Justin Review 3

justin shop, managing complexity, and Dune

This is the third issue of Justin Review.

I talk about making shop.justinliang.me, managing complexity, and Dune

shop.justinliang.me

I set up a personal shop where I sell used items online to my friends. I didn’t want to simply sell things on Facebook Marketplace/ebay to strangers online, so I decided to make a website to represent this. I went with the simplest website possible that still visually shows what I want: a website that is just an image.

I initially created this in Figma and was planning on recreating it as a website, but I encountered complexity when attempting to port components such as the L-shaped container at the top. It seemed like such a pain to also recreate all of the other static images individually and position everything exactly as I wanted using HTML/CSS.

Then I realized I could just export the entire frame as an image (webp for smaller compressed size) and serve that as a website. It’s not “responsive” or “modern”, but who cares. The user can simply scroll and zoom in/out to anywhere in the image to see more detail. Since my shop is only intended for people who know me, I don’t need a “buy” button and can just have some text instructions to contact me to purchase anything.

Complexity

That made me think more broadly: what complexity do I really want to manage?

I only have so much time and energy at any given day. I don’t want to embark on complex tasks to get an idea out. Learning a complex system doesn’t necessarily contribute to personally learning, it’s just memorizing.

HTML/CSS bring huge swaths of complexity to the web. I just want to deliver a cool visual experience for many ideas I have, and a simple <img> tag suffices to bring it to the web.

If I want to make it interactive, I can add some <a> tags positioned using simple pixel values i.e. This is dead simple to think about compared to heavily nested HTML layouts + hundreds of lines of CSS.

a {
  position: absolute;
  top: 100px;
  left: 200px;
}

Of course what I’m saying specifically about HTML/CSS isn’t applicable for many use cases. The advantages of HTML/CSS allow you to create dynamic interfaces with various content. But for projects that don’t require this, I implore people to think about it and save on their complexity.

One of my coworkers told me that in his team, they take what he describes as “simple, scrappy solutions” to problems they face. These aren’t the most engineered solutions, but they are the ones that work for the problem at hand. Just because there is a “proper” way of doing something doesn’t mean that that way needs to be done.

Dune

I finished Dune today. It was a fun read.

Each chapter of the book starts with a short excerpt. It is usually something like a quote from one of the main characters in the future. I think this is Frank Herbert’s excuse for writing a guaranteed fire line every chapter.

Here are some Dune quotes I like the most, recorded on are.na in real-time while I read the book.

Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. https://www.are.na/block/35490968

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it. https://www.are.na/block/35640655

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh. https://www.are.na/block/35795776

The natural human’s an animal without logic. Your projections of logic onto all affairs is unnatural, but suffered to continue for its usefulness. You’re the embodiment of logic—a Mentat. Yet, your problem solutions are concepts that, in a very real sense, are projected outside yourself, there to be studied and rolled around, examined from all sides. https://www.are.na/block/35796242

What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us? https://www.are.na/block/35884140