Chris’ Corner: Terminological Fading

I found myself saying “The Edge” in a recent podcast with Stephen. I was talking about some server-side JavaScript that executes during a web request, and that it was advantageous that it happens at CDN nodes around the world rather than at one location only, so that it’s fast. That was kinda the whole point about “The Edge” is speed.

I don’t hear the term bandied about much anymore, but it’s still a useful architectural concept that many use. Salma Alam-Naylor has a good explainer post.

Take for example, the US West server on AWS. For me, making a request to US West from the UK takes longer than making a request to one of the European servers, due to the distance the data has to travel across the wire.

If you’re using serverless functions for server side rendering to enrich your Jamstack site, you need high availability on global servers in order to make your website fast for everyone in the world coupled with an intelligent network which knows how to route requests to the closest location to the user.

It’s just interesting how terms kinda just chill out in usage over time. They feel like such big important things at the time, that everyone has a thought about, then they just fade away, even if we’re all still doing and using the thing we were talking about.

Even terms like “SPA” (Single Page App) seemed like it’s all anyone wanted to argue about for quite a while there and now I see it chilling out. All the nuance and distinctions between that and a website with regular ol’ links and reloads have come to bear. Concepts like paint holding and view transitions make regular sites feel much more like SPAs and concepts like server side rendering make SPAs work as regular sites anyway. It’s not a fight anymore it’s just technology.

The more you understand, the more rote (and, dare I say, boring) all this becomes. Dave Rupert says:

… once you understand that your technology choices have security, performance, and accessibility considerations you become a much more boring developer. Acknowledging those obligations can sort of strips the fun out of programming, but we’re better for it.

Design, too, can be and benefits from being a bit boring. Fortunately we have grug to guide us.

grug not decorate. grug communicate.

grid keep thing straight. grid bring peace.

grug think: space good only when it help brain see fast.

if icon need tooltip, icon not good.

grug no want award. grug want thing to work.