Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Saturday 31st October, 2020 #

  • Running Node.js on iOS and iPadOS via iSH
  • esbuild - An extremely fast JavaScript bundler - Appears to be gaining some traction, the docs look well written and well structured
  • Interview with Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek who is a maintainer of the JQuery project - It’s interesting to read about what he likes about maintaining such a project, sure it’s not the so called modern javascript but JQuery is still running in something like 70% of the most popular websites
  • Where do content creators have their discussions online?
  • IH - GitHub Actions for custom content workflows
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Thursday 29th October, 2020 #

  • Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab - They are responsible for among other things developing Wikipedia, so it’s relatively big news when they make a big technology decision, they also recently decided to start using Vue as their front end framework
  • actions/cache - Cache dependencies and build outputs in GitHub Actions - Looks like this action could be very useful for optimising GitHub actions, making it possible to cache assets between workflow runs
  • If not SPAs, What? - Some general all round commentary on the current state of web development
  • I wish I had an rss reader that was scriptable, what I’d like todo is automatically subscribe to the feed of any blog that I post to my linkblog, then at a later date have some way to re-evaluate whether to stay subscribed or not, maybe there could be some stats that would make that decision easier, just thinking out loud
  • Comparing Static Site Generator Build Times - Really interesting article especially if you are at all into websites that are built using jamstack architectures and techniques, would be great if they also published the actual build times as well as the relative results
  • From the that looks interesting department, the LG Wing is a dual screen smart phone where one screen swivels / rotates into position, looks like it could be quite nifty for gaming, and the example of playing a game while watching a YouTube video has me wondering if some online code editors could make good use of this configuration
  • Surprise! The Section 230 Hearing Wasn’t About Section 230 - By the sounds of it Twitter’s Jack Dorsey got an earful from some of the senators
  • The latest in my experimental podcast is a collection of recordings of a man playing his trumpet in the park
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Wednesday 28th October, 2020 #

  • There is some pretty radically futuristic bits in the ToS for Starlink’s new internet service, the governing law section contains the following words: earth, moon, mars, free planet, transit, starship, colonisation spacecraft, earth-based government, Martian activities, and of course Martian settlement - wow the bar for ToS's just got raised rather significantly
  • RIAA’s YouTube-DL Takedown Ticks Off Developers and GitHub’s CEO
  • Reddit worries it’s going to be crushed in the fight against Big Tech - Interview with Reddit’s general council Benjamin Lee, the thing that strikes me is how he’s saying what chance do they have against the tech giants if section 230 is repealed, well if he’s saying that about Reddit, the so called “front page of the internet”, what chance do the rest of us have?
  • SpaceX prices Starlink satellite internet service at $99 per month, according to e-mail
  • Amazon is turning Audible into a true podcast app - Always good to see the podcasting landscape moving forward, meanwhile I was able to upload another recording to the internet archive, which should drop in the feed by tomorrow, tried to upload another, and uploads are blocked again :(
  • Zuckerberg And Facebook Throw The Open Internet Under The Bus - There is a lot of talk about reforming a bit of law called “Section 230”, it’s what has made it possible for smaller startup companies to build their products and services without fear of being squashed by existing companies, it’s become synonymous with the “Open Internet”, but some people feel it’s leading to disinformation spreading too easily - It doesn’t paint Zuckerberg in a very good light, but it also is quite thin on what the proposed reforms might be
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Tuesday 27th October, 2020 #

  • Freelance Web Developer, Consultant, Automation Engineer - I’ve just added a profile to my GitHub main page, check it out! I am available for hire to work on interesting projects :)
  • Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
  • Music industry forces widely used journalist tool offline - This is about the youtube-dl cli tool which is widely used for many important non copyright infringing use cases
  • 3 days of trying to upload a 300KB file to the internet archive, finally found an internet connection where the upload succeeded, tried to upload another equally small file, uploads are all failing again, so the pretty great recordings I got of a rain storm and of a man playing the trumpet will have to wait, until when I just don’t know
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Saturday 24th October, 2020 #

  • I was hoping to add a few more audio recordings to the podcast feed today, now that I’m in iTunes, but I can’t upload any files to the internet archive (where I am hosting the files), I’ve tried 3 or 4 different internet connections today, and none of my uploads complete :(
  • Introducing the npm public roadmap and a new feedback process - This seems like a good move, I previously opened some bug reports on the npm project and it felt more difficult than it needed to be, had to open a separate account on their website and never got much feedback, so it’s good to see all these public roadmap git repos
  • RSS feeds for your Github releases, tags and activity - Cool that there are repo RSS feeds, it would be awesome though if there was a feed for issues & PRs, which there doesn’t appear to be
  • Differences Between MacOS and Linux Scripting - There are quite a lot of differences between the two platform when it comes to scripting, this article does a good job of highlighting some of the differences you are likely to encounter
  • DevOps best practices Q&A - Automated deployments at GitHub
  • YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA - I’ve used youtube-dl a lot over the years, as far as I know pretty much always for non copyright infringing use cases, so it’s really sad to see this great cli tool get taken down
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Friday 23rd October, 2020 #

  • Mark Smith’s Podcast is now in iTunes!
  • Node.js v15.0.0 is here! - The official notes for the release, also mentions an upgrade to v8 8.6 which brings Promise.any(), AggregateError, String.prototype.replaceAll(), and Logical assignment operators &&=, ||=, and ??=
  • What’s New In Node.js 15? - N-API Version 7, npm 7, AbortController, QUIC, Updated handling of rejections
  • Writing new websites the old fashion way - A short exploration into getting rid of the compile step while keeping a modern javascript setup by using ES modules
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Thursday 22nd October, 2020 #

  • Keeping track of live code with Netlify - Remi Sharp shares a neat workflow that uses some of the Netlify environment variables to embed a GitHub link in the webpage of his site that compares the code from the current build with that if the previous build so you can see what changed, and thus quickly find code that broke something
  • How to check if a URL exists with bash and curl
  • Twenty Thousand Hertz Podcast #107 | Dies Irae - Great episode, includes chants!
  • Airbnb announces multi-year partnership with Jony Ive and LoveFrom, his new independent design firm - “LoveFrom has amassed a creative team including designers, architects, musicians, writers, engineers and artists”
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Monday 19th October, 2020 #

  • Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It - Very thorough roundup of the landscape with wanderings into music history, video, broadcast, podcasting, gaming and virtual - Very long though, I drifted off towards the end
  • Atlassian to end sale and support of on-premise server products by 2024 They make a lot of very popular developer products including Bitbucket, Jira and Bamboo
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Saturday 17th October, 2020 #

  • Ever wondered why the TC39 is called that? It stands for technical committee of ECMA, here is a list of all the other technical committees and steering groups
  • tc39/ecma262 - Repo that hosts the Javascript specification, this where proposals for new language features are discussed
  • whatwg//html HTML Standard - The repo where the html standard is managed
  • Why Get Involved in Web Standards?
  • Google’s new ‘hum to search’ feature can figure out the song that’s stuck in your head
  • Workflow visualization - Another interesting looking Actions feature in development
  • Organization and enterprise workflows -One of the items on the GitHub roadmap that looks interesting, the ability to run an Actions workflow against any repo in an organisation
  • GitHub public roadmap - Worth keeping an eye on this as they are developing interesting new features - I am particularly interested in Actions features
  • The Node.js web server frameworks team are putting together some examples that show how the next generation http libraries could work
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Friday 16th October, 2020 #

  • I'm Slow And That's Okay - Great post about a certain aspect of development that is crucial but often overlooked
  • RFC for the new npm 7.0.0 workspaces feature - Skip to the examples where you will get a good idea of how these workspaces function by seeing the symlinks that get created in the project file system
  • Npm CLI v7.0.0 released - This release has what looks to be a really useful feature called workspaces, which make it much easier to work on several packages inside a project at the same time
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Wednesday 14th October, 2020 #

  • Run an action from another action? - Being able to create your own actions is great but based on this post, it’s not currently possible to use already created actions from within your own actions, so for now at least, actions you create can only contain your own code, which is actually quite a big limitation
  • Creating GitHub actions - After creating several GitHub workflows composed of community actions, eventually you will want to reuse those workflows, and the way to do that is to turn the workflows you created into your own actions, which you can then use as the building blocks of subsequent workflows you build
  • What do you use shell scripts for?
  • Netflix discontinues free trials across all territories
  • Contract to run .eu domain-name registry is up for grabs - Rumours of corruption, and do people really want .eu domains anyway? Brussels wants the domain to represent multi-lingualism
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Monday 12th October, 2020 #

  • Some pretty good analysis of the recent popularity of Stories type features on all major social media platforms
  • John Gruber writes a piece about Microsoft’s recently published position on the whole platforms are too powerful conversation - A good reminder that there are always many ways to parse the things that tech companies say about their motives and actions
  • A curation of CC licensed music from various artists and genres for you to use, however you like with correct attribution, in your creative projects
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Sunday 11th October, 2020 #

  • create-pull-request - Does what it says on the tin, create a pull request, easy and simple
  • merge-pull-request-action - A simple GitHub Action for merging pull requests
  • find-pull-request-action - A GitHub Action for finding pull requests
  • House Democrats say Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple enjoy ‘monopoly power’ and recommend big changes - This report is making quite a lot of tech people pay attention, it’s interesting stuff and it’s probably time some of these practices are scrutinised, I’ve been wondering lately because the future is rather unpredictable with the rapid advance of AI for everyone, I’m wondering if there aren’t some counter intuitive scenarios where having a few big players would in fact be better, what does the future look like when every small business is as powerful as these big 4 tech giants? The description of Google as “an ecosystem of interlocking monopolies” is kind of worrying, what does that look like in the future?
  • Do you think GitHub Actions has an overwhelm problem?
  • Civilization on the Moon - and what it means for life on Earth
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Saturday 10th October, 2020 #

  • If you are looking to build some custom content based workflows, feel free to get in touch with me anytime, as well as web development, I have years of experience building workflows for big media companies
  • automerge-action - Another auto-merge action that looks interesting
  • merge-me-action Automatically merges Pull Requests - It’s possible to implement some pretty neat workflows that use pull requests and repo branches as sort of queues for inbound content, to be reviewed and approved by real people, then published into statically rendered sites, this action auto-merges PRs
  • awesome-actions - A curated list of awesome actions to use on GitHub - Be careful here as it’s where the overwhelm sets in, I wouldn’t go too deep into these until you have built several simple workflows, still though it’s nice to see some of the possibilities
  • Triggering GitHub Actions across different repositories - After reading this post you start to see a lot more of the power of these workflows, you get all sorts of webhooks with payloads in each repo, and the payload is available to use inside the triggered workflow, which runs in a container, and you can easily build up whichever runtime environment you need, be it NodeJS, Bash, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby etc...
  • Publishing actions in GitHub Marketplace
  • Deploying to Heroku from GitHub Actions
  • How to Manually Trigger a GitHub Actions Workflow - The manual triggers seems to have been introduced quite recently, and makes it possible to launch your workflow from the web UI after filling out a form with the workflow inputs
  • Building Gatsby with GitHub Actions and deploying to Netlify - A good example of how to deploy your app to Netlify
  • I’ve been doing a lot of work using GitHub Actions the past few days - It’s really quite a cool automation framework geared specifically around developer workflows, so anything that involves source code repos, but what’s really surprising is the variety of things you can implement, and it doesn’t have to be just for code, but it can also support all kinds of interesting content workflows - The volume of published workflows is a little overwhelming though, what follows is some of the links I found useful
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