Adobe announced Flash will die in 2020, an execution date, published three years out, for the technology that was the fun internet of my adolescence. Newgrounds, Homestar Runner, every browser game that ruined my GPA, YouTube’s original player: all Flash. It also was a security hellscape (this blog’s archives contain a decade of “patch Flash now” by implication), a battery vampire, and the subject of the most consequential product memo of the mobile era, Jobs’ 2010 “Thoughts on Flash,” which everyone called spite and which turned out to be a roadmap. HTML5 won by becoming boring and universal. The deprecation lesson, for the file: platforms don’t die when the replacement is better; they die when the replacement is default. And three years of scheduled hospice is a gift; the average internal system gets killed by a Friday email. Announce your deprecations like Adobe; migrate like it’s 2019.
The other memo this fortnight was Google’s, an internal screed about gender and engineering ability that leaked, detonated, and got its author fired within the week. I’ll log it briefly and carefully: the document dressed bias in citation-formatting, and the discourse it triggered cost real colleagues real energy that the rest of us didn’t have to spend. The Fowler post documented a system; this one was a symptom. Both weeks mattered; only one was brave.
TIL: our own codebase contained one Flash dependency, an ancient file-upload widget, in the admin panel, untouched since before me. Deleted it myself. Pallbearer duty.