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45 tambourine_man 13 hrs 15
https://www.macobserver.com/tips/deep-dive/podcasters-replace-skype-discord/
I’ve been podcasting since June of 2005, and since June of 2005 I’ve been using Skype for every episode of every show we’ve ever done. For years, Skype was sensitive to the needs and use-cases of podcasters and worked quite well. Unfortunately, over the past year this has changed, and Skype’s interface and audio codec have changed such that it’s now difficult to use and adds a lot of noise (comfort noise!) into the connection. With that, I sought out another solution and that solution is Discord.
Discord has been around since May, 2015, and was built as a platform for gamers to chat. It features, text, audio, and video chatting, and can be tweaked to attain very high sound quality with zero extra noise. Discord is also built such that it can be used entirely inside a web browser, meaning your interview guests don’t have to download the Discord app. In fact, there’s a way to set it up so that your interview guests don’t even have to sign up for a Discord account.
About Discord’s User Interface
As I said, Discord was originally built for gamers, and its user interface most definitely betrays those roots. Ignore the cute loading messages and funky icons if they bother you, though. Discord’s audio game is on point.
Understanding Discord’s Differences
First thing’s first, go download Discord for your Mac. Yes, you can do everything inside your web browser (except Safari), but for you, as the host, you’ll want the app.
screenshot of Discord server creation screen Create yourself (and your podcast) a Discord server. It’s free!
During initial setup, Discord will ask if you want to Create a Server or Join an existing one. For your podcast, create a server. It’s free, and this allows you to tweak your settings the way you want.
Once your server is created, it will auto-create two channels. Both channels are called “general”, but one will be a Text Channel and the other will be a Voice Channel. You’ll automatically be joined to both. And while Discord does allow person-to-person calls, most everything you’re going to do for your audio podcast will be inside a Voice Channel.
The first thing to do is customize your channel. Click on the Edit Channel settings icon next to your General Voice Channel. In there, set the Bitrate all the way up to 96kbps. You’re podcasting and you’ll want as much signal as possible. You can also change your channel’s name here. Then click Save Changes. Don’t worry about the rest for now.
Discord Audio Settings Set your Discord audio channel’s bitrate as high as it will go.
Tweak Your Audio
One of the biggest reasons I like Discord is because it gives us easy control over our audio settings. At the bottom of the Discord window, you’ll see the little User Settings gear. Click that, then choose Voice & Video. There are quite a few changes to consider and experiment with on this screen. I’ll go through how I consider each one, and then I’ll leave you to experiment with what works best for your particular setup.
Set your input and output devices to match whatever you would normally use in Skype for podcasting. Automatically determine input sensitivity. I generally disable this and slide the slider all the way to the left. This way I get to be in charge of when audio is transmitting (I.e. always) instead of letting Discord decide and possibly cut off the beginnings or ends of phrases. Echo Cancelation. This can be mandatory if someone is not using headphones, but with headphones on this becomes unnecessary. It, too, can cut off phrases if it “thinks” that the noise it’s hearing is coming from one of your guests. It can also make recordings sound a little flanged when both people are talking simultaneously. I turn it off unless I need it enabled. Noise Supression. It’s worth experimenting here, too. For some setups this is great to have on. If it doesn’t make a difference, turn it off. No sense having it surprise you some day if you like the sound. Automatic Gain Control. This one you almost certainly want to disable, though if you wind up talking at different volumes, you might want to turn it back on. Experiment and have fun. Discord's Advanced Audio Settings Experiment with Discord’s advanced audio settings to find what works best for your show.
Inviting Co-Hosts and Guests
You’ll want your co-hosts and guests to join the same Discord Server and Channel as you, and Discord makes that easy with server-specific invites. From the main Server screen, click Invite People icon right at the top. For your co-hosts, you’ll want them to have Discord accounts that they can use every time you podcast with them, so the normal invite is fine. Also encourage your co-hosts to download the app instead of running inside their web browsers.
Discord Invite Guest Screen Invite co-hosts as full members and guests as temporary.
For one-time guests, though, you probably don’t want them in your channel all the time, and they probably don’t want to have to create a Discord account just to be a guest on your show. Click the Link Settings gear in the lower right and check the Grant temporary membership box, then Generate a New Link. That will give you the special link for your guests.
Remind your guests that they don’t have to download Discord nor do they have to create accounts (they need to click “Skip Setup” on the first screen they see after typing their names). But they do need to use a browser that’s compatible with Discord’s audio, and that means anything except Safari.
Recording from Discord
Here at TMO and Mac Geek Gab we’ve been using Audio Hijack to record our Discord audio and it works exactly the same as Skype. You can grab both the inbound and outbound audio if you like, or separate them one or the other. You can check out my detailed Audio Hijack setup and just replace Skype with Discord and you’re good to go.
And, in fact, that’s it. Just replace Skype with Discord and we think you’ll be amazed at the difference. We started using Discord back in November for Mac Geek Gab 685 and listener Kyle’s unsolicited email comment says it best: “I’m writing to ask you please, don’t change anything! You’ve found the sweet spot!”
It doesn’t get much better than that! Let us know in the comments if you have any questions. I’m happy to answer!
120 kiyanwang 3 hrs 70
https://javascriptreport.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-javascript-frameworks/
Updated Jan. 21st, 2018: Added AppRun and dva.
Keeping up with JavaScript frameworks can be a challenge. There are a lot of them, and seemingly another one every month. How do you know which ones might be right for your project? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How do you get started?
That’s where this guide comes in. It’s a living document that is a reference for all known front end JavaScript frameworks (archived or deprecated projects are not included). In this case, the term “frameworks” is being used in a broad sense. It includes user interface (UI) libraries like React, as well as full frameworks like Angular.
Why Is This Useful?
Some of you may be wondering why a guide like this is useful. Most readers will end up using one of the frameworks I call the "Big Three" — React, Angular and Vue. That's OK. They're great choices. That said, a guide like this has value. Here's an example...
Perhaps you've heard of the Dojo framework. Probably not, though. Dojo focuses on a couple of things that make it unique — accessibility and internationalization. All Dojo widgets are accessible by default and it provides everything needed to internationalize an application.
Another example...maybe you're making an app that needs excellent performance on mobile networks. There are a number of very good, high performance libraries and frameworks listed below that may just fit the bill.
There are also small frameworks that provide a fantastic opportunity for learning. You can dig into the code and find out for yourself how one goes about building this kind of software. Picodom is a library that you can use to build your own framework. Very cool, right?
How This Guide Is Organized
The frameworks are broken up into broad categories — you’ll see that in the listing tables below. To the extent possible, each framework will have a section that explains the rationale for the framework, it's pros and cons and some additional learning resources.
If you are a framework author — or a fan of one — and you don’t see your framework listed, or wish to correct some information, reach out to me on Twitter. I’ll be happy to add or update the listing.
Guide to icons:
The icons below are meant to help readers understand general framework characteristics and tendencies. They are only rough guides.
🔥 Performance: A top five performer in benchmarks Functional programming paradigm Reactive programming paradigm Object-oriented programming paradigm TypeScript as primary devlopment language
The Big Three
React Angular Vue.js Historically Significant
Notable
Elm Inferno 🔥 Preact ReasonML Rest of the Pack
The Big Three
The three frameworks that currently dominate in popularity and usage are React, Angular and Vue. They each have large communities and lots of training resources available. If you’re a new developer learning a framework to help you get a job, these three are your best bets. Here's a look at their npm downloads over the last six months:
We can see that React is far ahead of Angular and Vue. What is less apparent is that Vue has had roughly double the growth rate over the past year compared to Angular. If GitHub stars are an indicator of developer enthusiam or interest, then Vue looks strong there as well, with 79,000 stars compared to Angular's 32,000. React has almost 86,000 stars at this writing.
React
React logoReact was introduced as an open source project in May, 2013. The original author was Jordan Walke, an engineer at Facebook.
React bills itself as, "a JavaScript library for building user interfaces", as opposed to a full framework like Angular. Concerns like routing, state management and data fetching have been left to third parties. This has resulted in a large and very active ecosystem around React.
Many large React applications will use the popular Redux library for state management and React Router for routing, but there are other good alternatives available.
React is responsible for popularizing functional programming principles among a new generation of developers. Although not a purely functional library, it allows developers to work in a largely functional style, particularly when combined with Redux.
For more information on how React compares to the other popular frameworks, see my article on React and Angular, and this one on React and Vue.
Pros
Hugely popular with a strong job market Lots of training resources and third-party libraries to help accelerate development Best choice for cross-platform teams (web, mobile, desktop, other devices) Versatile Strong corporate support (Facebook) Cons
Abundance of choice can be overwhelming at first Best practices not always clear to newcomers Learning curve can be steep for building larger applications Additional Resources
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Angular
Angular logoAngular is the successor to AngularJS. It is a full-featured and opinionated framework that provides defaults for data fetching, state management, development language, and build toolchain.
Perhaps the most notable feature of Angular is its use of TypeScript as the development language. This has made the framework well-suited to those coming from traditional object-oriented languages like Java and C#, as TypeScript takes inspiration from those languages.
It's been said that "enterprises" are the the target users for Angular. In the sense that many large companies have teams familiar with Java and other object-oriented languages, this may be correct.
Pros
Full-featured framework with well-tested defaults TypeScript provides familiar language for those with background in object-oriented programming Strong corporate support (Google) Clear best practices Cons
Learning curve can be steep TypeScript may be a barrier to adoption Poor start up metrics in benchmarks Additional Resources
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Vue.js
Vue logoAlthough often seen as the "new kid on the block", Vue has been around since 2013. Evan You is the creator and primary developer, and unlike React and Angular, Vue is not directly supported by a major company. It instead relies on individual and corporate donations.
Of the three most popular frameworks, Vue is widely considered to be the easiest to learn. It is similar to React in many respects, but also has things in common with AngularJS — for example, directives and templates.
Vue's relative simplicity, developer experience, and good performance have contributed to a huge surge in its popularity.
One notable feature of Vue is that it's a "progressive framework" and can be used as a jQuery replacement as well as for large single page applications. From the Vue documentation:
Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. The core library is focused on the view layer only, and is easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects.
While Angular is opinionated and React agnostic about concerns like routing and state management, Vue takes a middle approach, with official routing and state management solutions that are optional, but kept in sync with the core library.
To learn more about how Vue compares to React, see my article that reviews the differences.
Pros
Easy to learn Good documentation Surging in popularity and usage Best performance of top three frameworks Cons
Current job market is less than that for React and Angular Additional Resources
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Historically Significant
There was a time some years ago when these frameworks would have been considered the "Big Three". Although less popular today, they are still widely used and have been influential in the development of later frameworks.
AngularJS
AngularJS logoIn 2013, AngularJS was the most popular framework. Some of the factors contributing to its popularity during that period were its MVC architecture, declarative programming style, two-way data binding, and robust feature set.
AngularJS has an opinionated approach and aims to provide developers with a complete solution:
AngularJS is not a single piece in the overall puzzle of building the client-side of a web application. It handles all of the DOM and AJAX glue code you once wrote by hand and puts it in a well-defined structure. This makes AngularJS opinionated about how a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application should be built. But while it is opinionated, it also tries to make sure that its opinion is just a starting point you can easily change.
In late 2013 React was introduced. React used unidirectional data flow and argued that two-way data binding made it difficult to understand applications, particularly as they scaled. In 2014, the Angular team announced Angular 2, which would subsequently be renamed to simply, Angular. This new version would introduce unidirectional data flow among other major changes. This marked the beginning of a long decline in the popularity of AngularJS.
Despite the growth of its successor project, AngularJS is still widely used and is in active development.
Pros
Abundant training resources Good documentation Very well established Full featured Cons
Two-way data binding, other technical issues that may not be desirable Declining popularity (fewer jobs) Additional Resources
Understanding AngularJS PhoneCat Tutorial App Practical Uses of AngularJS ⬆️ Return to top
Backbone
Backbone logoAuthored by Jeremy Ashkenas, who also created CoffeeScript, Backbone was initially released in the fall of 2010. A key part of the Backbone ecosystem is Marionette, a framework that simplifies development.
Backbone is significant because it was one of the first frameworks to bring more structure to front end applications by implementing a MVC pattern. From the documentation:
The single most important thing that Backbone can help you with is keeping your business logic separate from your user interface. When the two are entangled, change is hard; when logic doesn't depend on UI, your interface becomes easier to work with.
In recent years Backbone has seen a decline in usage, although it continues to be shipped in the latest version of the Drupal content management system. One relevant comment on a possible reason for the decline:
Backbone’s author, Jeremy Ashkenas made a decision to call Backbone “finished” in terms of API and feature set after the 1.0 release. This has the advantage of leaving Backbone as by far the most stable major JavaScript framework, but hinders efforts to pull in lessons from other frameworks
Pros
Provides code structure Stable project Cons
Declining popularity (fewer jobs) Imperative programming style (as opposed to popular declarative style) Additional Resources
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Ember
Ember logoEmber was authored by Yehuda Katz, a prolific creator or contributor to numerous open source projects. Ember is based on the MVVM pattern and has a rich feature set. It also has a strong philosophical viewpoint:
Ember sets out to provide a wholesale solution to the client-side application problem. This is in contrast to many JavaScript frameworks that start by providing a solution to the V in MVC (Model–View–Controller), and attempt to grow from there...
Ember is one component of a set of tools that work together to provide a complete development stack. The aim of these tools is to make the developer productive immediately. For example Ember CLI, provides a standard application structure and build pipeline. It also has a pluggable architecture and over 3500 addons to enhance and extend it.
One of the major criticisms of Ember is its large size, which has a negative impact on performance. Ember is also viewed as having a steep learning curve and difficult to master.
Pros
Clear best practices Very well established Full featured Cons
Large size Steep learning curve Declining popularity (fewer jobs) Additional Resources
Creating Your App Ember.js Tutorial Warming Up With Ember.js ⬆️ Return to top
Notable
The frameworks listed in this section all have good documentation and healthy communities around them. Although they aren’t as widely used as "The Big Three", they fill important niches and are notable for their unique or innovative approaches.
Aurelia
Aurelia logoAurelia, authored by Rob Eisenberg, can be seen as a decendant of both AngularJS and Eisenberg's previous framework, Durandal. Prior to creating Aurelia, Eisenberg was a part of the Angular team, leaving in late 2014 over disagreement with the direction of the Angular 2 project.
Aurelia is a complete framework. Here's the basic pitch from the documentation:
Aurelia provides core capabilities like dependency injection, templating, routing and pub/sub, so you don't have to piece together a bunch of libraries in order to build an application. On top of this rich core, Aurelia also provides a number of additional plugins for internationalization, validation, modal dialogs, UI virtualization and much more.
You also don't have to cobble together a bunch of different tools. Aurelia provides a CLI for generating and building projects, a browser plugin for debugging and a VS Code plugin as well. Yet, you're not forced to use any of these as Aurelia is structured to enable you to swap out any detail, even down to the templating/binding engine, in order to guarantee maximum flexibility.
Pros
Complete solution Language agnostic, works with JavaScript, TypeScript and other languages Stable API Cons
Smaller community vs top frameworks Fewer job opportunities Additional Resources
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Elm
Elm logoElm is somewhat unique on this list. Rather than a typical framework, it's actually a separate language that compiles to JavaScript, similar to Reason. However, it positions itself as an alternative to React:
Elm is a functional language that compiles to JavaScript. It competes with projects like React as a tool for creating websites and web apps. Elm has a very strong emphasis on simplicity, ease-of-use, and quality tooling...I can safely guarantee that if you give Elm a shot and actually make a project in it, you will end up writing better JavaScript and React code.
Elm has also been highly influential, including being one of the sources of inspiration for the popular Redux state management library.
The basic advantages of Elm:
Forget what you have heard about functional programming. Fancy words, weird ideas, bad tooling. Barf. Elm is about:
No runtime errors in practice. No null. No undefined is not a function. Friendly error messages that help you add features more quickly. Well-architected code that stays well-architected as your app grows. Automatically enforced semantic versioning for all Elm packages. No combination of JS libraries can ever give you this, yet it is all free and easy in Elm. Now these nice things are only possible because Elm builds upon 40+ years of work on typed functional languages.
Pros
Elimination of virtually all runtime errors Strong architecture Simplified refactoring Cons
Interoperability with JavaScript required in some cases (added complexity) Smaller commmunity Fewer job opportunties Additional Resources
An Introduction to Elm Start Using Elm to Build Web Applications ⬆️ Return to top
Inferno
Inferno logoIf performance is your primary concern, Inferno might be the framework for you. Originally authored by Dominic Gannaway — now a member of the React team — Inferno was initially designed to prove that a JavaScript framework could perform well on mobile devices.
Inferno started as an idea two years ago, to see if a UI library could really improve the experience, battery, memory usage and performance on mobile devices. At the time we really struggled to get good performance on any UI library/framework – it simply wasn't happening...
Inferno proves that it is possible to be fast on mobile...In terms of performance, Inferno is currently the fastest JavaScript UI library there is – both in benchmarks and actual real-world scenarios. It excels on the browser at initial page load, parse times, render times and update times. Inferno's server-side rendering is around 5x faster than React, around 3x faster than Angular 2 and around 1.5x faster than Preact and Vue.
Inferno has an API that is very similar to React and it's possible to port a React app directly to Inferno using the inferno-compat library.
Inferno also has it's own router, soon to be updated to match the API of React Router 4, and is compatible with the Redux and MobX state management libraries.
Pros
Excellent performance Familiar API for React developers Good documentation Cons
Small community Using inferno-compat may impact performance Additional Resources
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Polymer
Polymer logoPolymer is a Google-backed libary focused on Web Components, a proposed group of technologies that are currently not well-supported in browsers. Polymer, along with the Polymer App Toolbox, helps developers use these technologies today to build web applications.
Polymer is a lightweight library that helps you take full advantage of Web Components.
With Web Components, you can create reusable custom elements that interoperate seamlessly with the browser’s built-in elements, or break your app up into right-sized components, making your code cleaner and less expensive to maintain.
Polymer sprinkles a bit of sugar over the standard Web Components APIs, making it easier for you to get great results.
A primary motivation of the Polymer project is to move the web platform forward. The Polymer team have a #UseThePlatform hashtag that they explain on their About page:
...there are real costs to doing too much outside and above the platform itself—costs that both developers and users pay. Developer costs come in the form of complexity and lock-in.
Over time, the stacks we’ve built on top of the platform have pushed web development further and further from the simplicity of view-source and shift-refresh, to a place where every project begins with an overwhelming sea of choices.
Thanks to new web platform primitives, many of the needs we’ve addressed by building over and around the platform can now be met by the platform itself...
We believe the patterns, libraries and tools we work on are beneficial, and we're happy to see them widely adopted. But our campaign to #UseThePlatform is ultimately not about driving people to use the stuff the Polymer Project builds. It’s about promoting the use of the web platform to deliver the best apps possible
If you've followed Google's much-appreciated efforts to promote the web platform over the years, much of this will sound familiar and in line with other efforts from the company.
Pros
Strong corporate support (Google) Supports emerging web standards Cons
Community complaints around communication Poor browser support limits options/implementation of vision Additional Resources
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Preact
Preact logoAuthored by Jason Miller, Preact is a well-established React alternative that emphasizes small library size. Coming in at 3KB gzipped, Preact uses the same API as React and is compatible with much of the ecosystem.
Preact itself is not intended to be a reimplementation of React. There are differences. Many of these differences are trivial, or can be completely removed by using preact-compat, which is an thin layer over Preact that attempts to achieve 100% compatibility with React.
The reason Preact does not attempt to include every single feature of React is in order to remain small and focused - otherwise it would make more sense to simply submit optimizations to the React project, which is already a very complex and well-architected codebase.
Preact is used by a number of large organizations including Lyft, Pepsi and Uber. Although Preact has better start up performance (page load, for example) than React, in the latest benchmarks React is faster at updating the UI once the page is loaded.
Pros
Lightweight Good documentation React-compatible Cons
Smaller community than React (but lots of overlap, intermingling) Using preact-compat may impact performance Additional Resources
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Reason
Reason logoIn a way, Reason can be thought of as a part of the React ecosystem. However, it is much more than that. Reason is a syntax on top of the OCaml langauge. It can compile to JavaScript, but it can also compile to assembly and be used to build desktop and mobile applications. Here's some further explanation from the documentation:
Reason is not a new language; it's a new syntax and toolchain powered by the battle-tested language, OCaml. Reason gives OCaml a familiar syntax geared toward JavaScript programmers, and caters to the existing NPM/Yarn workflow folks already know...
Reason compiles to JavaScript thanks to our partner project, BuckleScript, which compiles OCaml/Reason into readable JavaScript with smooth interop. Reason also compiles to fast, barebone assembly, thanks to OCaml itself.
Reason (sometimes referred to as ReasonML) has a companion project, ReasonReact:
ReasonReact is a safer, simpler way to build React components, in Reason.
By leveraging the latter's great type system, expressive language features and smooth interoperability with JS, ReasonReact packs ReactJS' features into an API that is:
Safe and statically typed Simple and lean Familiar and easy to insert into an existing ReactJS codebase Well thought-out (made by the creator of ReactJS himself!) It is often said that writing ReactJS code feels like "just using JavaScript". The same applies to ReasonReact, but we push it further; writing routing, data management, component composition and components themselves feel like "just using Reason".
Pros
Strong corporate support (Facebook) Good documentation Versatile Familiar for React developers Cons
Additional Resources
ReasonML first impressions ReasonReact Documentation ReasonML vs TypeScript ⬆️ Return to top
Svelte
Svelte logoAuthored by Rich Harris, Svelte takes a unique approach. It compiles your app at build time so that you ship the lightest weight code possible. From the documentation:
...Svelte has a crucial difference: rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.
And because there's no overhead, you can easily adopt Svelte in an existing app incrementally, or ship widgets as standalone packages that work anywhere.
An interesting project related to Svelte is Sapper, a framework similar in philosophy to Next.js, but with a greater emphasis on performance.
Sapper is a framework for building extremely high-performance web apps...There are two basic concepts:
Each page of your app is a Svelte component You create pages by adding files to the routes directory of your project. These will be server-rendered so that a user's first visit to your app is as fast as possible, then a client-side app takes over Building an app with all the modern best practices — code-splitting, offline support, server-rendered views with client-side hydration — is fiendishly complicated. Sapper does all the boring stuff for you so that you can get on with the creative part.
Pros
Fast and lightweight Good documentation Innovative Cons
Small community Very new (but promising!) Additional Resources
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The Rest of the Pack
There are a lot of interesting frameworks here. Some are the product of a single developer, while others have strong communities with a large number of contributors and corporate sponsorship.
If you're an author or contributor to one of these projects and you'd like to provide more or updated information, please reach out to me.
AppRun
Authored by Yiyi Sun, AppRun in a small (3KB) library that uses TypeScript as the development language and takes inspiration from Elm:
AppRun is a lightweight library...using the elm style model-view-update architecture and event publication and subscription. Additional Resources
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Binding.scala
Binding.scala is a one-way data-binding library written in Scala, although it targets both JavaScript and JVM. From the documentation:
Binding.scala can be used as a reactive templating language in both web and desktop GUI development. It enables you use native XHTML literal syntax to create reactive DOM nodes, which are able to automatically change whenever the data source changes...Binding.scala has more features and less concepts than other reactive web frameworks like ReactJS. Additional Resources
Making UI easily with Binding.scala Binding.scala Todo MVC ⬆️ Return to top
Bobril
Bobril takes inspiration from React and Mithril. From the documentation:
It is fast, low size framework with rendering based on Virtual DOM. The main focus is on speed and simplicity of code generation...Content and behavior of any page can be defined simply by composing JavaScript objects.
The page content rendering is based on comparison of Virtual DOMs. The application has some state in time and bobril application generates the Virtual DOM according to this state. Virtual DOM is an object representation of the resultant DOM. If some state-changing event occurs and the previous Virtual DOM is different than currently generated Virtual DOM, the real DOM will change according to this change.
Additional Resources
Bobril - I - Getting Started ⬆️ Return to top
Choo
Choo is a functional library for building user interfaces. It's small (4KB) and supports server rendering. The Choo philosophy:
We believe frameworks should be disposable, and components recyclable. We don't want a web where walled gardens jealously compete with one another. By making the DOM the lowest common denominator, switching from one framework to another becomes frictionless. Choo is modest in its design; we don't believe it will be top of the class forever, so we've made it as easy to toss out as it is to pick up...We want everyone on a team, no matter the size, to fully understand how an application is laid out. And once an application is built, we want it to be small, performant and easy to reason about. All of which makes for easy to debug code, better results and super smiley faces.
Additional Resources
Your first app Fun Functional Programming with the Choo Framework ⬆️ Return to top
Cycle.js
Billed as a "functional and reactive JavaScript framework for predictable code" Cycle.js is primarily the work of André Staltz. It has over 100 contributors and corporate sponsorship. From the documentation:
Cycle’s core abstraction is your application as a pure function main() where inputs are read effects (sources) from the external world and outputs (sinks) are write effects to affect the external world. These I/O effects in the external world are managed by drivers: plugins that handle DOM effects, HTTP effects, etc.
Additional Resources
Cycle.js Fundamentals (free video course) A Gentle Introduction to Cycle.js ⬆️ Return to top
DIO
DIO is a lightweight (7KB), declarative UI library that offers an alternative to React:
There a lot of small details that give DIO its edge that don't realy touch on new API's but rather on creating a larger surface area of what React already supports and adding to this.
For example React can render strings, numbers, elements and components but what if it was able to render Promises or Thenables? This would help solve a lot of "problems" with data fetching and lazy loading that is possible with React but not declaratively incentivised at the library level.
Additional Resources
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Dojo
One of the important principles behind Dojo is accessibility, which makes me think it's a potential candidate for projects in government and higher education, where there are often stringent compliance requirements. From the website:
Dojo 2 is grounded in the belief that accessibility is as important online as it is in our physical environments, and architects of both share a similar responsibility to provide access to all...all Dojo 2 widgets have been designed to be accessible by default, and any tools needed to meet WCAG standards have been integrated into @dojo/widget-core and @dojo/widgets.
Internationalization is another area of focus:
Internationalization, or i18n, is the process of decoupling an application from a particular language or culture, and is a major requirement of most enterprise applications. As such, internationalization is one of Dojo 2’s core concerns. @dojo/i18n, Dojo 2’s internationalization ecosystem, provides everything that is needed to internationalize and localize an application, from locale-specific messaging to date, number, and unit formatting.
Like Angular, Dojo uses TypeScript as its development language.
Additional Resources
The long and winding road to Dojo 2 An in-depth introduction to Dojo 2 ⬆️ Return to top
Domvm
Domvm is a, "thin, fast, dependency-free vdom view layer". Like Vue, it can be used as a jQuery replacement. Similar to React, it leaves concerns beyond views to other libraries (but provides a good list of options). From the documentation:
domvm is a flexible, pure-js view layer for building high performance web applications. Like jQuery, it’ll happily fit into any existing codebase without introducing new tooling or requiring major architectural changes...As a view layer, domvm does not include some things you would find in a larger framework. This gives you the freedom to choose libs you already know or prefer for common tasks. domvm provides a small, common surface for integration of routers, streams and immutable libs.
Additional Resources
React's tic-tac-toe demo using domvm ⬆️ Return to top
dva
dva is a popular framework from China. The documentation in English is somewhat limited. It takes inspiration from a number of functional libraries/frameworks like Elm, Choo and Redux.
Additional Resources
Getting Started dva Concepts ⬆️ Return to top
Etch
Although Etch can be used for front end web applications, its target usage is in Atom packages and the Electron desktop framework. From the documentation:
Etch is a library for writing HTML-based user interface components that provides the convenience of a virtual DOM, while at the same time striving to be minimal, interoperable, and explicit. Etch can be used anywhere, but it was specifically designed with Atom packages and Electron applications in mind.
Additional Resources
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Gruu
Gruu is a relatively new framework by Marek Łabuz. From Marek's article introducing Gruu:
I believe that none of the existing libraries is perfect. Each time a new library/framework is created, some new idea is revealed. No matter if the new library is good or bad. It always brings something unique that is valuable.
Many frontend libraries rely on a render function that is called each time something changes, no matter what the change affects. It leads to unnecessary renders of the parts of the application that has not changed, but still we have to check it because we don’t know for sure...Gruu gets rid of a render function. Instead, it renders only once at the beginning, then it changes only this parts of the view that have actually changed without rendering whole components.
Additional Resources
Creating Single Page Applications in Gruu ⬆️ Return to top
Glimmer
Glimmer is part of the Ember ecosystem and even uses the Ember CLI to manage projects. As mentioned when discussing Ember, it is a large framework. Glimmer provides Ember developers with a lighter weight option for building single page apps. If needed, Glimmer components can be dropped directly into Ember without a problem.
Additional Resources
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Hyperapp
Coming in at a very slender 1KB, Hyperapp is a library with a minimalist API. It does, however, support server rendering. The Hyperapp approach:
Hyperapp is a JavaScript library for building web applications.
Minimal: Hyperapp was born out of the attempt to do more with less. We have aggressively minimized the concepts you need to understand while remaining on par with what other frameworks can do.
Functional: Hyperapp's design is inspired by The Elm Architecture. Create scalable browser-based applications using a functional paradigm. The twist is you don't have to learn a new language.
Batteries-included: Out of the box, Hyperapp combines state management with a VDOM engine that supports keyed updates & lifecycle events — all with no dependencies.
Additional Resources
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Hyperdom
Formerly named, Plastiq, Hyperdom, is a "fast, feature rich virtual-dom framework for building dynamic browser applications." From the documentation:
Hyperdom applications are made of regular JavaScript objects that represent application state with render() methods that define how that state is represented in HTML. Hyperdom supports a simple event-update-render cycle, promises for asynchronous operations, JSX, non-JSX, client-side routing, SVG, two-way data binding, and optimises for performance, developer usability and simplicity of application architecture.
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hyperHTML
Framework agnostic, hyperHTML was created to, "simplify DOM performance best practices...is 100% ECMAScript compliant and it weighs in at less than 4Kb". From the introductory article:
It’s nothing more than a function, that works bound with DOM nodes and fragments as context. You bind your target node once, or even more if you don’t care, and you render the same template literals over and over simply passing new data.
Additional Resources
hyperHTML: A Virtual DOM Alternative New in hyperHTML v1 ⬆️ Return to top
Ivi
The Ivi documentation notes that, although Ivi is small, size is at the bottom of its list of priorities:
It seems that nowadays many people in javascript community were brainwashed that small library size is a synonym to fast performance and simple implementation. In reality it usually means that library is using different tricks to reduce code size by using inappropriate data structures (slower performance), initializing data structures at runtime (slower bootstrap performance), reusing code for many different data types (slower performance), etc.
Library size in ivi library is at the bottom on the list of priorities:
Correctness Consistency / Predictable Behavior Performance / Developer Experience Library Size Additional Resources
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Knockout
Using the MVVM pattern, Knockout is a library that has been around for a while. From the documentation:
Knockout is a JavaScript MVVM (a modern variant of MVC) library that makes it easier to create rich, desktop-like user interfaces with JavaScript and HTML. It uses observers to make your UI automatically stay in sync with an underlying data model, along with a powerful and extensible set of declarative bindings to enable productive development.
Additional Resources
Learn Knockout What's the difference between Knockout.js and Rx.js? ⬆️ Return to top
Maquette
Maquette is a lightweight (3KB) library inspired by React, Mithril and Mercury:
Maquette is a virtual DOM implementation that excels in both speed and simplicity. It solves the problem of keeping the user interface in sync with underlying data.
Maquette allows you to specify the UI using plain Javascript. This makes maquette easy to learn, easy to debug and easy to deploy. Maquette is very unopionated by design, making integration with other frameworks and libraries as painless as possible.
Although it's not the default, you can use TypeScript with Maquette.
Additional Resources
The Maquette Tutorial Maquette with Typescript quick-start ⬆️ Return to top
Marko
A product of eBay Open Source, Marko is a reactive front end framework that emphasizes UI performance. Similar to Vue, you can use single file components that include component logic, template and CSS.
Here's a quote on Marko vs React from the lead developer, Patrick Steele-Idem:
While many of the features in Marko were inspired by React, Marko and React offer very different usability and performance characteristics. Marko was designed to avoid almost all boilerplate and is more closely aligned with HTML. In almost all cases, a Marko UI component will require less lines of code than its React JSX equivalent while maintaining readability and allowing the same expressiveness as JSX.
Additional Resources
Marko vs React: An In-depth Look Building a Color Picker Component ⬆️ Return to top
Mithril
Mithril is a lighweight framework. Unlike React, it incudes functionality for routing, XHR and state management. The pitch for Mithril:
Why use Mithril? In one sentence: because Mithril is pragmatic. This 10 minute guide is a good example: that's how long it takes to learn components, XHR and routing - and that's just about the right amount of knowledge needed to build useful applications.
Mithril is all about getting meaningful work done efficiently. Doing file uploads? The docs show you how. Authentication? Documented too. Exit animations? You got it. No extra libraries, no magic.
Additional Resources
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Moon
A small (7KB) library, Moon positions itself as an alternative to React, Vue and Mithril.
Moon is a minimal, blazing fast library for building user interfaces. It combines the positive aspects of popular libraries into one small package. It's super lightweight, and includes advanced optimizations to ensure fast render times. The API is small and intuitive, while still remaining powerful. Moon is compatible with IE9+.
Yes, there have been a lot of front end libraries released lately, and many people prefer different parts about each of these libraries. For example, React provides the ability to use JSX and uses a virtual DOM, Angular provides easy to use directives, and Ember provides a nice templating engine built in.
Moon aims to combine the best parts of these libraries into a single, lightweight package, while providing improved performance.
Additional Resources
Getting Started with Moon.js ⬆️ Return to top
Nerv
Nerv is a new framework out of China. It bills itself as a, "blazing fast React alternative, compatible with IE8 and React 16." In fact, you can convert a React app to Nerv simply by adding an alias in your webpack config. All of that and a library size of 4.4 KB.
Because it is so new and makes claims of superior performance vs React — some members of the React community asked for clarification on those claims, as well as more information about Nerv. From the author's reply:
In my humble opinion, The biggest difference between preact, Inferno, and Nerv, is not some technical issue like what’s the right way to implementing a React feature. It is about the what does the library want to achieve. In preact, maybe they just want a lite library, Inferno want to be fast as they can, React compatibility just a bonus, they are both need a compat module to do that. But for Nerv, compatible with React is our main goal, by doing that, we can sacrifice performance and size.
Peter Mikitsh’s criticism is right. Nerv can’t pass React fiber(16) 100% unit test, which is predictable —— the React team takes whole year to achieve the target, how can two guys come from nowhere(says by some guy in Hacker news) be able to do that?
So, What’s the tradeoffs? Obviously, some third-party React component/library couldn’t work properly in Nerv. But which one? To be honest I don’t know. I’m glad to be heard that Next.js next-news worked on first try., but in the meantime, Benchmark tabs don't work in Firefox (fixed) —— All of this, We wouldn’t know if we don’t go public.
Rome wasn't built in a day. Nerv is not perfect, no library is, particularly in early stage, maybe there still tons of bug we don’t know. Therefore we decided to open source, to go public, we need the community’s help, we need your help.
Additional Resources
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NX
NX is the work of Bertalan Miklos, JavaScript engineer at RisingStack. From the NX documentation:
NX is a modular front-end framework - built with ES6 and Web Components. The building blocks of NX are the core, the middlewares, the components and the utilities. These are all hosted in separate GitHub repos and npm packages.
The NX core is a tiny library, responsible for one thing only. It allows you to create dumb components and to augment them with middlewares. A component executes its middlewares when it is attached to the DOM and it gains all the extra functionalities from them. NX comes with some core middlewares out of the box, which you can find listed below.
Additional Resources
Writing a JavaScript Framework - Project Structuring TodoMVC ⬆️ Return to top
petit-dom
Authored by Yassine Elouafi and one of the fastest in performance benchmarks, petit-dom takes a minimalist approach:
Diff algroithm is based on pre-optimizations described at https://neil.fraser.name/writing/diff/ and the algorithm presented in the paper "An O(ND) Difference Algorithm and Its Variations. There is also an excellent article which explains how the algorithm works. The article includes a GUI application to play with the algorithm
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Picodom
Picodom is interesting in that it's authored by the same guy behind Hyperapp, Jorge Bucaran. Described as a, "1 KB VDOM builder and patch function", Picodom is a tool that can be used to build your own framework:
Picodom supports keyed updates & lifecycle events — all with no dependencies. Mix it with your favorite state management library or create your own custom view framework.
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Pux
Pux is a framework that uses PureScript, a strongly-typed, functional programming language that complies to JavaScript. There are currently problems with performance:
The slow performance arises from translating Pux's (smolder) virtual DOM to React's virtual DOM. The goal is to write a purescript virtual DOM module for smolder, which would avoid that translation step and could be optimized for a monadic datastructure. I suspect this would achieve performance on par with Halogen.
Additional Resources
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Ractive.js
Originally created for use on the Guardian website, Ractive is a reactive, template-driven UI library:
Unlike other frameworks, Ractive works for you, not the other way around. It doesn't have an opinion about the other tools you want to use with it. It also adapts to the approach you want to take. You're not locked-in to a framework-specific way of thinking. Should you hate one of your tools for some reason, you can easily swap it out for another and move on with life.
Additional Resources
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react-lite
Aiming to be a lighter-weight version of React, react-lite, is an "implementation of React that optimizes for small script size." From the documentation:
React-lite supports the core APIs of React, such as Virtual DOM, intended as a drop-in replacement for React, when you don't need server-side rendering in browser(no ReactDOM.renderToString & ReactDOM.renderToStaticMarkup).
Additional Resources
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RE:DOM
Authored by Juha Lindstedt, RE:DOM is a small (2KB) and fast UI library. In fact, it's one of the best performers in the latest benchmarks. From the website:
RE:DOM is a tiny (2 KB) DOM library by Juha Lindstedt and contributors, which adds useful helpers to create DOM elements and keeping them in sync with the data.
Because RE:DOM is so close to the metal and doesn't use virtual dom, it's actually faster and uses less memory than almost all virtual dom based libraries, including React (benchmark).
It's also easy to create reusable components with RE:DOM.
Another benefit is, that you can use just pure JavaScript, so no complicated templating languages to learn and hassle with. Plus RE:DOM plays nicely with others. No need to write wrappers for things like Google Maps.
Additional Resources
Documentation site
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Reflex
Authored by Irakli Gozalishvili of Mozilla, Reflex is a library heavily inspired by Elm:
Reflex is a functional reactive UI library that is heavily inspired by (pretty much is a port of) elm and it's amazingly simple yet powerful architecture where "flux" in react terms is simply a byproduct of a pattern. In order to keep a major attraction of elm — algebraic data types & type safety — the library uses flow, a static type checker for JS. All types are separated from implementation though, so it's your call if you want to take advantage of it or just ignore it.
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Riot
The Riot documentation gets straight to the point:
The frontend space is indeed crowded, but we honestly feel the solution is still “out there”. We believe Riot offers the right balance for solving the great puzzle. While React seems to do it, they have serious weak points that Riot will solve.
A major feature of Riot is custom tags (which look a lot like a Vue single file component):
A custom tag glues relevant HTML and JavaScript together forming a reusable component. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve.
And...
Riot is Web Components for everyone. Think React + Polymer but without the bloat. It’s intuitive to use and it weighs almost nothing. And it works today. No reinventing the wheel, but rather taking the good parts of what’s there and making the simplest tool possible.
Additional Resources
Live demo Riot.js Tutorial ⬆️ Return to top
rxdomh
Although interesting, rxdomh has the look of an experimental project. It was inspired by Binding.scala and react-flyd.
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San
San is another project from Chinese developers. The documenation is in Chinese, but Chrome does a pretty good job with the translation:
San, is a MVVM component framework. Its small size (12K), good compatibility (IE6), high performance is a reliable and dependable solution for implementing a responsive user interface.
San also supports data-to-view binding instructions, the most commonly used branches in business development, looping instructions, etc. in addition to supporting the syntax features of all native HTML through declarative HTML-like view templates that remain well-used on the basis of, based on the complete frame template string parsing, and build a view of layer node relation tree generated by the UI view of the quick view of a high-performance engine.
Additional Resources
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Simulacra.js
It's fair to say that no other framework has a smaller API than Simulacra:
Simulacra.js returns a DOM Node that updates when an object changes. Its API is a single function, and it does not introduce any new syntax or a template language. It recursively adds metaprogramming features to vanilla data structures to work.
It is a fairly low cost abstraction, though it may not be quite as fast as hand-optimized code. The approximate size of this library is ~5 KB (minified and gzipped).
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Slim.js
Authored by Avichay Eyal, Slim.js is a lightweight web component authoring library:
Slim.js is a lightning fast library for development of native web-components and custom-elements based modern applications. No black magic involved. It uses es6+DOM native API and boosts up HTML elements with superpowers.
Additional Resources
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Stem JS
Authored by Mihai Ciucu, Stem JS is the framework that tries not to be a framework:
The syntax might look familiar, but Stem is designed to empower individual components and not the framework...
Stem was designed with code maintainability as a primary purpose, regardless if your project has 100 or 100k lines of code.
We also hate it when libraries force programmers to jump through hoops to make any non-standard change to it, so everything is designed to be easily modified.
Additional Resources
Another Javascript Framework ⬆️ Return to top
Surplus
In performance benchmarks, Surplus was very fast. It also has a different approach, utilizing S.js:
Surplus is a compiler and runtime to allow S.js applications to create high-performance web views using JSX. Thanks to JSX, the views are clear, declarative definitions of your UI. Thanks to S, they update automatically and efficiently as your data changes.
Also...
Surplus is not a React “work-alike,” but it uses the JSX syntax popularized by React to define its views...JSX mitigates some of the risk of adopting (or abandoning) Surplus. Much Surplus JSX code already works as React stateless functional components, and vice versa. Surplus avoids arbitrary differences with React when feasible.
Differences with React:
Surplus makes real DOM elements, not virtual, and they update automatically. This removes most of the React API. The ref property takes an assignable reference, not a function. Events are native events, not React's synthetic events. Surplus is a little more liberal in the property names it accepts, like onClick/onclick, className/class, etc. ⬆️ Return to top
Thermite
Thermite is another library that uses PureScript, the functional language that compiles to JavaScript. From the documentation:
It does not provide all of the functionality of React, but instead to provide a clean API to the most commonly-used parts of its API. It is possible to use purescript-react for more specialized use cases.
Additional Resources
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TSERS
TSERS stands for Transform-Signal-Executor framework for Reactive Streams. From the documentation:
In the era of the JavaScript fatigue, new JS frameworks pop up like mushrooms after the rain, each of them providing some new and revolutionary concepts. So overwhelming! That's why TSERS was created. It doesn't provide anything new. Instead, it combines some old and well-known techniques/concepts and packs them into single compact form suitable for the modern web application development.
Technically the closest relative to TSERS is Cycle.js, but conceptually the closest one is CALM^2. Roughly it could be said that TSERS tries to combine the excellent state consistency maintaining strategies from CALM^2 and explicit input/output gates from Cycle - the best from both worlds.
Additional Resources
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Vidom
Authored by Filatov Dmitry, Vidom is another React-inspired library:
Vidom is just a library to build UI. It's highly inspired from React and based on the same ideas. Its main goal is to provide as fast as possible lightweight implementation with API similar to React.
Additional Resources
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Vuera
Vuera is an unusual library. It allows you to use React componets inside Vue and vice versa. The anticipated use cases are when migrating between React and Vue or when using both frameworks with a single project.
Additional Resources
Integrating React and Vue Components in One Application ⬆️ Return to top
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Until next time, happy coding…
WhatsApp獲Facebook收購逾3年後，終於再有大動作，周五宣布在印度、意大利、英國、墨西哥及美國推出商業版WhatsApp，專門為企業用戶設計，可以協助顧客獲得有用資訊及回答常見問題。
同時，該公司營運總監Matt Idema接受路透訪問時稱，企業每日需要接收及回覆大量訊息，商業版WhatsApp可成為更方便的工具，未來有意向企業用戶收費，但收費模式及具體服務仍言之尚早。
設快速回覆新功能
商業版WhatsApp會先在上述5個國家推出Android版本，之後會陸續拓展至其他地區，亦將推出iOS版本。企業可以利用商業版本設立簡介頁面，提供地址、電郵及營業時間等基本資料。
此外，商業版設有「快速回覆」功能，可讓企業更快回答顧客提出的常見問題，或者向顧客發出「問候訊息」。為了讓企業用戶更了解所發訊息有否作用，商業版附有簡單統計數據，例如所發的訊息有多少人已讀。
WhatsApp的競爭對手微信多年前已推出類似功能，讓企業在微信內設立公眾賬號，藉此提供簡單客戶服務。由於企業市場需求龐大，微信早前已表明即將就微信公眾號，推出獨立的手機應用程式。
(20 Jan 2018)
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Features Design
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201 lainon 15 hrs 68
http://blog.ycombinator.com/going-global-with-your-startup/
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16187126
Kwindla Hultman Kramer is the founder of Daily.co (W16).
When we started Daily.co, we thought we were only targeting the US market. Our plan was to get traction at home and then later think about growing internationally. But we got orders from international customers on day one, and these days, half our users are outside the US.
This will probably be the case for your startup, too, unless your business model is specifically geographical. The Internet is global! So it’s worth thinking fairly early on about what it means to have international customers, partners, employees, and offices, and what kinds of international growth and infrastructure to invest in.
Daily.co is my third startup, and as it happens both my first two startups did a lot of stuff internationally (customers and partners in something like 50 countries, and offices in half a dozen), so I’ve accumulated some lessons and rules of thumb over the years.
Here are five things that come up in many of the conversations I have with other startup founders about international issues.
It’s easy to process orders from international customers. It’s a lot harder to fulfill those orders.
We ship stuff every day, and we’ve learned that we can’t reliably tell a customer what duties they will be charged when they take delivery of our packages. This is true even of Canada!
Shipping physical things is still expensive, too. It costs about $45 to ship our little hardware video conferencing appliance to Canada, and about $70 to Europe. (That’s not including import duties, which also vary by country.) There are even a few places we can’t ship to at all, because “video calling equipment” is covered by very specific export or import restrictions.
If you’re doing a crowdfunding campaign, we highly recommend paying someone who understands fulfillment at a deep level. You’ll save a lot of time, frustration, and money. Our friends at BackerKit are really good at this, and have a whole set of shipping integrations and features.
Most of my experience is shipping items from the US to other countries. But shipping to the US is just as complicated. For example, let’s say you’ve done a great job with a Kickstarter campaign for a cool new kind of flashlight, you are based outside the US, and you want to ship to US customers. You can look up the duties your US customers will have to pay at the United States International Trade Commission website. In most cases, the answer is 12.5%. But if you’re shipping from Canada, Mexico, Israel, Morocco, and a few other countries, there are no duties. For Korea (South), the duties are 3.7%. For Korea (North) and several other countries, the duties are 35%! Often it can be a little hard to figure out which category best fits your product. It takes work to figure all this stuff out, and it’s a good idea to figure it out before you have a large number of orders coming in!
If you are shipping bigger items, you have, well, bigger challenges! Ask me sometime over beer about air-shipping a dozen pallets of high-end graphics hardware and installation gear to a customer in Saudi Arabia. Those crates took a long time to clear customs.
UPS and FedEx both have international shipping departments that will gladly take your money, but over the years I’ve consistently had better service from DHL.
When you make hardware, you order things from China. In large quantities, ocean freight is very affordable. But like most things in life, when you want something fast, you pay more. Just as a data point for new hardware entrepreneurs: last time we made a relatively small order for a part we were running short of, shipping via ocean freight was quoted at $350 and would have taken about five weeks, and air freight was quoted as $1500 and would have taken about a week. (The differential here varies a lot based on size, weight, and quantities, of course.)
If you are frequently shipping freight internationally — like, as part of your supply chain — I recommend talking to the folks at FlexPort. Also, they have a great blog.
It turns out that the job of opening and running a new office involves doing a lot of translating between your company’s norms and the specific local environment. A surprising number of decisions have to get made. New employees will want to fit in with how you already do things. The new office should be an extension of your company, not a completely new culture all its own!
You can definitely hire someone local to manage the new office. (And often that’s the best approach.) But bring your local hire to work alongside you at HQ for at least a few weeks before starting the process of opening the new office.
Companies that hit growth stage and plan to open several new offices usually split the work of opening up a new office into two roles: the person responsible for initially setting up the office and the person responsible for running it long term. The setup person develops a repeatable plan for opening additional offices and does this job multiple times. The person who will run each new office works closely with the setup person, but only worries about the one office that they’re responsible for.
This one surprised me. But it makes sense. Startups use lawyers and accountants in the US to file incorporation paperwork and do taxes. Every country has somewhat different corporate law and business tax structures, so you probably need local lawyers and accountants.
If you only have part-time contractors in a country, you might not need local lawyers and accountants. But as soon as you’re paying people for full-time work, or have local revenues, or have your signature on a lease, you’ll need to get help filing the right paperwork, adhering to local banking and accounting regulations, and handling tax payments correctly.
Just like shipping physical goods, moving people around the world hasn’t changed very much in the Internet era. Getting permission to work in a country you don’t have citizenship in is often confusing and always time-consuming.
US startups can often hire global engineers and executives through the H-1B visa program. The requirements are complex, but here’s a short summary:
Skilled workers with a university degree are eligible for H-1B visas The worker must be sponsored by a company with the financial resources to pay a competitive salary and must not be directly replacing a US citizen in the same job The visas are valid for approximately three years and can usually be extended (in fact, the visa-holder can often start the process of applying for a “green card,” permanent residency) There is an annual cap on the number of new H-1B visas that are issued, and when that cap is reached, no more H-1Bs are available until the next January I’ve hired many engineers over the years as H-1B workers. The main challenge is the cost and time that the paperwork takes, and waiting for the visa to be approved. (This often means applying, then waiting for the next calendar year.) While waiting for the visa, it’s often possible for the engineer to work as a contractor from her home country.
You definitely want to get a lawyer who specializes in immigration work to prepare and submit the H-1B application. This saves you a lot of time and greatly increases the chances that the visa will (eventually) be approved. Phyllis Jewell, of Jewell, Stewart & Pratt, has been hugely helpful to me many times.
Recently, the H-1B program has become a political football. It’s not clear whether the program will continue in its current form. I hope it does.
There are other options besides H-1B visas, including the O-1 Visa for people with “extraordinary abilities.” Unfortunately, the new “startup visa” for entrepreneurs, which was supposed to go into effect last year, has been indefinitely put on hold by the Trump administration.
The rules about hiring people and getting them work and residency permits are different in every country. In the EU, for example, it’s very easy to hire people from any other EU country — which is great. But it’s typically very difficult to hire citizens of any non-EU country (including the US).
Finally, I’ll note that if you start down the road of working with international customers, partners, and employees, I bet you’ll spend a lot more time on airplanes than you expect.
I’m a big believer in remote work — my company makes video conferencing products, after all! Collaboration tools have gotten so good that it’s now completely possible for a startup team to be distributed all around the world.
But actually sitting together in person can be critical. When building a team, or setting up a manufacturing operation, or closing a sale, sometimes you just have to be there. Which means you have to get on an airplane.
For example, all the entrepreneurs I know who have successfully shipped a physical product manufactured in China have at some point gotten on an airplane and spent multiple weeks on the ground working with their manufacturing partners. Every CEO who sells enterprise tech gets on airplanes to help her sales team close big deals. If you have a remote office, you’ve got to go spend time in that office.
In Closing
Talent is everywhere, and talent is always a critical resource for a startup. Also, some places have real advantages over the US in some arenas (like China, right now, in high quality electronics manufacturing). And customers all over the world want the best products.
So don’t be afraid to be an international company even when you’re small. Just make sure you do a little bit of up front planning to account for the extra overhead that comes with travel, coordination across time zones, and dealing with multiple government agencies.
an 13. 2010 22:02
在這裡向大家介紹的是美國建築大師：路易士．康作品中頗具代表性的建築作品：「沙克生物研究中心」。
此建築作品被列入世界十大現代代表建築之一，與萊特等人一同站在建築不朽殿堂。此作品為路易士．康建築理念的重要呈現，作品裡對於光線、建築材料之精神本質與對自然光線的已然應用純熟，是他所提出的靜謐與光明(BETWEEN SILENCE AND LIGHT)理念的完整展現，還有一種對於材料與本質本身的一種自我發言，光、量體、場域與人在此地自然地產生關係，一切都是如此的和諧自在，量體有其自我的展現等等的理念在此建築作品裡都能夠獲得理解與實踐。
沙克生物研究中心.jpg
沙克生物研究中心 Salk Institute for Biological Studies
１、建築名稱：沙克生物研究中心 Salk Institute for Biological Studies
２、基地地點：10010 North Torrey Pines Road La Jolla,California
３、建造時間：西元1959－1965年
４、基地環境：佔地27英畝（約11公頃），高出海平面350英呎（110公尺），面臨太平洋的懸崖峭壁上。
委託人的要求：
興建沙克生物研究中心的構想最早來自生物學家沙克（Jonas Salk）博士，沙克博士本身是一位在生物研究方面的開拓者，因此，他對康提到了許多深奧的問題，包括人類的未來、生命的意義和價值、人的本性…等，令康頗為著迷。
他希望未來的研究中心，有著僧侶隱居的環境，有拱廊、柱列、中庭等。沙克博士要求能有寬敞開闊、沒有任何障礙的內部空間，以因應未來科學研究多變性的需要，建築材料必須簡單、耐久，能經得起長年累月的時間考驗而不需太高的維護費用。
除此之外，研究機構的環境必須能使研究人員頭腦清靜，除卻不必要的聯想，設計要具人性化和審美觀，沙克博士要求建築師根據這些原則創造一座能讓畢卡索都覺得值得來參觀的場所。（王紀鯤，1994，P89-93）可見沙克博士對該建築的期望，康亦接受此一挑戰，並由其設計結果而了解康用心的程度。
沙克生物研究所設計理念中的精神：
康可以說是一個偉大的、哲學味道極濃厚的建築師，他的創作思想和作品著實不容易輕易的被理解。雖然康的文筆非常的優美，但他在闡述他的思想理論時卻總是含糊難明，這和他在大學十年間的「思考」和「等待」有非常大的關係，也就是成就近代建築大師的起點。在沙克生物研究所的設計中可以看出其精鍊的設計手法；完成的建築作品再配合上路易士．康自己的一些片段的敘述，可以從這一些線索看到些許清晰的理念。
對於沙克生物研究所建築乙案，康曾說：
「當沙克到事務所來要求我蓋一棟實驗室時，他說：『我希望有一件事能實現，我希望邀請畢卡索到這個實驗室來。』當然，他是在暗示科學（關於計量的）裡，連最微小的生命也有完成自我的意志。微生物希望成為微生物；玫瑰花希望成為一朵玫瑰花；而人希望成為一個人，去表達自己。沙克傳達了這種表達的欲望－科學家需要不可計量之出現，而那是藝術家的領域。」
沙克博士一生要求建築要能表現出醫學科學的人文涵意，致使康在做研究所的規劃設計時，思緒回溯到歷史上學者聚集的場所，如中世紀的修道院和其他學者隱居之所。他將研究所分為三組，一為交流會議部份，一為生活部份，一為研究所部份，三者分列為崖岸的不同部份。
此計劃案早於1959年即著手進行，原先之基本計劃為由研究所，宿舍及聚會所三處所構成，三者均配置於富起伏變化之基地上，各自獨立成一單元，並藉具有強烈引導性之通道，使三者互相呼應，而構成一個整體。
在具有都市計劃傳統之費城渡過大半生之路易士．康，在其40年代屢次參與費城之都市計劃，特別是對都市設計之造詣，更具超人一等之見地，就某個觀點看來，整個沙克研究所建築群的場域或可謂康首度經手的一個「超小型都市」的建築計劃。然而，沙克生物研究所是康對於一種新建築第一個完成的夢想，一種反映新人類的新建築。
建築量體發展的概念原型與場域的中心概念：
在本設計案之中，根據路易士．康的思想精神與實際建築量體展現的空間效果，可以整理出下列兩項特徵：
１、曼陀羅（Mandala）的概念：
康把沙克生物研究所設計成東方曼陀羅的式樣。在東方藝術裡曼陀羅代表自然的秩序，透過一組同心幾何形狀劃分出層次不斷向四方延展，每一個幾何形包含了一個神的象徵或神的屬性。在容氏心理學裡曼陀羅被視為是一種統一對自我之各種觀點的途徑。而在沙克生物研究所的研究建築體上就能夠發現康將他所擅用的基礎幾何型體如同曼陀羅一般的在基地平面上延展開來。
２、從外在驅體到內在精神的連貫思考：
康的建築物從外面包含樓梯廁所的設備空間（軀體）向內發展；經過實驗室空間──生物研究進行的──不透氣的封閉著，由電腦監察，同時被管道和設備的大空間所服務（心靈）；經過走廊，那是與人會面的地方（社會）；經過可看到海景而被栗木所屏遮的科學家私人辦公室，那是沉思的地方；最後到達有一條簡單的水流過的中庭，那是一個靜止的場所，一的面向天空的立面，一個沒有屋頂的教堂（精神）。
因此，順序是軀體＞心靈＞社會＞精神：全人類的屬性象徵。一棟偉大的建築必須對這些每一項都能滿足，而且扮演一種整合它們的角色；（朱咸立譯，1989，P76）也就是說康對建築所追求的，從文化精神、社會需求、基地的尊重、人類心靈的探求，建築物都要滿足它。
36 kawera 1 hr 17
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/19/post-work-the-radical-idea-of-a-world-without-jobs
Work is the master of the modern world. For most people, it is impossible to imagine society without it. It dominates and pervades everyday life – especially in Britain and the US – more completely than at any time in recent history. An obsession with employability runs through education. Even severely disabled welfare claimants are required to be work-seekers. Corporate superstars show off their epic work schedules. “Hard-working families” are idealised by politicians. Friends pitch each other business ideas. Tech companies persuade their employees that round-the-clock work is play. Gig economy companies claim that round-the-clock work is freedom. Workers commute further, strike less, retire later. Digital technology lets work invade leisure.
In all these mutually reinforcing ways, work increasingly forms our routines and psyches, and squeezes out other influences. As Joanna Biggs put it in her quietly disturbing 2015 book All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, “Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”
And yet work is not working, for ever more people, in ever more ways. We resist acknowledging these as more than isolated problems – such is work’s centrality to our belief systems – but the evidence of its failures is all around us.
As a source of subsistence, let alone prosperity, work is now insufficient for whole social classes. In the UK, almost two-thirds of those in poverty – around 8 million people – are in working households. In the US, the average wage has stagnated for half a century.
As a source of social mobility and self-worth, work increasingly fails even the most educated people – supposedly the system’s winners. In 2017, half of recent UK graduates were officially classified as “working in a non-graduate role”. In the US, “belief in work is crumbling among people in their 20s and 30s”, says Benjamin Hunnicutt, a leading historian of work. “They are not looking to their job for satisfaction or social advancement.” (You can sense this every time a graduate with a faraway look makes you a latte.)
Work is increasingly precarious: more zero-hours or short-term contracts; more self-employed people with erratic incomes; more corporate “restructurings” for those still with actual jobs. As a source of sustainable consumer booms and mass home-ownership – for much of the 20th century, the main successes of mainstream western economic policy – work is discredited daily by our ongoing debt and housing crises. For many people, not just the very wealthy, work has become less important financially than inheriting money or owning a home.
Whether you look at a screen all day, or sell other underpaid people goods they can’t afford, more and more work feels pointless or even socially damaging – what the American anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” in a famous 2013 article. Among others, Graeber condemned “private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers … telemarketers, bailiffs”, and the “ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone is spending so much of their time working”.
The argument seemed subjective and crude, but economic data increasingly supports it. The growth of productivity, or the value of what is produced per hour worked, is slowing across the rich world – despite the constant measurement of employee performance and intensification of work routines that makes more and more jobs barely tolerable.
Unsurprisingly, work is increasingly regarded as bad for your health: “Stress … an overwhelming ‘to-do’ list … [and] long hours sitting at a desk,” the Cass Business School professor Peter Fleming notes in his new book, The Death of Homo Economicus, are beginning to be seen by medical authorities as akin to smoking.
Work is badly distributed. People have too much, or too little, or both in the same month. And away from our unpredictable, all-consuming workplaces, vital human activities are increasingly neglected. Workers lack the time or energy to raise children attentively, or to look after elderly relations. “The crisis of work is also a crisis of home,” declared the social theorists Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek in a paper last year. This neglect will only get worse as the population grows and ages.
And finally, beyond all these dysfunctions, loom the most-discussed, most existential threats to work as we know it: automation, and the state of the environment. Some recent estimates suggest that between a third and a half of all jobs could be taken over by artificial intelligence in the next two decades. Other forecasters doubt whether work can be sustained in its current, toxic form on a warming planet.
Like an empire that has expanded too far, work may be both more powerful and more vulnerable than ever before. We know work’s multiplying problems intimately, but it feels impossible to solve them all. Is it time to start thinking of an alternative?
Our culture of work strains to cover its flaws by claiming to be unavoidable and natural. “Mankind is hardwired to work,” as the Conservative MP Nick Boles puts it in a new book, Square Deal. It is an argument most of us have long internalised.
But not quite all. The idea of a world freed from work, wholly or in part, has been intermittently expressed – and mocked and suppressed – for as long as modern capitalism has existed. Repeatedly, the promise of less work has been prominent in visions of the future. In 1845, Karl Marx wrote that in a communist society workers would be freed from the monotony of a single draining job to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”. In 1884, the socialist William Morris proposed that in “beautiful” factories of the future, surrounded by gardens for relaxation, employees should work only “four hours a day”.
In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by the early 21st century, advances in technology would lead to an “age of leisure and abundance”, in which people might work 15 hours a week. In 1980, as robots began to depopulate factories, the French social and economic theorist André Gorz declared: “The abolition of work is a process already underway … The manner in which [it] is to be managed … constitutes the central political issue of the coming decades.”
Since the early 2010s, as the crisis of work has become increasingly unavoidable in the US and the UK, these heretical ideas have been rediscovered and developed further. Brief polemics such as Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” have been followed by more nuanced books, creating a rapidly growing literature that critiques work as an ideology – sometimes labelling it “workism” – and explores what could take its place. A new anti-work movement has taken shape.
hamster wheel illustration for andy beckett long read on post-work 19 jan 2018 Illustration: Nathalie Lees for the Guardian Graeber, Hester, Srnicek, Hunnicutt, Fleming and others are members of a loose, transatlantic network of thinkers who advocate a profoundly different future for western economies and societies, and also for poorer countries, where the crises of work and the threat to it from robots and climate change are, they argue, even greater. They call this future “post-work”.
For some of these writers, this future must include a universal basic income (UBI) – currently post-work’s most high-profile and controversial idea – paid by the state to every working-age person, so that they can survive when the great automation comes. For others, the debate about the affordability and morality of a UBI is a distraction from even bigger issues.
Post-work may be a rather grey and academic-sounding phrase, but it offers enormous, alluring promises: that life with much less work, or no work at all, would be calmer, more equal, more communal, more pleasurable, more thoughtful, more politically engaged, more fulfilled – in short, that much of human experience would be transformed.
To many people, this will probably sound outlandish, foolishly optimistic – and quite possibly immoral. But the post-workists insist they are the realists now. “Either automation or the environment, or both, will force the way society thinks about work to change,” says David Frayne, a radical young Welsh academic whose 2015 book The Refusal of Work is one of the most persuasive post-work volumes. “So are we the utopians? Or are the utopians the people who think work is going to carry on as it is?”
One of post-work’s best arguments is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the work ideology is neither natural nor very old. “Work as we know it is a recent construct,” says Hunnicutt. Like most historians, he identifies the main building blocks of our work culture as 16th-century Protestantism, which saw effortful labour as leading to a good afterlife; 19th-century industrial capitalism, which required disciplined workers and driven entrepreneurs; and the 20th-century desires for consumer goods and self-fulfillment.
The emergence of the modern work ethic from this chain of phenomena was “an accident of history,” Hunnicutt says. Before then, “All cultures thought of work as a means to an end, not an end in itself.” From urban ancient Greece to agrarian societies, work was either something to be outsourced to others – often slaves – or something to be done as quickly as possible so that the rest of life could happen.
Even once the new work ethic was established, working patterns continued to shift and be challenged. Between 1800 and 1900, the average working week in the west shrank from about 80 hours to about 60 hours. From 1900 to the 1970s, it shrank steadily further: to roughly 40 hours in the US and the UK. Trade union pressure, technological change, enlightened employers, and government legislation all progressively eroded the dominance of work.
Sometimes, economic shocks accelerated the process. In Britain in 1974, Edward Heath’s Conservative government, faced with a chronic energy shortage caused by an international oil crisis and a miners’ strike, imposed a national three-day working week. For the two months it lasted, people’s non-work lives expanded. Golf courses were busier, and fishing-tackle shops reported large sales increases. Audiences trebled for late-night BBC radio DJs such as John Peel. Some men did more housework: the Colchester Evening Gazette interviewed a young married printer who had taken over the hoovering. Even the Daily Mail loosened up, with one columnist suggesting that parents “experiment more in their sex lives while the children are doing a five-day week at school”.
Piccadilly Square in London during the three-day week of 1974. Piccadilly Square in London during the three-day week of 1974. Photograph: PA Archive The economic consequences were mixed. Most people’s earnings fell. Working days became longer. Yet a national survey of companies for the government by the management consultants Inbucon-AIC found that productivity improved by about 5%: a huge increase by Britain’s usual sluggish standards. “Thinking was stimulated” inside Whitehall and some companies, the consultants noted, “on the possibility of arranging a permanent four-day week.”
Nothing came of it. But during the 60s and 70s, ideas about redefining work, or escaping it altogether, were commonplace in Europe and the US: from corporate retreats to the counterculture to academia, where a new discipline was established: leisure studies, the study of recreations such as sport and travel.
In 1979, Bernard Lefkowitz, then a well-known American journalist, published Breaktime: Living Without Work in a Nine to Five World, a book based on interviews with 100 people who had given up their jobs. He found a former architect who tinkered with houseboats and bartered; an ex-reporter who canned his own tomatoes and listened to a lot of opera; and a former cleaner who enjoyed lie-ins and a sundeck overlooking the Pacific. Many of the interviewees were living in California, and despite moments of drift and doubt, they reported new feelings of “wholeness” and “openness to experience”.
By the end of the 70s, it was possible to believe that the relatively recent supremacy of work might be coming to an end in the more comfortable parts of the west. Labour-saving computer technologies were becoming widely available for the first time. Frequent strikes provided highly public examples of work routines being interrupted and challenged. And crucially, wages were high enough, for most people, to make working less a practical possibility.
Instead, the work ideology was reimposed. During the 80s, the aggressively pro-business governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan strengthened the power of employers, and used welfare cuts and moralistic rhetoric to create a much harsher environment for people without jobs. David Graeber, who is an anarchist as well as an anthropologist, argues that these policies were motivated by a desire for social control. After the political turbulence of the 60s and 70s, he says, “Conservatives freaked out at the prospect of everyone becoming hippies and abandoning work. They thought: ‘What will become of the social order?’”
It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but Hunnicutt, who has studied the ebb and flow of work in the west for almost 50 years, says Graeber has a point: “I do think there is a fear of freedom – a fear among the powerful that people might find something better to do than create profits for capitalism.”
During the 90s and 00s, the counter-revolution in favour of work was consolidated by centre-left politicians. In Britain under Tony Blair’s government, the political and cultural status of work reached a zenith. Unemployment was lower than it had been for decades. More women than ever were working. Wages for most people were rising. New Labour’s minimum wage and working tax credits lifted and subsidised the earnings of the low-paid. Poverty fell steadily. The chancellor Gordon Brown, one of the country’s most famous workaholics, appeared to have found a formula that linked work to social justice.
A large part of the left has always organised itself around work. Union activists have fought to preserve it, by opposing redundancies, and sometimes to extend it, by securing overtime agreements. “With the Labour party, the clue is in the name,” says Chuka Umunna, the centre-left Labour MP and former shadow business secretary, who has become a prominent critic of post-work thinking as it has spread beyond academia. The New Labour governments were also responding, Umunna says, to the failure of their Conservative predecessors to actually live up to their pro-work rhetoric: “There had been such high levels of unemployment under the Tories, our focus was always going to be pro-job.”
In this earnest, purposeful context, the anti-work tradition, when it was remembered at all, could seem a bit decadent. One of its few remaining British manifestations was the Idler magazine, which was set up in 1993 and acquired a cult status beyond its modest circulation. In its elegantly retro pages, often rather posh men wrote about the pleasures of laziness – while on the side busily producing books and newspaper articles, and running a creative consultancy with corporate clients, Idle Industries. By the early 21st century, the work culture seemed inescapable.
The work culture has many more critics now. In the US, sharp recent books such as Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) by the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, and No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by the historian James Livingston, have challenged the dictatorial powers and assumptions of modern employers; and also the deeply embedded American notion that the solution to any problem is working harder.
In the UK, even professionally optimistic business journals have begun to register the extent of work’s crises. In his 2016 book The Wealth of Humans: Work and its Absence in the 21st Century, the Economist columnist Ryan Avent predicted that automation would lead to “a period of wrenching political change” before “a broadly acceptable social system” emerges.
Post-work ideas are also circulating in party politics. Last April, the Green party proposed that weekends be lengthened to three days. In 2016, shadow chancellor John McDonnell said Labour was “developing” a proposal for a UBI in the UK. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told his party conference last September that automation “can be the gateway for a new settlement between work and leisure – a springboard for expanded creativity and culture”.
“It felt like a watershed moment,” says Will Stronge, head of Autonomy, a British thinktank set up last year to explore the crisis of work and find ways out of it. “We’re in contact with Labour, and we’re going to meet the Greens soon.” Like most British post-workists, he is leftwing in his politics, part of the new milieu of ambitious young activist intellectuals that has grown up around Corbyn’s leadership. “We haven’t talked to people on the right,” Stronge admits. “No one’s got in contact with us.”
Yet post-work has the potential to appeal to conservatives. Some post-workists think work should not be abolished but redistributed, so that every adult labours for roughly the same satisfying but not exhausting number of hours. “We could say to people on the right: ‘You think work is good for people. So everyone should have this good thing,’” says James Smith, a post-workist whose day job is lecturing in 18th-century English literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. “Working less also ought to be attractive to conservatives who value the family.”
Outside the insular, intense working cultures of Britain and the US, the reduction of work has long been a mainstream notion. In France in 2000, Lionel Jospin’s leftwing coalition government introduced a maximum 35-hour week for all employees, partly to reduce unemployment and promote gender equality, under the slogan, “Work less – live more.” The law was not absolute (some overtime was permitted) and has been weakened since, but many employers have opted to keep a 35-hour week. In Germany, the largest trade union, IG Metall, which represents electrical and metal workers, is campaigning for shift workers and people caring for children or other relatives to have the option of a 28-hour week.
Even in Britain and the US, the vogues for “downshifting” and “work-life balance” during the 90s and 00s represented an admission that the intensification of work was damaging our lives. But these were solutions for individuals, and often wealthy individuals – the rock star Alex James attracted huge media attention for becoming a cheesemaker in the Cotswolds – rather than society as a whole. And these were solutions intended to bring minimal disruption to a free-market economy that was still relatively popular and functional. We are not in that world any more.
And yet the difficulty of shedding the burdens and satisfactions of work is obvious when you meet the post-workists. Explorers of a huge economic and social territory that has been neglected for decades– like Keynes and other thinkers who challenged the rule of work – they alternate between confidence and doubt.
“I love my job,” Helen Hester, a professor of media and communication at the University of West London, told me. “There’s no boundary between my time off and on. I’m always doing admin, or marking, or writing something. I’m working the equivalent of two jobs.” Later in our interview, which took place in a cafe, among other customers working on laptops – a ubiquitous modern example of leisure’s colonisation by work – she said knowingly but wearily: “Post-work is a lot of work.”
Yet the post-workists argue that it is precisely their work-saturated lives – and their experience of the increasing precarity of white-collar employment – that qualify them to demand a different world. Like many post-workists, Stronge has been employed for years on poorly paid, short-term academic contracts. “I’ve worked as a breakfast cook. I’ve been a Domino’s delivery driver,” he told me. “I once worked in an Indian restaurant while I was teaching. My students would come in to eat, and see me cooking, and say: ‘Hi, is that you, Will?’ Unconsciously, that’s why Autonomy came about.”
James Smith was the only post-workist I met who had decided to do less work. “I have one weekday off, and cram everything into the other days,” he said, as we sat in his overstuffed office on the Royal Holloway campus outside London. “I spend it with our one-and-a-half-year-old. It’s a very small post-work gesture. But it was a strange sensation at first: almost like launching myself off the side of a swimming pool. It felt alien – almost impossible to do, without the moral power of having a child to look after.”
Wheelbarrow and computer monitors in empty office Photograph: Getty Defenders of the work culture such as business leaders and mainstream politicians habitually question whether pent-up modern workers have the ability to enjoy, or even survive, the open vistas of time and freedom that post-work thinkers envisage for them. In 1989, two University of Chicago psychologists, Judith LeFevre and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, conducted a famous experiment that seemed to support this view. They recruited 78 people with manual, clerical and managerial jobs at local companies, and gave them electronic pagers. For a week, at frequent but random intervals, at work and at home, these employees were contacted and asked to fill in questionnaires about what they were doing and how they were feeling.
The experiment found that people reported “many more positive feelings at work than in leisure”. At work, they were regularly in a state the psychologists called “flow” – “enjoying the moment” by using their knowledge and abilities to the full, while also “learning new skills and increasing self-esteem”. Away from work, “flow” rarely occurred. The employees mainly chose “to watch TV, try to sleep, [and] in general vegetate, even though they [did] not enjoy doing these things”. US workers, the psychologists concluded, had an “inability to organise [their] psychic energy in unstructured free time”.
To the post-workists, such findings are simply a sign of how unhealthy the work culture has become. Our ability to do anything else, only exercised in short bursts, is like a muscle that has atrophied. Frayne told me: “My dad works for Corus Steel [now Tata Steel]. He’s 58, and he joined as an apprentice at 16. It’s manual work, in the hot mill. The night shifts are killing him. He’s going to get out in February. He’s been getting his savings and pension in order. But now he’s terrified. He says: ‘What am I going to do when I wake up in the house on a Tuesday morning?’ Leisure is a capacity.”
Graeber argues that in a less labour-intensive society, our capacity for things other than work could be built up again. “People will come up with stuff to do if you give them enough time. I lived in a village in Madagascar once. There was this intricate sociability. People would hang around in cafes, gossiping, having affairs, using magic. It was a very complex drama – the kind that can only develop when you have enough time. They certainly weren’t bored!”
In western countries too, he argues, the absence of work would produce a richer culture. “The postwar years, when people worked less and it was easier to be on the dole, produced beat poetry, avant garde theatre, 50-minute drum solos, and all Britain’s great pop music – art forms that take time to produce and consume.”
The return of the drum solo may not be everyone’s idea of progress. But the possibilities of post-work, like all visions of the future, walk a difficult line between being too concrete and too airy. Stronge suggests a daily routine for post-work citizens that would include a provocative degree of state involvement: “You get your UBI payment from the government. Then you get a form from your local council telling you about things going on in your area: a five-a-side football tournament, say, or community activism – Big Society stuff, almost.” Other scenarios he proposes may disappoint those who dream of non-stop leisure: “I’m under no illusion that paid work is going to disappear entirely. It just may not be directed by someone else. You take as long as you want, have a long lunch, spread the work though the day.”
Town and city centres today are arranged for work and consumption – work’s co-conspirator – and very little else; this is one of the reasons a post-work world is so hard to imagine. Adapting office blocks and other workplaces for other purposes would be a huge task, which the post-workists have only just begun to think about. One common proposal is for a new type of public building, usually envisaged as a well-equipped combination of library, leisure centre and artists’ studios. “It could have social and care spaces, equipment for programming, for making videos and music, record decks,” says Stronge. “It would be way beyond a community centre, which can be quite … depressing.”
This vision of state-supported but liberated and productive citizens owes a lot to Ivan Illich, the half-forgotten Austrian social critic who was a leftwing guru during the 70s. In his intoxicating 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, Illich attacked the “serfdom” created by industrial machinery, and demanded: “Give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency … from power drills to mechanised pushcarts.” Illich wanted the public to rediscover what he saw as the freedom of the medieval artisan, while also embracing the latest technology.
There is a strong artisan tendency in today’s post-work movement. As Hester characterises it: “Instead of having jobs, we’re going to do craft, to make our own clothes. It’s quite an exclusionary vision: to do those things, you need to be able-bodied.” She also detects a deeper conservative impulse: “It’s almost as if some people are saying: ‘Since we’re going to challenge work, other things have to stay the same.’”
Instead, she would like the movement to think more radically about the nuclear home and family. Both have been so shaped by work, she argues, that a post-work society will redraw them. The disappearance of the paid job could finally bring about one of the oldest goals of feminism: that housework and raising children are no longer accorded a lower status. With people having more time, and probably less money, private life could also become more communal, she suggests, with families sharing kitchens, domestic appliances, and larger facilities. “There have been examples of this before,” she says, “like ‘Red Vienna’ in the early 20th century, when the [social democratic] city government built housing estates with communal laundries, workshops, and shared living spaces that were quite luxurious.” Post-work is about the future, but it is also bursting with the past’s lost possibilities.
Now that work is so ubiquitous and dominant, will today’s post-workists succeed where all their other predecessors did not? In Britain, possibly the sharpest outside judge of the movement is Frederick Harry Pitts, a lecturer in management at Bristol University. Pitts used to be a post-workist himself. He is young and leftwing, and before academia he worked in call centres: he knows how awful a lot of modern work is. Yet Pitts is suspicious of how closely the life post-workists envisage – creative, collaborative, high-minded – resembles the life they already live. “There is little wonder the uptake for post-work thinking has been so strong among journalists and academics, as well as artists and creatives,” he wrote in a paper co-authored last year with Ana Dinerstein of Bath University, “since for these groups the alternatives [to traditional work] require little adaptation.”
Pitts also argues that post-work’s optimistic visions can be a way of avoiding questions about power in the world. “A post-work society is meant to resolve conflicts between different economic interest groups – that’s part of its appeal,” he told me. Tired of the never-ending task of making work better, some socialists have latched on to post-work, he argues, in the hope that exploitation can finally be ended by getting rid of work altogether. He says this is both “defeatist” and naive: “Struggles between economic interest groups can’t ever be entirely resolved.”
Yet Pitts is much more positive about post-work’s less absolutist proposals, such as redistributing working hours more equally. “There has to be a major change to work,” he says. “In that sense, these people want the right thing.” Other critics of post-work are also less dismissive than they first sound. Despite being a Tory MP from the most pro-business wing of his party, Nick Boles accepts in his book that a future society “may redefine work to include child-rearing and taking care of elderly relatives, and finally start valuing these contributions properly”. Post-work is spreading feminist ideas to new places.
Hunnicutt, the historian of work, sees the US as more resistant than other countries to post-work ideas – at least for now. When he wrote an article for the website Politico in 2014 arguing for shorter working hours, he was shocked by the reaction it provoked. “It was a harsh experience,” he says. “There were personal attacks by email and telephone – that I was some sort of communist and devil-worshipper.” Yet he senses weakness behind such strenuous efforts to shut the work conversation down. “The role of work has changed profoundly before. It’s going to change again. It’s probably already in the process of changing. The millennial generation know that the Prince Charming job, that will meet all your needs, has gone.”
After meeting Pitts in Bristol, I went to a post-work event there organised by Autonomy. It was a bitter Monday evening, but liberal Bristol likes social experiments and the large city-centre room was almost full. There were students, professionals in their 30s, even a middle-aged farmer. They listened attentively for two hours while Frayne and two other panellists listed the oppressions of work and then hazily outlined what could replace it. When the audience finally asked questions, they all accepted the post-workists’ basic premises. An appetite for a society that treats work differently certainly exists. But it is not, so far, overwhelming: the evening’s total attendance was less than 70.
And yet, as Frayne points out, “in some ways, we’re already in a post-work society. But it’s a dystopic one.” Office employees constantly interrupting their long days with online distractions; gig-economy workers whose labour plays no part in their sense of identity; and all the people in depressed, post-industrial places who have quietly given up trying to earn – the spectre of post-work runs through the hard, shiny culture of modern work like hidden rust.
Last October, research by Sheffield Hallam University revealed that UK unemployment is three times higher than the official count of those claiming the dole, thanks to people who are either “economically inactive” – no longer seeking work – or receiving incapacity benefits. When Frayne is not talking and writing about post-work, or doing his latest temporary academic job, he sometimes makes a living collecting social data for the Welsh government in former mining towns. “There is lots of worklessness,” he says, “but with no social policies to dignify it.”
Creating a more benign post-work world will be more difficult now than it would have been in the 70s. In today’s lower-wage economy, suggesting people do less work for less pay is a hard sell. As with free-market capitalism in general, the worse work gets, the harder it is to imagine actually escaping it, so enormous are the steps required.
But for those who think work will just carry on as it is, there is a warning from history. On 1 May 1979, one of the greatest champions of the modern work culture, Margaret Thatcher, made her final campaign speech before being elected prime minister. She reflected on the nature of change in politics and society. “The heresies of one period,” she said, always become “the orthodoxies of the next”. The end of work as we know it will seem unthinkable – until it has happened.
Main illustration: Nathalie Lees
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EDB - 學校搜尋
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https://codeburst.io/full-stack-single-page-application-with-vue-js-and-flask-b1e036315532
https://www.reddit.com/r/flask/comments/6kuhjk/flask_api_backend_vuejs_frontend/
https://github.com/yymm/flask-vuejs
I wanted a bit different case. What if I need a single page application built with Vue.js (using single page components, vue-router in HTML5 history mode and other good features) and served over Flask web server? In few words this should works as follows:
-Flask serves my index.html which contains my Vue.js app
-during front-end development I use Webpack with all the cool features it provides
-Flask has API endpoints I can access from my SPA
-I can access API endpoints even while I run Node.js for front-end development