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 (#101) documented a system; this one WAS a symptom. Both weeks mattered; only one was brave.
TIL: our own codebase contained one (1) Flash dependency — an ancient file-upload widget, in the admin panel, untouched since before me. Deleted it myself. Pallbearer duty.