Matthew Lang

According to philosophy professor Jordan Shapiro, parents should embrace the technology that their kids are using and not worry so much about the time they are spending on it.

“Your job as a parent is not to stop unfamiliar tools from disrupting your nostalgic image of the ideal childhood, nor to preserve the impeccable tidiness of the Victorian era’s home/work split. Instead, it’s to prepare your kids to live in an ethical, meaningful and fulfilled life in an ever-changing world,” he writes. To do this, he argues, families and schools must embrace technology, including gaming, to prepare kids for an uncertain but determinedly digital future.

— A philosophy professor argues kids should use more technology, not less by Jenny Anderson for Quartz

As a tech-loving parent of two boys I know full well the impact of technology on our family. We do have a few ground rules when it comes to technology. No devices at the dinner table, no devices during movie nights and at least one night a week spent reading instead of gaming. Sure there are times when even I think that the boys have spent too much time on their games consoles and so we’ll huckle them off, and we’ll do something else.

Mostly it’s all about balance in our house, but I definitely lean towards allowing them to spend a bit more time on their games consoles. I remember spending whole weekends playing my games consoles and computers as a kid, so I’m in the camp that video games are not a bad thing. We also have more creative and educational games available. Minecraft anyone?

Maybe I’m a bit more forgiving in this respect because my oldest and I have started gaming together online recently. It certainly helps in the competitive matches in Overwatch to have a player you know to communicate with. We just need to get Drew to practice a bit more, and we’ll have a solid trio to play as online!

Over the last few days there has been some interest in my bookmarking web app that I’ve been working on.

Why another bookmarking solution though?

I used Pinboard and Pocket for a while, but I was never comfortable with either of them. Pinboard hasn’t seen much change in the last two years and Pocket is more akin to Instapaper (which I already use) than it is to Pinboard. I also wanted to work on something that I could pin to my GitHub repo as an example of work.

Features are light at the moment, with just the ability to add, edit and delete bookmarks as well as the ability to group tags into bundles. A basic web application, but it works. I’m using it on a subdomain of my own site .

I’ve had replies from people who are interested in a hosted solution rather than having to roll their own. I initially pushed back against the idea of starting a SAAS product. There’s a lot to do to make this happen as the open source version is for a single account only. There’s also all the other parts of a SAAS product to consider such as billing and privacy now that GDPR is a requirement. Also, my first attempt at a SAAS product is still ticking over but hardly a success in terms of revenue.

However, with growing interest, I am going to entertain the idea of making Commonmarks into a SAAS product. I won’t be abandoning the open source version, but the way ahead might lie in using the same model as Feedbin. They are an RSS reader service, but the source code is open source. I’m wondering if this would work for Commonmarks as a product as well?

There is a lot of other things to consider as well for this such as hosting, pricing and support. I won’t be entirely excluding the idea though until I can at least gauge some interest in the product.

The next step looks like it might be to set up a page to allow people to register their interest.

There’s no denying that JavaScript is an excellent language for the web, especially the front-end of any web application. Without it, we can’t enjoy a user experience that challenges native applications.

However, I am not convinced that JavaScript is a language that is suitable for all parts of an application’s stack, all the time. There are benefits to using JavaScript depending on the requirements, but it feels like JavaScript is becoming the go-to language for everything.

Heydon Pickering’s post is an excellent read about this issue and full stack development and how this role is changing with the larger set of JavaScript tools and frameworks available, but it’s his point about separation of concerns that resonated with me:

We need to revisit the separation of concerns principle. We simple can’t afford for people to have to know everything just to do something. It’s good that we conceptualize designs in terms of self-contained components now, but that can be a mental model without being a technology-specific land-grab.

— Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack by Heydon Pickering

It wasn’t that long ago when front-end developers and designers worked with back-end developers on applications. There was a separation of the two roles and their focus, and each side had the knowledge to carry out their role. Front-end developers would work on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, crafting functional yet beautiful user-interfaces. Back-end developers would work on business logic and background processing.

With the rise of JavaScript though, we’re seeing a convergence of tooling onto a single language, and the roles of front-end, back-end and full stack developers becoming less about knowing the respective field and more about knowing JavaScript.

The new world of web applications is moving to JavaScript, and that’s great for the web as a platform. We can now build applications that rival that of native apps using a single language.

However, when faced with programming language choices in the stack, should developers be quick to default to JavaScript?