Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Saturday 28th March, 2020 #

  • How are Unix pipes implemented - The first half of this article is interesting from a historical perspective, it then gets a bit too technical for me, but if you are a C programmer probably a good read
  • A look at iPad multitasking, makes a good case for why this feature is critical in future devices, especially given the new devices are aimed more as being laptop replacements
  • Movies Anywhere is bringing its digital film locker to LG’s TVs
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Thursday 26th March, 2020 #

  • Chrome Phasing out Support for User Agent String - The user agent string has over the years been overloaded to the point where it doesn’t really correspond to anything meaningful anymore so it’s probably a move in the right direction, I’m interested to see what their updated feature looks like
  • 10 Best IDE Software - Pretty good run down of the popular IDEs that are available
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Wednesday 25th March, 2020 #

  • I've been using the octonode library to read and write files directly to a Github repo, it implements the v3 Github API, and has a pretty good interface
  • How to do Base64 encoding in node.js?
  • Aston Martin designs a new V6 for James Bond - and the Valhalla hypercar
  • SpaceX gets approval for 1 million Starlink user terminals for US internet service
  • Reddit’s new polls will let you vote on basically anything
  • Emojis as Favicons - More neat favicon tricks
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Monday 23rd March, 2020 #

  • Highlights from Git 2.26 - Optimised network fetch protocol is now the default, cool new tools to show the scope of configs, faster git grep, additional colorization for the format command, and more
  • Javascript template literals with nested backticks - You don't really ever want to have template literals inside template literals, but in cases where it happens, and it just happened to me, there is a way
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Sunday 22nd March, 2020 #

  • What You Can Do with Netlify Build Plugins - I like that all these companies are creating CI/CD tools, quite a lot of it is definitely useful, but honestly a lot of for instance Github actions and some of Netlify docs are really confusing, I hope all these build tools don’t turn into frankenmonsters that you have to set up in the cloud and on your local machine
  • New Issue: Turning off strict mode for babel-loader in netlify-lambda build
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Saturday 21st March, 2020 #

  • Maintaining Performance - Makes some great points about the ever changing best practices and the pros and cons of using 3rd party services vs rolling your own solutions
  • Interesting discussion with Brian Leroux about serverless architectures on the Shop Talk Show podcast - Devops have been a bit reticent to get into serverless, but frontend devs are very bullish on these types of setups, so it's interesting to hear some frontenders talk about the variety of things that are and could be built in this space
  • Wikimedia has decided to move ahead adopting Vue.js as their frontend framework - These are the folks behind internet giant Wikipedia, so it's a pretty big deal as far as web development goes, firstly because as great as Wikipedia is, they use quite an antiquated tech stack, so moving their website towards something more modern is going to be interesting to watch, but also because they chose Vue over React with some pretty good reasoning in my opinion
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Friday 20th March, 2020 #

  • Should you buy the new iPad Pro? Here’s how it compares to the 2018 iPad Pro
  • Next Phase Montage - Isaac Schlueter founder of Npm Inc writes about the journey so far, and his read on the acquisition - It's nice to see a lot of positivity there, npm contributed quite a lot to my decision to become a NodeJS/Javascript developer, so it's very interesting to me, I wish them all this best
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Thursday 19th March, 2020 #

  • Apple’s New iPad Pro Smart Keyboard Comes With A Built-In Trackpad - This review has the latest iPad Pro advertisement which in typical apple fashion makes it look very cool
  • Here’s how the iPad’s new trackpad actually works - Some big changes in the world of touch / gesture based apple products, it might be an interesting new direction for the devices
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Tuesday 17th March, 2020 #

  • CI/CD - Serverless Ebook using Gitbook CLI, Github Pages, Github Actions, and Calibre
  • Interesting - @Microsoft now owns my entire dev stack, especially for writing JavaScript
  • New Issue: __dirname appears to be incorrectly set in lambda function
  • Pretty big news in the world of Javascript - Github is acquiring Npm Inc - The folks that weren't happy about Microsoft buying Github are probably not going to like this acquisition either, but personally I think it's good that an entity so central to web development has some sturdy financial backing, although I have recently gotten lost a few times in Github documentation, and also recently gotten really really lost in Microsoft documentation, really hope these 3 companies find a way to keep npm great
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Saturday 14th March, 2020 #

  • Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD Pipeline) with Github Package and Github Actions - Continuation of the previous tutorial link, adds CI/CD integration
  • Create Your First Github Package - Short tutorial that does a pretty great job of showing you how to create a Github package, IMO much clearer than the official docs
  • Microsoft announces Bill Gates is to step down from it’s board of directors to concentrate on his philanthropic activities
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Thursday 12th March, 2020 #

  • Three Things You Didn't Know You Could Do with npm Scripts - I use npm script a lot, so it was great to discover in this article some features I was not aware of regarding environment variables and argument parsing
  • Delightful Node.js packages and resources - I have probably linked to this in the past, but worth linking again because it's a great compendium of NodeJS resources
  • Building a GitHub App With Node.js - Really useful tutorial that has all the pieces you need to create an express app that makes modifications to a Github repo
  • The UK will spend $1 billion on a moonshot agency to fund cutting-edge tech
  • The UK’s new digital tax starts in April
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Tuesday 10th March, 2020 #

  • What is Sourcebit? with Eduardo Bouças - I linked to Sourcebit a few days ago, so it's interesting to see a Smashing Magazine podcast interview with the creator of the project - He describes the various use cases really well, it's a sort of swiss army knife for ingesting and processing data from APIs, and has a plugin architecture so you can pull from any API source and push that data out to any target static site generator - It's a pretty cool javascript/NodeJs project
  • I've managed to get the styles to apply the static render of my linkblog, one thing I had to change was the day hash links, now they point to that day on the monthly archives page - The downside is that the context around a day isn't as good but at least there is the context of the current month, and for the rest well the reader has to navigate using the breadcrumbs, there is no way around it because with no server running there is no way to turn the 'date' query param into a page in the main 'infinite scroll' linkblog
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Monday 9th March, 2020 #

  • I got the libraries to load by using Bootstrap CDN instead of self-hosting the libraries, necessary because I'm seeing an issue updating the build command where I have the site hosted - So my statically rendered linkblog is looking a bit prettier now
  • Static rendering of my linkblog - It still looks a pretty weird because some libraries aren't loading yet and there is no styling, but it's a start, made with the mini static site generator I've been working on
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Thursday 5th March, 2020 #

  • Please stop recommending Git Flow! - Teams come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes and develop in various contexts, this post explores some of the trade offs that the Git Flow development model makes
  • I built a solution that converts your API into a SaaS - Every time I finish a very difficult bit of development, pretty much immediately afterwards someone releases a product that does exactly the thing that I spent weeks/months/years building, happens every single time, like clockwork - this solution called SaasBox actually looks pretty good
  • JavaScript Libraries Are Almost Never Updated Once Installed - The aversion to upgrades is almost universal, I say almost because one place where it’s not only not an issue, it’s almost become something to look forward to is in web browser software
  • After attracting 800K web developers, Netlify wins $53M in funding
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Wednesday 4th March, 2020 #

  • Mozilla moves from using IRC to Matrix, with their first instance in full production
  • Data-driven JAMstack with Sourcebit - I spent much of the early part of my career building file ingest workflows for media companies, these companies deal with lots of files, often big files, and they have to move them around and modify them - I've noticed that ingest workflows are viewed differently depending on the context, in machine learning companies for instance, the ingest workflows aren't so much about ingesting files, but about pulling in data from various APIs, and then processing the data - Anyway all to say, it's interesting to see the static website site generation space building tools for API based ingest workflows, this particular tool Sourcebit has taken a cli approach to creating configuration files that power the data ingest and processing - It's also interesting to me because I have recently been writing my own static site generator tool, and working with a lot more APIs
  • HTML - The Inaccessible Parts - A living document from Dave Rupert chronicling some of the inconsistencies in HTML
  • Chris Coyier drops some Typeography links
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Monday 2nd March, 2020 #

  • Travelling with 24" monitors - Pretty awesome DIY solution to this travel conundrum, I feel like travel screens could be a new area for tech
  • Little known features of iTerm2 - Covers smart selection and dynamic profiles, both really useful - other ones to check out are the pw manager and automatic colorisation of strings based on a regex
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