.

    Which makes me feel a lot like we’ve swung back around to the content recommendation zero-state that existed on the internet of the 90s.

    Everything 90s is back, why not bring back webrings?!

    A retro solution for modern times?

    Why not consider reviving webrings? But what would a modern webring look like?

    I’m not really envisioning a literal revival of webrings. The original webring UI, as detailed in the Hover post, would feel out-of-place in today’s internet (in a bad way). The UX, the concept of browsing sites in a linear order, curated by someone else, might hold some novelty but lacks practicality.

    What intrigues me is the essence of webrings: a centralized yet distributed system of recommendations.

    If I knew what that looked like and how it worked I would be building it right now.

  • WordCamp US 2023

    WordCamp US 2023

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    I attended my first WordCamp US this year and it was great!

    The Travel

    WCUS 2023 was held in National Harbor, Maryland. It was my first time visiting the DC area.

    DC is such a well documented and important city that I felt like I knew exactly what to expect and it delivered. Basically to the extent that my own personal experiences feel a little trite given the vast amount that has already been written about the city.

    Personal highlights though were finally meeting some of my teammates IRL and biking around DC with them on the Sunday (also frisbee).

    So I’ll forego the usual travel blog and jump right to the talks.

    The Talks

    Videos of the talks have just been posted online (full playlist).

    Here are my highlights

    Most Groundbreaking

    The WordPress Playground has existed for a little while now and it’s one of those things I filled away in my mind to check out later.

    It is absolutely incredible.

    It’s literally a copy of WordPress running PHP in your browser! It’s not a virtual machine you’re remote desktop-ing into, it’s actually running in your browser! There’s a tonne of potential applications.

    Antonio Sejas talks through some of them.

    Check it out, I have a feeling this could be the future.

    WordPress Playground, present and future applications

    Most Engaging

    How do you make a dry topic like core web vitals engaging?

    Enter Henri Helvetica.

    Easily one of the best talks on any subject that I’ve ever seen. It’s fun and you might even learn something.

    Core Web Vitals 2023: User Experience and Performance Evolved

    War stories

    Two talks I am putting under the “war stories” slash “how we built this really cool thing” category.

    If you’ve ever worked on client projects I think you’ll find these two talks validating.

    For All Userkind: NASA Web Modernization
    All The Presidents Websites

    Contributor Day

    The Thursday before the event was set aside for “contributor day.”

    Essentially, anyone interested working on WordPress itself could break into small groups to contribute to a specific area of the project (be it core, documentation, infrastructure, etc.). Apparently, at previous WordCamps the contributor day was held after the main conference when everyone was tired/hungover. The day before definitely seems like the right choice to me.

    I fell in with the group making a renewed push for a core fields API.

    Read Scott’s post.

    Fields API Progress Summary: WCUS Contributor Day 2023

    And check out the repo: https://github.com/sc0ttkclark/wordpress-fields-api

    I’m actually semi-interested to start a local regular contributor day, if I can find any collaborators.

    Oh, And The Swag…

    I got some.

    Verdict

    I met a lot of cool people, had a lot of great food and conversation.

    10 out of 10. Would WordCamp again.

    Get Involved

    So hey, if you’re local to me in the Winnipeg area and you’re interested in WordPress, check out the monthly meetup.

    It’s not just for developers, in fact most of the attendees are often end-users.

    It’s the on the first Wednesday of the month at 7PM at Red River College downtown campus, more info and RSVP on eventbrite.