Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Tuesday 31st December, 2019 #

  • Awesome Newsletters - A curated list of awesome newsletters
  • Managing my dotfiles as a git repository - The author uses an interesting technique I hadn’t seen before of making his entire $HOME directory a git repo
  • Tech.eu Podcast - Robert Falck (Einride) and Rudi Skogman (Blok) - This episode is a few weeks old but I found the interviews in the autonomous trucks sector and Finland’s startup scene interesting
  • How To Move Git Commits From One Branch to Another
Become a Patron!

Monday 30th December, 2019 #

  • Common Javascript Promise mistakes every beginner should know and avoid - I liked this article, I’m still on the whole not loving Javascript Promises though, there are all these weird edge cases with error handling, the logic get split into several different places with async functions, try/catch blocks, resolve/reject, the flow control is just not as comprehensive as caolan/async, and in a lot of cases I think it’s not much better in terms of ledgeability and as a defense against callback hell - callbacks for all the complaints are simple and IMO quite wysiwyg, easy to step through in a debugger - Currently I much prefer callbacks to Promises, at least in nodejs, I find it weird that everyone is mad for Promises
  • The Joys of UNIX Keyboards
  • Why working from home is good for business - Matt Mullenweg from Automattic (makers of Wordpress) makes a good case for distributed-first companies
  • The author of the previous post shares his updated setup in this HN thread, he is using VSCode and Eclipse editors now
  • Software development 450 words per minute (2017) - What it’s like to code websites when you are blind, pretty interesting to read about a typical blind dev setup and workflow
  • How Many Websites Should We Build? (In the context of handling desktop browser and also mobile requests)
  • 5 things in web development I learned this year
  • Vaughan Oliver, Graphic Designer for Pixies, Cocteau Twins, and More, Dead at 62
  • California is rewriting the rules of the internet - Businesses are scrambling to keep up - Similar to GDPR in the EU but this set of regulations is called California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and will be rolled out by July 2020
Become a Patron!

Sunday 29th December, 2019 #

  • Google’s Monopoly is Stifling Free Software
  • Strongly typed vs More-strongly typed - Interesting article that goes a bit deep but not too deep and neatly avoids the weeds, I don’t currently use types in any of the Javascript I write (i.e Typescript) - It’s not that I won’t use types, it’s that so far I haven’t seen enough benefit to using them, if I do then I want to properly understand the trade-offs, because I think in a lot of cases it’s not worth it - Also I really like that in javascript types are optional
  • In what scope are module variables stored in node.js? - Useful to know how code in a module gets wrapped
  • A brutal year - how the 'techlash' caught up with Facebook, Google and Amazon
  • A personal API - Interesting idea, it would be cool to see something like this take off
Become a Patron!

Saturday 28th December, 2019 #

  • This article about running a modern pizza business(es) was pretty fascinating
  • Guido van Rossum exits Python Steering Committee - This happened last month but I guess is somewhat of a big deal
  • "server" is hard to define - this article does a really good job of demystifying a word we use a lot in the computer industry, it turns out it means quite a lot of different things depending on the context, people who work with computers everyday tend to have internalised all the different meanings and automatically switch depending on the context (often without realising), but for newbies and people outside the industry that can be quite confusing
  • Why Open Hardware on Its Own Doesn’t Solve the Trust Problem - Worth taking the time to read this article IMO
Become a Patron!

Friday 27th December, 2019 #

  • Microplastic pollution is raining down on city dwellers
  • Smashing Podcast Episode 2 With Liz Elcoate - What’s So Great About Freelancing? - It’s nice to find a web development podcast with some british accents because everyone seems to be american these days
  • How we can protect truth in the age of misinformation
  • Simulating physical reality with a quantum computer - I had high hopes for this article because it appeared to actually try to solve something useful other than crypto, but by about 1/2 way through its all a jumble of maths notation, complex numbers, matrices and other quantumish - All I could think about as I was reading this was how wonderful JavaScript and JSON are
  • Why npm lockfiles can be a security blindspot for injecting malicious modules
  • Netflix was the best-performing stock of the decade, delivering a more than 4,000% return
Become a Patron!

Thursday 26th December, 2019 #

  • Dropbox Transfer - a new file delivery tool from Dropbox - “Send large files to anyone”
  • Why I love Coding in C - A programmer’s ode to writing computer programs in C, a nice description of the feeling of being ‘close to the bare metal’
  • The 10 Tech Products That Defined This Decade
  • Why's It Called Stratford International If It Has No International Trains?
  • When We Fail To Understand Privacy As A Set Of Trade-Offs, Everyone's 'Solutions' Are Unhelpful
Become a Patron!

Wednesday 25th December, 2019 #

  • ‘Advertising breaks your spirit' - the French cities trying to ban public adverts - I liked this piece, it gives a nice snapshot of the perception of advertising in France, which is similar to in other parts of the world but with some french peculiarities
  • Beatles trivia - Strawberry Fields Forever is actually two completely different mixes welded together in the middle
  • My Business Card Runs Linux
  • It s a Wonderful Life (1946)
  • What's it like to bootstrap a business before it can financially support you?
Become a Patron!

Tuesday 24th December, 2019 #

  • Chatroulette Was Shorthand for Chaos Online - Then Came the 2010s - I had completely forgot about Chatroulette, probably one of the last big OMG inspiring websites, it was this perfectly imperfect combination of simplicity, connection, with a bit of the chaoticness of MySpace, but kind of risqué
  • Minimalism - Likely the most undervalued development skill
  • Travis Kalanick is leaving Uber’s board of directors, he has sold 90% of his shares worth a total of $2.5 billion
  • Kutt is a modern URL shortener with support for custom domains - shorten URLs, manage your links and view the click rate statistics - Written in Nodejs
  • Researchers Have Identified 100 Mysteriously Disappeared Stars in The Night Sky
Become a Patron!

Saturday 21st December, 2019 #

  • Mozilla make improvements to their Reality browser
  • Is Web Design Easier or Harder Than it was 10 Years Ago?
  • The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland - Comprehensive roundup of a lot of the issues seen on a daily basis that make browsing the web a horrible experience in 2019
  • A software-defined radio is a radio implemented with reconfigurable software - “Software-defined radios offer the allure of instant reconfigurability in every dimension: frequency, modulation, and protocol. In theory, you would simply run a different program to implement an entirely different radio - whether it’s a FM broadcast receiver, a UMTS handset, or a Bluetooth device”
  • Apple is reportedly working on a secret satellite communications project
Become a Patron!

Friday 20th December, 2019 #

  • A pretty good round up of use cases where Node.js is a good fit, there’s a lot of variety so it’s vaguely useful to have a broad understanding of what is possible
  • Schedule AWS Lambda Functions Using CloudWatch Events
  • Chrome 80 - Content Indexing for PWAs, ES Modules for workers and More
  • Bear - Write beautifully on iPhone, iPad, and Mac
  • The Man Who Reads 1,000 Articles a Day - Probably not a massive surprise that I found this quite interesting
  • This Page is Designed to Last - A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web
Become a Patron!

Thursday 19th December, 2019 #

  • I just spent the whole day trying to get Safari bookmarks onto my iOS device, previously you could sync them using iTunes, I've been doing that for years, but now that doesn't work, and it seems you have to use iCloud - Since iCloud bookmark sync is basically impossible, eventually I just emailed an HTML export file to myself, opened each link one by one and added each one as a bookmark one by one in Safari on iOS - On the one hand pretty tedious, but soon I will be able to do it while ziping around in a self driving car
  • Spotify’s Tastebuds feature will let you explore your friends’ music tastes
  • Jack Dorsey Just UNFOLLOWED Mark Zuckerberg - I’m mildly ashamed that my initial reaction to this news was OMG
  • UK to create regulator to police big tech companies
  • It’s Interesting to see that although a lot of folks have been forking Chromium lately, some people are also forking Firefox to create their own browser, this article outlines the reasons behind going that direction
  • Billionaire Musk releases all Tesla patents to help save the Earth - The hope is that the 'open source philosophy' will accelerate the introduction of electric vehicles made by other manufacturers and thus have a much bigger positive environmental impact for the planet
Become a Patron!

Tuesday 17th December, 2019 #

  • I wish there was a way to choose between different recommendation algorithms on YouTube
  • Cronhooks - Schedule one time or reoccurring webhooks - These webhook saas tools can be pretty useful when you are starting out building an app because integrating a scheduler into an app can be a lot of effort
  • Your Makefiles are wrong - Nice tutorial, some tips on getting rid of the need for using tabs, I kind of want to try out some of my build processes with make
  • Occupation Growth and Decline
  • Apple Arcade annual subscription launches
  • Map of water ice on Mars shows where NASA (and SpaceX) are likely to send their first astronauts
  • This is the HN thread to the article I linked to earlier about text-only news, there’s some good topics discussed in there
Become a Patron!

Monday 16th December, 2019 #

  • What I've learned over 10 years on Stack Overflow - I think a lot of what is mentioned in this article is on point, as a reader and occasional poster for about 10 years my initial reaction to having to post a question is extreme caution, I’m not sure that’s the intention of the people running the site (most likely it isn’t), but that’s how it is now for me, I’m even a bit worried posting this link (on my own linkblog!)
  • A History of CSS Through Fifteen Years of 24 ways
  • .ORG Update
  • On the undervalued notion of text-only websites
  • Google halts Chrome 79 rollout on Android after bug deletes user data
  • Palantir Wins New Pentagon Deal With $111 Million From the Army
  • DebConf 14 - QA with Linus Torvalds
Become a Patron!

Sunday 15th December, 2019 #

  • The Oddly Comforting Allure of London’s Vintage Tube Textiles - It’s odd that all those years in London taking the tube and it never occurred to me that the seat patterns were retro stylish, they were just the slightly boring seats, but looking at them now I can see there is a certain style to them
Become a Patron!

Saturday 14th December, 2019 #

  • Everybody calling the Cybertruck "brutalist" is wrong - I liked this article a lot including this description of the car “It’s the equivalent of a cultural somersault”
  • The cowardice of Brave - A rather scathing critique of the new Brave browser business model, my thoughts so far about Brave can be broadly described as ‘caution’, I don’t really understand the business model, I think it’s a healthy discussion to be having, because a lot of people have been switching
  • Stonehenge 1875 family photo may be earliest at monument
  • Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes - I hope they figure this out, I know there is a lot of headwinds for Google recently, but overall I still like Google, they have some great products and they are in so many countries, that's a really hard thing todo - Maybe there is a maximum size for a company with a Google type culture, well ok then lets have more of those instead of a few massive mega corps running the world
  • Apple and Spotify can now play podcasts on your Alexa-enabled devices - I guess if you are into Alexa then this is pretty cool
  • Google Maps has now photographed 10 million miles in Street View
Become a Patron!

Friday 13th December, 2019 #

  • In what is presumably completely unrelated to the nginx news, I saw a live russian band play an outdoor concert this evening, they played some great russian folk music interspersed by some covers played in a russian folk music style, their cover of ACDC's Thunderstruck was like some sort weird but brilliant echo through time, I felt as though I was at the russian folk concert but superimposed ontop of an invisible massive ACDC stadium rock concert
  • Russian police raid NGINX Moscow office - Can't say I'm entirely surprised by this news, it was pretty much the only part of my tech stack that hadn't had some major controversy, Nginx is really great software I wish them all the best, I hope they find a way to keep the software open source
  • Google has setup a free phone line in India where you call and can ask questions and get Alexa style answers, so people without internet access can get information similar to doing a google search - Sort of reminds me of the speaking clock, but for knowledge
  • Google Assistant can now interpret 44 languages on Android and iOS - It's a live translation with auto-suggestions for replies to help speed up the conversation
  • Is there dark matter at the center of the Milky Way? - Based on this article, I’m not convinced these scientists are fully aware of their assumptions, using fakes to ascertain the truth is very tricky business
  • Leaders from Seattle’s ‘boring’ unicorns on staying private and their most important lessons learned - Sometimes I feel like in tech you either have to run a unicorn company or work for a unicorn company, where is the spectrum and diversity? In the real world this would be like walking down the street in a normal/average sized town and every single shop would be a Walmart
  • There’s a quantum computer bullshit detector twitter account causing a stir - my take on the whole quantum calculator stuff - show us something that does more good in the world than a cat gif, then I’ll be a bit more interested, maybe not the best metric but I am but a lowly web developer
  • The English language is finally losing its grip on the internet
  • An article about the use of “Link In Bio” - Perhaps that’s what I should have called the linkblog globe icon feature, I wasn’t aware at the time that it was a common way to call that feature, and there aren’t any user bios at the moment - I agree about the importance of outbound links for the open web
  • Electron joins the OpenJS Foundation
  • Node.js & MongoDB - How to Implement Transactions
Become a Patron!

Thursday 12th December, 2019 #

  • My internet connectivity is unbelievably horrendous, sites barely load, just did a speed test - 0.76 Mbps download and 30 Mbps upload - not a lot I can do with that, a little bit one sided me thinks, no YouTube no podcasts, even my git remote commands hang half the time
  • Jack Dorsey Wants to Help You Create Your Own Twitter
  • Chrome 79 released - Lots of new security features, tab freezing looks interesting, back-forward caching, also interested to see the UI update to clearly show if you are signed into Chrome or not
  • Firefox 71 released - It's got a collection of some of the best new features and improvements that I have seen in a browser release, especially if you are a javascript developer - web sockets message inspector, network full-text search, console multi-line editor mode, inline variable preview in debugger, Promise.allSettled(), Media Session API, log on event listeners, also a bunch of CSS features
Become a Patron!

Sunday 8th December, 2019 #

  • My iOS device has stopped being able to recognise the power adapter so this might be my last post from the device as I am down to a few % power, and earlier today I read about the new iPhones that will have no ports at all, what a strange coincidence
  • Good news that ESA is planning to address space debris with special space robot - Two bits of worrying info from the article, there are 3000 inactive satellites orbiting earth, and the ESA head of space debris said that when it comes to collision alerts there are a lot of false positives because they are ‘acting based on probabilities’, that doesn’t sound good
  • Cédric O (born 1982) is a French politician, currently serving as Secretary of State (junior minister) for the Digital Economy of France
  • France Plans a Revolution to Rein in the Kings of Big Tech - The thing that stands out to me about this story is how uncommon it is for a person to have a 1 letter surname, I don’t remember ever seeing a 1 letter surname anywhere in Europe before
  • It All Starts with a Humble <textarea> - Good example of how to build a site using progressive enhancement
  • New Post: New Linkblog feature: highlightable messages
  • Tesla Cybertruck in LEGO
  • CSS Architecture for Modern JavaScript Applications
Become a Patron!

Saturday 7th December, 2019 #

  • Larry, Sergey, and the Mixed Legacy of Google-Turned-Alphabet
  • I just added a "Latest Linkblog.io News" section to the main linkblog landing page that collects together all the linkblog-related blog posts I've written to date
  • New Post: Steady and stable progress
  • What is the difference between a Library vs A Framework?
  • I installed the Strapi quickstart yesterday, pretty good setup instructions and no setup issues, the thing that's missing is that it's not at all obvious how to run in a debugger, which is crucial imo
  • Building a search engine from scratch - Another post in their series which I'm finding very interesting on building an independent search engine
  • The Rising Complexity of JAMstack Sites and How to Manage Them - An interesting approach to JAMStack sites where you use a CMS to generate the static site
Become a Patron!

Friday 6th December, 2019 #

  • Amazon expands Bezos’ elite ‘S-team,’ adding 6 execs from emerging branches of the company - Kind of interesting to see how the big guys are organized, like watching the vfx credits at the end of a big motion picture
  • New Post: Building the foundations for the future of linkblog
  • Not The Moon
  • One online artwork a day for 30 days, starting 16th of november 2019 - This feels quite old school internet to me
  • This map shows how the US really has 11 separate 'nations' with entirely different cultures - Great map
Become a Patron!

Wednesday 4th December, 2019 #

  • There's So Much More Microplastic in the Ocean Than We Realized - Surely it’s got to be extremely dangerous for tiny animals at the bottom of the food chain to be eating microplastics, if it has a bad effect on these organisms then it directly affects every living organism above them, and the fact that it’s not possible to remove these particles via water treatment combined with the knowledge that we are producing more and more plastic must be cause for alarm
  • Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin relinquish control of Alphabet to CEO Sundar Pichai
Become a Patron!

Tuesday 3rd December, 2019 #

  • Clive James Got It Right - This article was the first I had heard of his death, it’s a wonderfully written piece that reminded me how much I liked to watch him on the tele, RIP
  • Amazon Braket – Amazon releases a quantum computing web service with 3 types of fancy looking quantum computers
  • Facebook pushes data portability with a new photo transfer tool which enables moving pictures to other services starting with Google Photos
Become a Patron!