Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Tuesday 29th September, 2020 #

  • I also have a patreon account, it you like the links I post, and even if you don’t particularly like them, it would be great to have you as a member of this very exclusive club :)
  • Given the incredible efficiency of the internet to deliver incredible javascript articles covering exactly the topic I am currently interested in, it’s probably a good time to mention that I offer NodeJS development services, it’s a great time to start as project, feel free to get in touch with me!
  • The Flavors of Object-Oriented Programming (in JavaScript) - I mentioned interest in javascript classes as well as getters and setters 3 days ago, and today a well written article about exactly that, and it’s at just the right level of detail, though it is rather long, which is more emblematic of the nature of javascript than it is the quality of the article - On the one hand it is quite nice to have several ways of doing things, especially for experienced developers, but for learning I feel it makes it more difficult, though perhaps once you finally do understand it, you know it better because you’ve had to think about it from so many different angles, but even then I suspect the weeds are always just a short distance away, maybe the vigilance necessary eventually becomes second nature
  • Google Demands 30% Cut From App Developers in Its Play Store
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Monday 28th September, 2020 #

  • GitHub Actions - Looks to me like the docs have had a bit of a restructuring, at least today I was able to quickly find the actions config syntax
  • There is some talk about the UK repealing GDPR and creating its own data protection legal framework
  • How do you deploy your Node.js back end?
  • Back-end Developers RoadMap - Quite a comprehensive list, there is a lot to learn, but the best way is to build a complete app while you are learning these topics
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Sunday 27th September, 2020 #

  • New Field Recording: Motorbike Sales Guy 1
  • 16,000 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use under the terms of the RemArc Licence
  • How Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service compares to Stadia, xCloud, and GeForce Now - Interestingly the iOS version of Luna is a progressive web app so they don’t have to pay Apple 30% or use their payments provider, also because it’s a progressive web app, it is completely cross platform and you can switch between any devices mid-game just by opening a URL
  • Elon Musk slams Microsoft exclusively licensing OpenAI's text-generating software - I like that Elon is standing up for openess, but I’m not sure what the best approach is for AI, on the one hand the power gained from these new AI technologies is in such a massive scale that it might be quite dangerous, but is it safer to have all that power in one (or a few) company, or just have it widely available to everyone and hope that everything balances out for the better
  • The failed promise of Web Components - Based on the title, you would think this article was a bit of a downer as far as web components go, but it’s actually quite a good read, with some good points made and some constructive suggestions, and it has resulted in some interesting discussion in the comments
  • Vime is a customizable, extensible, accessible and framework agnostic media player - Pretty cool library if you are looking to integrate a media player to play videos from multiple places like Vimeo, YouTube etc, based on web components, should be easy to integrate into most frontend frameworks
  • Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums 2003 vs. 2012 vs. 2020 - Really liked this list, very fun
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Saturday 26th September, 2020 #

  • JavaScript properties, getters and setters - Ever wondered why javascript has special getter and setter properties, couldn’t you just use a regular method? Turns out you totally can, but it’s not “modern”, after reading this article you will at least know the different ways, and what is modern
  • Feature watch - ECMAScript 2021 - I was most interested in the candidate features adding public and private fields to classes, having read through most of the description here I am left with the overall impression that it introduces a lot of complexity, maybe it’s because so much of the implementation is visible and that in practice once you start using them it will be kind of obvious, but this article doesn’t make me want to dive in, plain old javascript objects get you pretty far
  • graffiti - Minimalistic GraphQL framework - According to the docs this library makes it super simple to implement a graphql endpoint in node with just some mongoose models and configuration placed in a directory tree
  • Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house
  • How does one lead a team in a hackathon?
  • Dark mode with only 1 css property
  • Employees threaten to strike if Spotify refuses to censor Joe Rogan
  • Google plans crackdown on major developers circumventing Play Store in-app purchase rules
  • Coalition for App Fairness unites developers to fight Apple's App Store fees and policies
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Friday 25th September, 2020 #

  • The Dream Team Tapes - Really enjoyed this 8 part podcast series chronicling the stories around the greatest team in NBA history, various impromptu interviews from some of the best - Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Clyde Drexler and the others, if you were watching basketball in the early 90s you’ll probably really like this series
  • How’s my feed? - Another podcast feed validator tool
  • Podcast feed validator tool
  • A Podcaster’s Guide to RSS - Has the specification details for the iTunes specific tags you have to add to the feed so that it can be read by Apple
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Wednesday 23rd September, 2020 #

  • An Introduction to Multi-Platform Design Systems - Looks interesting, another one for reading later...
  • New Field Recording: Noisey Cafe 2
  • New Field Recording: Noisey Cafe
  • The Era of Visual Studio Code - Well written thought piece about editors and VSCode in particular, interesting to me is the fact that I had hardly any issues parsing this in a increasingly noisey cafe even though arguably the complexity of the text is higher than the previous bundles piece posted, I suppose it’s just familiarity / fluency with the concepts
  • Ben Thompson does an overview of the current state of bundles in 2020, Microsoft, Disney, Apple, Amazon and Netflix - I haven’t read this through yet because my head is in a low level javascript space with very different abstractions right now, plus noisey cafe, and I’m not able to parse his analysis well enough, but Ben always has good analysis in both his audio and written content, so I’m hoping to read this later, it’s got a good opening and it’s a topic I’m very interested in
  • The vanilla Javascript basics to know before learning React JS
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Tuesday 22nd September, 2020 #

  • Apple podcast feed technical requirements
  • A field recording of some chanting I made around 2016, somewhere in south east asia, most probably quite early in the morning
  • How to Get your Podcast on iTunes / Apple Podcasts
  • Creating a podcast website using GitHub and the Internet Archive
  • 10 Niche Ideas for Web Developers to Get Clients - Some good tips on market segments to target as a web developer
  • What I realised after learning Python, TypeScript and Kotlin - A lot of languages have very similar roots and it’s relatively easy to switch between them once you know one of them well
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Monday 21st September, 2020 #

  • What is Microdata?
  • I’m 42 today so I’m thinking about the Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • I’m having tremendous trouble reading this article about fish sticks because as a Brit these are called fish fingers and fish sticks just sounds silly to me, but as an adult fish finger sounds a bit off because really you don’t want to be eating fingers of any kind, as a kid none of this stuff ever mattered because the name is obviously just a pointer to the thing that is nice to eat
  • NetNewsWire 5.1 for Mac - New release of the open source RSS reader, has a neat Feedly sync feature
  • Let's Encrypt's New Root and Intermediate Certificates - Quite technical but well written and relatively easy to understand, interesting to see their architecture and how they handle migrations over long periods of time
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Sunday 20th September, 2020 #

  • GitHub CLI 1.0 is now available - I’ve always wanted to be able to manage PRs, issues etc from the command line, turns out there is a cli tool for that, the latest version has just been released
  • How vanilla JS Proxies work - I’d been reading about proxies recently but I couldn't think of many real world examples of where to use them, turns out you can create reactive UI components with them
  • Reef - A lightweight library for creating reactive, state-based components and UI - I had not seen this framework before, docs are easy and quick to read, worth considering for smaller projects
  • Bootstrap Templates - Open-Source and Free - If you are looking to create an admin panel or dashboard these could be a good way to go
  • 10 useful HTML5 features, you may not be using - Some if these have neat functionality that works without javascript
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Friday 18th September, 2020 #

  • To All The Jobs I Had Before - the author summarises the things she learnt in the jobs she had before becoming a developer, well thought out and nicely written
  • undici - An HTTP/1.1 client, written from scratch for Node.js
  • Apple is making Shazam a bigger part of your iPhone - I had missed the news that Apple had bought Shazam last year, so this is a nice surprise, in upcoming iOS you’ll be able to identify a song you’re currently listening to, even when you are using headphones, so it theoretically should work while you’re listening to podcasts, IMO probably the best feature to be added to the phone in the past 5 years
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Thursday 17th September, 2020 #

  • I just created a Patreon page, not quite sure if I did it right, an experiment that probably won’t go anywhere, but if you like the links I post, it would be nice to have some patreons! :)
  • material-shell - A modern desktop interface for Linux - It’s a Gnome extension that implements a tiling UI that sort of resembles tmux but it’s more modern, the official website is quite cool looking, there is also a floating mode if the tiling is getting annoying
  • Interview with Andrew Bosworth (VP of AR and VR) about Facebook's Project Aria, they are test-driving tech for AR glasses - I’m wondering what cool developer tools you could create in an AR world
  • Writing even more CSS with Accessibility in Mind, Part 1 - Progressive Enhancement - This article does a great job of explaining progressive enhancement with neat examples, I wish there were more articles like this because progressive enhancement is brilliant but it’s difficult to imagine how to actually implement features
  • Amazon Music Joins Podcasting Fray
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Wednesday 16th September, 2020 #

  • Apple accuses Epic of ‘starting a fire and pouring gasoline on it’ in new Fortnite filing - I can say from personal experience that it’s definitely the gasoline pouring that’s the problem not the fire starting, it’s really something to experience, the fire doesn’t give a shit about gravity and will ignite the gasoline all the way right back up into whatever pouring device you are using, and now you have to dispose of pouring device full of gasoline which is on fire, not very easy to do safely (makes me wonder a bit about the quality of this analogy) - Anyway, very fucking scary, very fucking dangerous, if you’re thinking “yeah but it’s just a small bit of gasoline”, nope doesn’t matter, and it happens lightning fast
  • Would you use a mobile device with no App Store, where you could only use apps you wrote yourself?
  • What is the Value of Browser Diversity? - Well written and thought out piece about the danger to the web of loosing Firefox, with only one rendering engine the web sort of becomes another App Store, I hope they keep the URLs
  • Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons - I wonder how they expect the western countries to react, seems like they are betting either the west already has a similar database, or it will build one, or do they expect them to just do nothing, it’s the worst kind of race to the bottom, where we all end up imprisoned by the technology we are building
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Sunday 13th September, 2020 #

  • Why Apple’s anti-tracking move hurts everyone … but Apple - There are some compelling arguments in this article, but as a user I feel like there should be an option to just turn off tracking all together in case the tracking gets too oppressive, and as a developer I would argue the same thing because if it’s always on you might not be able to debug issues completely
  • How TechCrunch took Disrupt virtual - and grew for its tenth anniversary
  • Deep Dive - Next Gen low level Node HTTP APIs - A look at the low level QUIC protocol implementation, mention of possible web-sockets replacement, and also a discussion around a unified http library and how the higher level frameworks could use this next gen API
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Friday 11th September, 2020 #

  • Minitel - The Online World France Built Before the Web - I remember the Minitel numbers on TV and Radio, they were everywhere, very much like how Twitter hash tags are today, interesting comparison to the Apple app store ecosystem - Nice bit of computing history, well written article
  • I'm writing this on my phone - Dave Rupert experiments with writing blog posts on a mobile device and writes about his perceptions as he writes
  • React 17 - Why it's so important ? - Quite a good summary of the changes arriving in the latest version of the framework
  • Blue/Green Node.js Deploys with NGINX - Great write up, I have built very similar setups myself - It does get quite complicated, but you get the ability to deploy anywhere - Maybe some better open source tools will be developed to make the process easier
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Wednesday 9th September, 2020 #

  • Working with JavaScript Media Queries - I’ve used media queries in CSS a lot but I didn’t know you could use media queries from javascript - Cool!
  • Apple counter-sues Epic - The high profile case continues, I hope all the users are ok, I guess mostly it’s probably fine because it’s just games, but these days some people rely on these platforms to make a living
  • Chris Coyier does a roundup of recent progress in web components, disappointing to hear that with the way people seem to be using them, we are just as locked as using a framework
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Saturday 5th September, 2020 #

  • Designing a JavaScript Plugin System - I really liked this article because though we use libraries every day that have plugin systems, there isn’t that much material on how to go about actually building a plugin system for your app - the tutorial builds the “world’s smallest plugin system”, it’s a calculator where you can register new functionality by writing a plugin, by the end of it you have a good idea of how to structure plugin systems and the trade-offs inherent in designing such functionality
  • Mastering Hard Parts of JavaScript - A participant in the frontend masters course is writing up notes on GitHub as he completes the course - Worth a read because imo this course looks like best in class
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Wednesday 2nd September, 2020 #

  • The problem with C - Interesting article that covers the relationship between C and C++ and the two developer communities - I think there could be a similar dynamic developing between Javascript and Typescript, that’s why I previously asked what the TC39 committee thought of Typescript, well the point to note is that as far as C++ developers are concerned they want C to not evolve as a language, they want to keep it simple, they don’t want C to have new features, and then they also blame C for all the problems in C++, “many C++ developers wait for the day when C finally burns in the hot flames of hell”, that’s not a good dynamic
  • GitHub introduces the GitHub Container Registry
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Tuesday 1st September, 2020 #

  • Facebook - “we are left with a choice of either removing news entirely or accepting a system that lets publishers charge us for as much content as they want at a price with no clear limits”
  • Twitter releases feature to create Tweets about a Tweet and calls them “Quote Tweets“ - Cool feature name
  • Facebook Threatens to Cut Off Australians From Sharing News - The australian government is trying to pass legislation forcing Google and Facebook to pay media companies
  • The Architecture of Open Source Applications -Interesting sounding book, but also some interesting ideas for developer podcasts in this HN thread
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