cafedave.net

Paul Ford’s epic Bloomberg piece on coding is the kind of article / teaching piece / tutorial that people will be talking about for years to come. It’s a long read, and the amount you learn from it will depend on how much experience with programming you’ve had.

If you’re looking to work with programmers in some capacity, or you’re trying to understand what a career in a programming discipline might entail, it’s worth at least a skim read.

In the lead up to (David) Letterman’s final episode, there were a lot of best-ofs, tributes, excerpts from the show going up on YouTube and some widespread melancholia. I think I started down the rabbit warren watching a tribute song performed by Adam Sandler, and then went much broader, watching different videos and reading a host of pieces that were each searching for a fresh angle on the same story, the one that everyone wanted to tell.

Different late-night TV hosts followed on with their own tributes – Conan, memorably, told his audience  when to switch over to Dave’s final show (and asked his viewers to record his show, and just watch the ads a few times each).

I even managed to watch some of the final show as it was broadcast on free-to-air TV here in Australia: it was on when I returned home from some meeting or other. It was clearly something that would become and important TV memory; and the final Foo Fighter performance which was overlaid with a montage of moments from the show was particularly poignant.

But a couple of things were missing from the show, and danced around by the various armchair experts.

Retirement is a chance to reflect on mortality. As much energy as he might still have, the amount of effort involved in being a Tonight Show host is incredible, and can only kept up for so long. As beloved as Dave is, the next chapter is going to be smaller than the last at least in overall reach.

The end of Letterman (the show) marks an inflection point on the way that we consume recorded TV-style content. Terrestrial, free-to-air TV has more or less had its day. It will continue on for a while, but the kinds of shared cultural moments that marked the end of a show like M*A*S*H are going to be things that need to be explained to the next generation of viewers.

I still read a lot online; mostly through a feed reader, which I pay for. Part of reading through a feed reader is not seeing the content in its original context, except for those sites that encourage the user to click through to read something.

If you’ve been online for a while, you will be deeply familiar with the way that online advertising generally works. The banner ad itself is over 20 years old. Immunity to online advertising is called banner blindness: the particular structures that appear on a webpage are often not noticed by seasoned readers of the web.

This led – over many years – to an escalation of online advertising: becoming more and more difficult to avoid – full-screen pre-roll pages, site takeovers: all kinds of things.

I wouldn’t normally comment, but the Next Web, May 2015 (I’m including the date in case you need to find it in the wayback machine) did something I haven’t seen before, and appeared to change the relationship between ad and content.

On this site, when it loads, you’re presented with the site’s top nav, and some social media buttons, and a small “show article” link, but the article itself has floated off to the right of the browser window, so only a small sliver is showing. You know you’re on the right page, but the message is a new one to me – this is the advertiser’s space, and we’re just going to place the article over the top of it, because we know that’s important to you.

It made me think “I should pay more attention to this ad” – admittedly, for products I’d already heard of, and with really beautiful design – in a way I haven’t seen for a long time.

The ability to shape the experience of a visitor to your site should not be underestimated, even as there’s perceived pressure that “no one reads your site” anymore.

There is still a strong tendency among the people who build the web to think of it as a “page” first, and to limit their output to the constraints of print and paper. Admittedly, of responsively designed paper, but paper nonetheless. The capacity to communicate a sense of home and place, a hierarchy of interactions between stakeholders, has barely been tapped.

I expect to see even more innovation in the content-publisher space, even as the giant sites like Facebook move to bring more of the web’s content within their walled garden.