Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Saturday 29th February, 2020 #

  • A Text Renaissance - Venkatesh Roa goes on a very rambly walk through his text focussed junkyardy media empire, initially I really liked this piece, then I was like, gee this is getting way too long and I drifted off for a bit, but then there was another interesting part, and another etc, so much ground covered, but also nothing much, only wished I'd brewed a cup of tea before I started, if you are not in a rush and into technology and writing, it's definitely worth the read - Also some junkyards are pretty cool, it's nice to be reminded of that
  • How a 2 person startup already uses 28 other tools - It's interesting to see the tools stack of a seed stage two person startup
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Friday 28th February, 2020 #

  • Bootstrap 4 Tree View - Plugin that creates a nice looking tree view useful for navigation, pretty neat
  • My 2004 Blogroll - Via the medium of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, David Weinberger reminisces about his blogroll from 2004 - I used to read a lot of those blogs too, or listen to early podcasts that featured these folks, especially IT Conversations & Gilmore Gang, I guess I am getting old, though sometimes I honestly feel like I am almost dead - “Blogrolls were early social networks“
  • Build a Single Page Application (SPA) Site With Vanilla.js - Uses the latest javascript feature such as es modules, classes, template literals and destructuring
  • Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates
  • Brave Browser and the Wayback Machine - Working together to help make the Web more useful and relia
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Monday 24th February, 2020 #

  • The Slippery Slope of Docker Dev Environments - Covers something I've come up against in the past, containerisation is pretty great for devops and deployments, but it's not always so great for local dev environments, because it adds quite a lot of complexity that can get in the way of debugging code
  • EU Commission to staff - Switch to Signal messaging app
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Sunday 23rd February, 2020 #

  • The command line options we deserve - Such a timely piece considering the previous iPad multi tasking link, this article discusses the curl command line utility that has nearly 300 options, and the importance of a user base being used to a particular way of doing things
  • Ryan Christoffel's Proposed Fix for iPad Multitasking - Kind of makes me wish I had an iPad again to get a better idea about how multi-tasking functions, one issue I think his proposal would face is that users are already quite used to long press activating “app jiggly mode”, which is one of the most absurd yet accurate ways ever of describing a mode
  • We need to address streaming's massive carbon footprint
  • Should you self-host Google Fonts? - Interesting deep dive in font loading, feels like there might be a need for an open source version of the Google Fonts server since the speed improvements are considerable but Google is doing a lot of clever stuff behind the scenes, also highlights that there is a lot of complexity when it comes to fonts
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Saturday 22nd February, 2020 #

  • Podcorn - A marketplace for podcast sponsorships and endorsements - Neat idea for a company, I wonder if they have a team of people who’s job it is to listen to loads and loads of podcasts or if they just use algorithms
  • iHeartRadio is now turning podcasts into books
  • Looks like GitHub are testing out a new feature called Discussions, similar the issues but more focused on threaded conversations
  • Hotwheels creates Tesla Cybertruck with customisable broken window sticker
  • Attempt To Put Every Musical Melody Into The Public Domain Demonstrates Craziness Of Modern Copyright
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Friday 21st February, 2020 #

  • Multiple SSH Keys settings for different github account
  • octonode - NodeJS library for the Github api v3
  • Notes on North Goa Beaches - Another great James Clark photowalk, it reminds me of my time in South Goa, though not always the easiest place to travel, it has so much charm and variety, I'd love to go on another trip there
  • Building a Circuit Breaker in Node.js (Part 2)
  • Building a Circuit Breaker in Node.js (Part 1)
  • The Circuit Breaker Pattern - These days we often integrate 3rd party APIs into our applications, but it can become tricky when the services run into issues, this pattern is a way to gracefully handle these situation
  • A Practical Introduction to GeoJSON with Node.js
  • Open-Registry - A JavaScript Package Registry funded, developed and maintained by the community, for the community - Could be useful as a backup if the main npm registry goes down
  • Kristin Addis from Be My Travel Muse highlights some of the double standards women sometimes face when travelling alone
  • The Universe within 12.5 Light Years The Nearest Stars - These old school maps are a bit 8bitish but their simplicity is their strength, lots of useful information
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Sunday 16th February, 2020 #

  • University students are using AI bots to generate essays, some are saying that in a few years they will be indistinguishable from human written essays
  • The WebSocket object provides the API for creating and managing a WebSocket connection to a server, as well as for sending and receiving data on the connection
  • YouTube paid $3 billion to the music industry last year - Seems like quite a lot, but I’d like to know how much it is compared to the total amount the industry generates
  • Podcasters want an awards show, so they’re trying to start one
  • Harrison Ford Says He Starts Doing Something With Indiana Jones 5 in a Couple Months
  • Treat us like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Facebook's Zuckerberg
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Friday 14th February, 2020 #

  • Building a Continuous Integration & Deployment Pipeline Using Docker (CI/CD) - Well written and concise tutorial, this appears to be the minimal CI/CD setup these days, it’s a bit striking how much more complicated it is than the old “ftp files to server” days
  • The new Samsung Galaxy Z Flip looks pretty cool, it has a glass screen so it folds closed in a nicer way than other foldable phones, looks like it would be good for shooting video or having video calls too because you can place it half open on a surface rather than have to hold it out in front of you selfie-style
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Thursday 13th February, 2020 #

  • NASA puts a price on a 2024 Moon landing- $35 billion - The cool bit in this is that they might built a Human Landing System to get down from lunar orbit easily, that sounds like it might be a landing pad
  • REST vs GraphQL - The Main Differences
  • YouTube continues to mirror Twitch, tests new clap feature that lets fans donate to creators
  • Ofcom to be put in charge of regulating internet in UK
  • An interview with Ben Keene, co-founder of Rebel Book Club - ""Not Your Average Book Club"
  • Wes Anderson’s French Dispatch trailer looks wonderful
  • Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch Has A Gorgeous Poster
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Wednesday 12th February, 2020 #

  • Registrars raise alarm over proposal for big .com fee hikes - Wouldn't it be cool if there was some way that every person could have 1 domain name for free, and you didn't have to worry about price hikes, or loosing the domain for whatever reason, it's events like this that make you realise that we are all building our stuff on unstable ground
  • Fork and Pull Request Workflow - Some useful descriptions of commonly used github/git workflows
  • William Gerstenmaier joins SpaceX, and that’s a really big deal - He was in charge of many human space flight missions including the space shuttle, International Space Station, commercial crew, and exploration programs at NASA and has a reputation for excellent in safety
  • Patreon is adding new features for creators in Europe - It’s adding payment options in euros and pounds
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Tuesday 11th February, 2020 #

  • Integration testing WebSocket server in Node.JS
  • Alphabet's Jigsaw incubator is now back under Google
  • Sole Trader Tax – A Guide for Start-Ups & the Newly Self Employed
  • 6 things I wish I knew about state management when I started writing React apps - I like the angle this article expands on because it highlights all the different types of frontend state you need to manage in a React app, and it’s a good basis for a mental model for thinking about more complex frontend applications
  • Europe’s solar orbiter begins its journey to the Sun - I would have thought that sending up a satellite to orbit the thing that keeps everyone on planet earth alive would get a bit more publicity, it’s the first I’ve heard of the mission
  • Man who helped the Queen send her first email dies - Of course I am somewhat saddened by this news, but also sort of impressed that the queen has been sending emails since before I was born
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Monday 10th February, 2020 #

  • TypeScript Interfaces
  • I used to think TypeScript is a waste of time - Now I changed my mind - There’s a bit of an unexpected twist in this article but it’s worth the read, I feel like more could be said about the benefits of using TypeScript interfaces, how do they effect the way you think about and structure your code on a large project?
  • Ask HN - What are your war stories for converting teams to remote?
  • A Moon Landing In 2024? NASA Says It'll Happen; Others Say - No Way
  • Will Spotify Ruin Podcasting? - Some pretty good commentary on the state of the podcasting scene
  • Getting Started in Freelance Web Development without Experience
  • Bill Gates orders £500m hydrogen-powered superyacht
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Sunday 9th February, 2020 #

  • The Trouble with TypeScript - Interesting how the author mentions CoffeeScript in this article, I’m seeing more people starting to see downsides with TypeScript, I think the way it effects your ability to easily and quickly see the flow of the code is a big deal, it’s adding something but it’s also taking away something too, is it worth the trade-off?
  • Living Without a SIM Card
  • Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay
  • Understanding Modern Cloud Architecture on AWS - A Concepts Series - This blog series is pretty good if you are looking to get a bird's eye view of how all the pieces fit together
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Saturday 8th February, 2020 #

  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
  • Is Having an RSS Feed Just Giving Content Away for Free? - I like the sentiment of this article, a lot of the points raised are the reasons I run my blog and linkblog, both of which have RSS feeds now which I’m very happy about, I just wish I had had the chance to do it sooner but that’s not how things panned out
  • An extremely minimalistic alternative to Jest - The difference in the amount of lines of code is quite startling, +1 for liking old school function declarations
  • Use Cloudflare JavaScript Workers to Deploy Your Static Generated Site (SSG)
  • Chrome 80 brings support for module workers
  • The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric - I really hope Google isn't foobared, because I just tried to use my outlook.com email account, and after an hour of changing settings, I still can't get it to work, it would be easier to just quit computers all together
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Friday 7th February, 2020 #

  • What are your favorite portfolio sites for devs?
  • Hosting Your Static Website For Free
  • Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open - Really well written writeup of one person’s mini quest to figure out what data a Wacom tablet is tracking and sending back to head office, I reckon that softwares that are doing this should at the very least offer a web interface that shows clearly what data is being sent, of course it’s also good to know how to verify what’s actually being sent over the wire
  • European parliament says it will not use facial recognition tech - I wonder what the consequences of having some large areas of the world using facial recognition extensively and other large areas not using it will be, it’s a pretty massive difference so it follows that there will be some new dynamics that will arise
  • Looks like Elon Musk might take SpaceX’s Starlink public with an IPO
  • Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sells off another $1.6B in stock; he’s sold $3.4B over the past week
  • IMDb’s free streaming service is adding major TV shows
  • Kirk Douglas, Hollywood legend and star of Spartacus, dies aged 103
  • Google Maps is turning 15! Celebrate with a new look and features
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Thursday 6th February, 2020 #

  • Testing Node serverless applications - AWS Lambda functions - A well written article with nice examples, demonstrating that although not totally straight forward, if you structure your code carefully it's possible to write well tested lambda functions
  • Ultimate guide to concurrent logging in Node.js - Show how to use NodeJS domains to pass context to independently executing tasks, so your debug logs can write out the current context that includes details about which task is creating the log message
  • The science of friction - and its surprising impact on our lives - I didn’t know the word Tribology, or that there was an entire area of science devoted to it, interesting talk
  • Apple Adds Universal Purchases for iOS, tvOS and macOS Apps in Xcode 11.4
  • Jeff Weiner Updates His LinkedIn Profile - After 11 years as CEO, he is passing the reins to deputy Ryan Roslansky, and will become executive chair
  • An investigation shows that UK councils let firms track visits to webpages on benefits and disability
  • Postgres for those who can’t even, part 2 – working with node and json
  • Postgres for those who can’t even, part 1
  • Welfare surveillance system violates human rights, Dutch court rules - Informative article that ends with the disturbing factoid that Daniel Dines, the world’s first “bot billionaire” wants a robot for every person
  • Chrome adopting new video ads rules that will also affect YouTube
  • Berlin Film Festival 2020 Preview - New Hands, Same Old City
  • Spotify is buying Bill Simmons’s The Ringer, a podcast-centric media company
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Tuesday 4th February, 2020 #

  • Is there any language that can kill JavaScript?
  • Apollo GraphQL without JavaScript - A interesting way to write your React/Graphql components so that when javascript is disabled in the browser, the page is still functional - It wraps the component in a form, which is only used when noscript is in effect, quite a nice progressively enhanced solution
  • Shlide - A slide deck presentation tool written in pure bash
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Monday 3rd February, 2020 #

  • Applications are eating the world - What's next? - "Applications have gone from being an addition to a company’s operations to being the centre of a company’s business"
  • A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity - Puts forward the idea that “slow multi-tasking” is a way to avoid getting stuck while at the same time infuse creativity into your projects
  • NewBusinessMonitor sorts and filters the 1685 new businesses that are registered in the UK each day, and lets you send personalised sales letters to your target market with a single click
  • Find a Crew - the World's largest international online Boat & Crew network and a truly global website
  • Amateur radio skills prove useful during bushfire emergencies
  • Flashpoint is saving 36,000 Flash games from going into the night
  • Goals – An experimental new tool which generalizes “make” - I skimmed the talk notes and it looks interesting, make has quite a lot of sharp edges that this new tool tries to address
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Sunday 2nd February, 2020 #

  • New Post: Test Post Written Using Github
  • How to force GitHub Pages build? - I'm trying to figure out a way write Github Pages blog posts from an iOS device, but it's not clear how to trigger the site build once you've written the post using the Github web UI, feels like this should be easier
  • The Dark Side of Microservices - I think the best point this article highlights is how complicated debugging becomes because often you have to setup a debugger in lots of different projects simultaneously, it's already a bit annoying with a website/api double monolith, so having even more debugger sessions open at once would be really tricky
  • The Scroll subscription service is an ingenious web technology hack - This new service sounds pretty cool, but I don't get how it's implemented because according to the article it sets a cookie that websites you visit can see and then not display ads, but as far as I know cookies are not cross domain for security reasons, example1.com cannot read cookies set by example2.com, I don't get it maybe they are magic cookies
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Saturday 1st February, 2020 #

  • TypeScript’s quirks - How inconsistencies make the language more complex
  • Cypress in a Nutshell - I've been following the cyprus project for a while now on Github, I watched this demo video yesterday, the feature set is really impressive, easy to understand way of defining tests all in javascript, screenshots taken of each step when the tests are run, ability to open dev tools console at any step and see debugging info, looks like a really good tool for frontend testing
  • California Attorney General delays .org sale
  • My Second Year as a Solo Developer - Pretty good writeup of an ex-googler’s solo dev journey for the past few years
  • Building simple HTTP server with Deno - "Definitely great"
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