Category: Design / Architecture Page 1 of 2

I remember a decade or two ago, people were talking about the idea of software as a craft, with apprenticeships, journeymen etc. This always struck a chord with me. A lot of the time, software (for me) has been about talking with people, working out what they really need, and carefully and iteratively developing the UI, code and and infrastructure. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some Engineering as well, in designing the architectures, scalability, failover, backups, etc, as well as in every DB query and service call.

It’s been a good three decades where the coding itself was a craft. Object oriented (or functional) beauty, DRY, readability, good naming, etc were lofty goals and paid their own way in terms of software maintenance costs, extensibility and lifespan, and developers were rewarded highly for these skills. It’s been a good run, but I can only think this period is coming to an end.

With AI coding, the industry is in the throws of an industrial revolution of code – more volume, less care, factory style. Maybe this is not a bad thing, but it looks like the end of the age of coding craftsmanship. That being said, you get better results with an experienced developer at the helm of the coding machinery who understands things like modularity, encapsulation, interfaces, frameworks, on-going maintenance effort, security, etc.

Software development is by no means just coding. It encompasses talking with people to find out what they need, working out what to build, designing efficient humane user interfaces, designing the architecture and implementing the infrastructure, constant decisions and trade-offs, telling people about what you’ve built and getting them to use it, supporting the software and maintaining it over time. Most of these areas are still crafts that rely on the skills and experience of humans and not (yet? maybe ever?) well done by AIs.

I’ve always thought that being a generalist is the best course in software – being able to do a bit of everything from talking to people, to writing code and understanding the infrastructure and networking. I can only see this is ever more true with AI growing in its abilities. The wider the range of your skillset, the less risk a lot of it will be replaceable by AI.. and besides, it’s more fun to do a variety of different things.

So in conclusion, software development is not dead and replaced by AI. Though I feel the coding craftsmanship part of it is ending.

The fonts built into modern browsers are varied – it is hard to avoid loading your own fonts. Arial is the rare exception – it is well supported across all old and modern browsers. It looks a little different between Windows and Mac / iOS especially as a larger bold heading. On Android, it is substituted by Roboto. On Linux variants, Arial will likely fall back to the sans-serif system font.

Verdana is also well supported but looks a bit odd in this day and age.

You could instead go with the system font on each platform (eg, San Francisco for Mac/iOS, Segoe UI for Windows, Roboto for Android, etc). However, this means that every platform will look a little different, especially for larger and heavier font styles. Personally I like San Francisco and Roboto (and they look fairly similar). However, I find Segoe UI in large and heavy looks quite different and unsuitable for a “serious” website. If you could use Roboto on Windows reliability, this approach would be better.. but Roboto is only included with Edge but not Chrome on Windows.

So basically, if you want a “serious” looking sans-serif font that is similar across platforms, then it’s either Arial OR it’s time to load your own font and take the performance penalty in return for the look and consistency across platforms.

Google Fonts is a good place to get a font to self host. You can then convert the downloaded ttf with woff2compress (also available on brew) to make it a smaller download and host as a woff2. The woff2 format is now supported by all modern browsers.