PinkLetter - Define Your Values (or Fall Trap of Vanity Metrics)

Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills about web development.

My Ramblings This Week

What values drive you?

Watch out if you struggle (like me) trying to answer.

This is not a hippie exercise. Like the ones people with fake smiles and empty souls fiddle with for five minutes and life is wonderful. It takes a long time to surface and define your values.

You live by your values no matter how clear they are to you. But you also live by your instincts: ever measured your worth by comparing salaries with other people? I sure do.

But that's a vanity metric. Similar to counting likes and followers, envying your neighbour's house, or desiring whatever the Joneses bought last week.

Values annihilate the problem. Instead of keeping up with the noise of vanity metrics, you can keep up with the signal of what's important in your life.

Strange how knowing what you want helps getting you there, huh?!

If I managed to convince you, here are a few resources to start your values research:

• Life Audit
• "A Personal Mission Statement: Your Road Map to Happiness," pretty much a list of questions
• Define your best average day: it's the small things that count and I'm pretty sure you can make average stuff happen consistently
• Define the buckets you value
• Personal values; thanks Nico for the tip!

Remember, it takes time: take it slow and keep it fun!

Elsewhere on the Web

Terms & Conditions Apply Game by Wieden+Kennedy, Jon Plackett, Alex Bellos, Adam Hunt

A mini-game about pop ups, and the deviousness of websites and apps EVIL CORP wants your data. It will use every trick in the book (and a few more, just for fun).

(Riccardo: I failed four of them on the first run. You?)

The Idempotency-Key HTTP Header Field by Sanjay Dalal and IETF

The HTTP Idempotency-Key request header field can be used to carry idempotency key in order to make non-idempotent HTTP methods such as "POST" or "PATCH" fault-tolerant.

(Riccardo: You should definitely read Using Atomic Transactions to Power an Idempotent API too.)

The speed of a single-page web application without having to write any JavaScript. by Basecamp

Turbo uses complementary techniques to dramatically reduce the amount of custom JavaScript that most web applications will need to write:

• Turbo Drive accelerates links and form submissions by negating the need for full page reloads.
• Turbo Frames decompose pages into independent contexts, which scope navigation and can be lazily loaded.
• Turbo Streams deliver page changes over WebSocket, SSE or in response to form submissions using just HTML and a set of CRUD-like actions.
• Turbo Native lets your majestic monolith form the center of your native iOS and Android apps, with seamless transitions between web and native sections.

It's all done by sending HTML over the wire. And for those instances when that's not enough, you can reach for the other side of Hotwire, and finish the job with Stimulus.