Thursday 31st December, 2020 #

• New Year's Eve fireworks display over Sydney Harbour as Australia ushers in 2021 - Heck of a year, the australians have made it to the other side
• How we built the GitHub globe - I hadn’t seen the new homepage, it looks pretty cool!
• Software Engineering Podcast - Cloud-Native Applications with Cornelia Davis (Repeat) - Looks at applications architected and built to run exclusively in cloud environments, covers event driven architectures, functional programming, infrastructure as code, Kubernetes, immutability and workloads, cloud failure domains, statelessness, microservices vs monoliths, and the new cloud abstractions such as Lambda and Big Query
• 🚀 Housekeeping note: I have added a link right at the top of the blog to make it easier to discover the daily linkblog, there’s so much fun action there!
• Big news in the podcast space - Amazon to acquire the Wondery Podcast Network, the deal is reported to be worth $300 million

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Wednesday 30th December, 2020 #

• More challenging projects every programmer should try - A list of interesting projects to try, with descriptions of what the minimal apps would be like, and suggestions as to what features could be added - I found it super interesting to learn about the different shapes of apps, I am mostly familiar with building web client/server and cli tools, so things like games engines, text editors, compilers, mini operating systems and video game emulators were completely unknown to me, but also the key value store and stock trading apps sound like a lot of fun to built, the article does a really great job of describing all these projects
• alex/what-happens-when - An attempt to answer the age old interview question "What happens when you type google.com into your browser and press enter?"
• CandyMail makes it easy to trigger and send multi-step email sequences in Node.js using a single JSON file
• Why I Use Web Components - Looks at the main reasons to use web components, namely reusability, robustness, stability, for code that will still function long into the future and increase in performance as the platform is optimised
• Google Maps' Moat is Evaporating - Interesting piece looking at the online maps space, some quality analysis of a sector composed of some of the biggest tech companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) and that is seeing a lot of movement between competing approaches, notably the rise of OpenStreetMap
• Apple patents ‘reconfigurable’ Mac keyboard with small display for each key
• Google Short Videos Carousel Displays TikTok & Instagram Videos - I’m not seeing this in my search results yet
• Css Tricks Design v18 - I love that Chris Coyier redesigns his website so often, it’s very on-brand, but also his writeups are great and the sites are proof you can have both fun design and a good reading experience

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Tuesday 29th December, 2020 #

• 🚀 Building websites and workflows - It's nice when a clear narrative comes into view
• 8 Themes For The Near Future Of Tech - Scott Belsky the Chief Product Officer for Adobe Creative Cloud looks into his technology crystal ball, he’s got an interesting angle on things and the future he paints feels kind of novel
• Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Contestable and Fair Markets in the Digital Sector (Digital Markets Act) - Dec 2020
• Online Harms White Paper - Full Government Response to the consultation (Dec 2020)

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Monday 28th December, 2020 #

• 56 Online Communities for Entrepreneurs
• A rundown of the main items from the Brexit deal, not so great for UK broadcasters and video-on-demand companies
• Bash HTTP monitoring dashboard - Simple bash script that monitors many sites in parallel using curl and generates a static site that displays the results
• What AlphaGo Can Teach Us About How People Learn - I know that AI is super trendy at the minute, and sure it's sort of interesting, but personally I like building websites and workflows
• Systems design explains the world - volume 1 - Well worth the time to read this article if you do any type of programming, covers the basics of what systems design actually is then examines 3 classes of system design problems: chicken-egg, second-system effect and innovators dilemma - Lots of great real world examples and very well written, a pleasant read on a marvellous text focussed website
• We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow - lots of interesting data and correlations, the standout bit of information for me was that JQuery is still on 40% of websites, React/Angular/Vue only on ~0.9% of websites

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Sunday 27th December, 2020 #

• A Short History of Capitalism
• Create Reusable Web Components in HTML
• Dave Rupert reviews his 2020 - A lot of accomplishments (80 books, wow) despite the difficulties, I’m looking forward to see where his involvement with web components will lead in 2021
• chilts/mongodb-queue - Message queues which uses MongoDB - Simple and straight forward interface, I successfully used these queues for managing backend processes in some of my past projects
• Redis, Kafka or RabbitMQ - Which MicroServices Message Broker To Choose? - Short and to the point article that highlights some of the main considerations, I thought it’s worth mentioning that I’ve also had success creating MongoDB backed queues for smaller applications
• Kit FUI - User interfaces from film, television, video games and the designers that created them
• European tech accuses US of using sanctions to shut it out of China

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Saturday 26th December, 2020 #

• The Art of Code - Dylan Beattie - If you have ever written a line of code, and even if you haven’t, you’ll most likely enjoy this talk, definitely worth watching
• Lex Friedman Podcast #80 - Vitalik Buterin - Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of Money - Fascinating and well paced conversation with the founder of Etherium covering a wide range of topics including Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchains, proof of work and identity, PKI and digital signatures, Bitcoin, money, the Etherium origin story, smart contracts, software engineering and project governance challenges, proof of stake and consensus algorithms, sharding of storage and computation, Etherium 2.0, games built using smart contracts, Uniswap, AI and crypto, and closes on Immortality
• In a streaming wars world, JustWatch has become an essential tool - It’s a search tool for digital media - “Type in a movie or TV show, and it’ll tell you everywhere you can stream it, watch it for free with ads, buy, or rent it. Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, you simply click and it’ll link you directly to that service”
• Demystifying SEO with experiments - The Pinterest engineering team describe their SEO testing framework, they run experiments whenever they make major changes to the frontend of the website to make sure that there aren’t any SEO regressions resulting in negative search rankings

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Friday 25th December, 2020 #

• IH Thread - Solo founders, what if you get hit by a bus?
• The Lunch Money Stack - A SaaS Solopreneur's Toolkit - Lots of technologies in this stack rundown, a very nice collection, including NodeJS, lots of other open source tools, services, hosting platforms and gadgets
• Pinterest Predicts - They have gone through their search data and produced this very nice looking website that has some predictions for trends in 2021, each trend page describes the trend with stats about relevant keyword popularity

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Thursday 24th December, 2020 #

• UK and EU agree Brexit trade deal
• FreeBSD has migrated from Subversion to Git for source control
• Build a static site generator in 40 lines with Node.js - Great writeup that’s given me lots of ideas about how to improve my linkblog static site generator, showing which modules to use so as to support globbing, markdown, and frontmatter to create a static site with minimal code
• Five easy ways for Elon Musk to combine his companies into a superconglomerate -Quite a lot of wild fantasy theorising in this fun piece
• Zoom is reportedly developing email and calendar services
• 🚀 Web design that focusses on text content is the best - I have realised recently how much I like web design where the focus is on the text content, even if it’s really simple design, it doesn’t matter as long as some of the points I cover are implemented, the site is pleasurable to read

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Wednesday 23rd December, 2020 #

• U.S. approves NYSE listing plan to cut out Wall Street middlemen - With the new regulation “Issuers can sell shares directly on the exchange in an auction, which would increase opportunities for more investors to purchase shares at the initial offering price, rather than having to wait to buy in the aftermarket”
• emqx/emqx - EMQ X Broker - Scalable Distributed MQTT Message Broker for IoT in 5G Era
• 🚀 Re-post: GitHub Actions for custom content workflows
• Great writeup of a custom content workflow - A conference website built on Jamstack architecture, that receives user generated content submissions via a form, backend processing is done using a GitHub Actions workflow that creates a PR for each submission and rebuilds the site with the new content after reviewer approval
• Web History by Jay Hoffmann - The next chapter in his series about the history of the web, this instalment is all about how the web transformed the publishing industry, with fringe new media publications such as Wired, and experiments by webzines, and later blogs; and also looks at the effect on old media and local publications
• WiFi 6 gets 1.34 Gbps on the Raspberry Pi CM4 - Great detailed writeup of the process, the IOT space has a lot of promise but it’s clear that there is still a lot of hurdles, inconsistencies and workarounds necessary, I’m also surprised that the theoretical limit of WIFI 6 is an insanely fast 10 Gbps
• A look at what happens to the various presidential Twiitter accounts when Trump leaves office, al the @POTUS tweets get archived and moved to an account called @POTUS45, then new accounts are created for the next president starting with 0 followers, Trump keeps his personal account

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Tuesday 22nd December, 2020 #

• Parsing JSON at the CLI - A Practical Introduction to `jq` (and more!) - This jq intro has some well thought out and illustrated examples, I hadn’t grasped until reading this that the | in jq commands behaved similar to unix pipes, passing the output from 1 filter to the input of another filter, and there’s also some links to useful related tools such as an online jq playground, jq for yaml (yq), jq for html (pup) - Given all the JSON used in web development, knowing how to handle it on the command line is a very useful skill to have
• NodeJS and IoT - An Overview
• rwaldron/johnny-five - JavaScript Robotics and IoT programming framework, developed at Bocoup
• Twitter expands its new API with conversation and reply controls
• IoT and Node.JS -How to Catch the Opportunity? - NodeJS is very well suited for IOT applications, this article covers some of the aspects to consider such as hardware and security, and explores some tracking solutions - I’m not a huge fan of technology that tracks employees, though there are a lot of industrial sectors where such technologies would be valuable to increase safety, I think the more interesting use cases are in creating low cost infrastructure for fleets of distributed sensors, and simple device configuration UIs
• wunderbucket - Turn local folders into global websites - This hosting solution might be relevant for small projects where you don’t want to muck around with command line, git etc, for simply making a folder of HTML/CSS/JS live without any fuss or ceremony
• SoftBank launches blank-check company to join SPAC craze
• Apple could begin producing its own car with a 'next level' battery in 2024

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Monday 21st December, 2020 #

• Ask IH: What tech stacks are you using for your internet-of-things (IOT) projects?
• Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V - Another piece about the future of chip architectures, it appears like a general move towards ARM cpus surrounded by specialised corprocessors running RISC-V with special extensions to the base instruction set, also discusses the possibility of using RISC-V for the cpu
• How Does a Modern Microprocessor Work? - Well written article that covers the main parts of a modern chip architecture, and looks at how they operate by describing the a fictional RISC-V microprocessor called the Calcutron-33, it’s a minimal example but for hardware chips
• FFmpeg is 20 years old today
• Raspberry Pi Server Mark III - Create a rack for raspberry pi servers using a 3D printer
• SoftBank to file for SPAC on Monday - SPACs are companies created for the sole purpose of buying another company, the SPAC IPOs and then later merges with the company to be purchased, these investment vehicles have become popular over the past few years, but it’s Soffbank’s first time using a SPAC

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Sunday 20th December, 2020 #

• 10 Must do Jekyll SEO optimizations - I need to do some SEO work on the blog in my quest to increase traffic to the site
• Facebook’s Laughable Campaign Against Apple Is Really Against Users and Small Businesses
• Strange radio transmissions are emanating from Proxima Centauri - That’s the closest star to the sun, they found the radio signals by digging through old data, we currently only are aware of technological ways of generating the narrow frequency range that these signals are being transmitted on
• Ask IH: How do you generate stats for your RSS feeds?
• Measuring & Tracking RSS - It’s pretty difficult to get proper stats on your RSS feeds when you want to use your own domain for the feed
• 🚀 Housekeeping Note: I’ve created a separate sponsorships page, based on the original blog post, and I’ve updated the text a bit so it’s a bit clearer what you get when you become a sponsor
• 🚀 Housekeeping Note: I’ve created a separate page for my policy on job interviews, based on the original blog post
• If Sapiens were a blog post - Summarises Yuval Harari’s book, all about the evolution of humans, very broad perspective on how things got to where we are today

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Saturday 19th December, 2020 #

• Getting lucky with posting on Hacker News - Some very interesting data mining, also a really wonderful text based website that is a pleasure to read on a mobile device
• Tune Into Forests From Around The World. Escape, Relax & Preserve - Cool idea for a website, it would be great if they added a feature to play the next forest without having to click a link
• What 2020 accomplishments are you proud of? (IH Thread)
• Substack is great for getting started with blogging and newsletters but some are finding they hit limitations as they try to grow their business - I’ve been hitting some of the same issues, namely the lack of both an API and markdown support means that it’s impossible to automate anything so each newsletter takes a few hours of copy / pasting links
• Microsoft may be developing its own, in-house ARM CPU designs
• Create a Dynamic Sitemap with Next.js

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Friday 18th December, 2020 #

• Google Sheets for Developers - Honestly I found this talk a bit confusing in how the information was presented, but I like the example use case, collecting data into Google Sheets and using scheduled cloud functions to create charts and a slide deck and sending these out via email, I could see how something like this could really streamline weekly team meetings
• Pretty amazing stop motion animation of Tom Cruise
• 🚀 New Post: The art of the minimal example - In praise of minimal examples I’ve added a “Minimals” section to my Portfolio, and in this post I explore the concept and why it’s a useful technique
• Github removed all non essential cookies from it’s websites so it no longer needs cookie popup consent forms - Thank you!
• goldbergyoni/nodebestpractices - The Node.js best practices list - Huge number of best practices curated by the community

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Thursday 17th December, 2020 #

• Facebook Wades Into ‘Fortnite’ Maker’s Dispute With Apple - Things are really heating up between big tech companies, this article does a good job of presenting the facts without too much commentary, it’s a complicated situation where some companies want to modify users behaviour to make money, now an increasing amount of users want to modify *their* behaviour, which looks much like a circular reference bug (to me at lest!), I hope we can somehow avoid an arms race to the bottom, I think the big picture is that we need a world wide web that is a pleasant experience, imho consent form popups plastered everywhere are not that, but also, modifying users behaviour to the point where you are tricking them, that's not ok either
• Manual steps in parallel groups available for Pipelines - This new Bitbucket feature for their automation product is interesting, makes it possible to have manual steps mid way through a workflow, where you have to click a button for the workflow to proceed
• Next.js CI / CD on AWS with GitHub Actions
• Twitter is returning retweets to the way they used to be - They are removing the automatic quote tweet prompt
• Facebook is creating a Cameo-like tool that lets you interact with celebs - It’s a video streaming app reportedly called Super, with interactive tools like tipping and digital gifts, ability to sell products, sounds cool, I like the name too
• Firefox Version 84.0 - Runs natively on Apple silicon M1 chips with 2.5 times faster startup time and web apps are twice as responsive; and accelerated rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11
• Tech Giants Face New Rules in Europe, Backed by Huge Fines - Two major new bills that focus on illegal content and anti-competitive behaviour

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Wednesday 16th December, 2020 #

• Minimal safe Bash script template - Some useful bash techniques presented in this writeup
• 🚀 Updated Portfolio - I’ve added a bunch of web development, workflow automation and devops projects from previous work and personal open source projects
• How to generate content ideas for your next blog post - I mostly use my linkblog to generate blog ideas from articles I find online, but there are specialist marketing tools available that look interesting if you are trying to grow your site
• AWS shifts focus to removing system complexity and observability - They want to focus less on developers and more on operators, more “systems thinking”
• Some big US tech firms are moving UK user data to US jurisdictions to avoid EU regulations - Controversial however might have the benefit of getting rid of the censorship consent forms that are plastered everywhere
• Google acquires CloudReady OS that turns old PCs into Chromebooks w/ plans to make official offering
• Microsoft unveils new native M1 support for many it it’s Microsoft 365 for Mac apps, including One Note, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook - They have all been rebuilt to be Universal apps, working on multiple architectures

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Tuesday 15th December, 2020 #

• 🚀 Portfolio - I’ve added a portfolio page to the blog that has a selection of some of the web development, workflow/automation solutions and devops projects I have worked on over the years
• mdn/content - The content behind MDN Web Docs
• Mozilla MDN Docs are going full Jamstack - Re-linking to my piece about the new collaboration Jamstack workflows that are being created for content sites, I think this is a really exiting area of web development at the present moment
• MDN on GitHub - Interesting to see Chris Coyier comment on the recent move of MDN Docs to a Jamstack + Github architecture, he runs css-tricks which is another huge web development docs site
• When to use SQL vs. NoSQL - Good high level overview of the major considerations, many folks end up using a bit of both, I think this is an interesting area, I’d like to see more real world examples where both types of are being used because I would expect there are some common patterns that emerge, the landscape is vast from small to large companies, different industries, different phases of development, and various business models
• FTC orders Amazon, TikTok owner ByteDance, Discord, Facebook and its subsidiary WhatsApp, Reddit, Snap, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube to explain how they collect and use personal data
• Mozilla launches campaign in support of Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 privacy features
• Protocol Source Code Podcast - Why video might be the biggest thing since the internet - Interview with Phil Libin who has held CEO positions at Evernote, All Turtles and most recently mmhmm, he believes we are entering completely new territory in the way we use video online, with new ways of collaborating, an increase in asynchronous communication, the rise of new platforms and a hybrid physical/digital future, I found his vision and perspective enlightening
• Amazon Zoox unveils self-driving robotaxi - Looks pretty cool, with carriage style seats that face each other, no driver and can reach speeds of up to 75mph

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Monday 14th December, 2020 #

• Paleontologists say mass extinctions on Earth follow a 27 million year cycle - Interesting article that describes the theory that there is another star in a massive orbit that periodically causes lots of comets to be slung at the earth, it doesn’t get into any predictions but it does note that the last mass extinction event was at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago
• Linux 5.10 - Linus Torvalds sends out the release plan - It’s so cool that we can see into the governance of this project, Linus gets a lot of push back for being rude/offensive, but in this case I really like how he communicates the plan to everyone, I wish the Linux project had some NodeJS code in it, It would be so cool to contribute
• Tesla may soon be as big as all other automakers combined - Looks at how insane the auto maker market is at the minute, with an outstanding gif that shows how market cap has evolved over the past 20 years for the biggest companies

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Sunday 13th December, 2020 #

• 🚀 New Post: Choosing your web development stack - There are lots of considerations when choosing a stack, this article will give you a broad view about web development so you can hopefully make some good choices
• Buy Don't Build - The author explores the landscape of buy vs build in detail, lots of good for thought, the arguments for building are generally much stronger when it’s a solution that solves something that is core to the business - I’m linking to the HN thread because there are some interesting comments about how vendor pricing models can effect growth in ways that aren’t immediately obvious
• A few ways to make money in FOSS - Reviews some tried and tested business models, some sane business advice and a few lead generation techniques
• Become shell literate - Concise and well written piece about why knowing how to use the shell can be extremely productive, with some neat pipeline examples to illustrate - As a side note, what a fantastically readable minimalist text based website

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Saturday 12th December, 2020 #

• Make it Personal - Nice article that’s gets to the core of why building your own personal site is a worthwhile endeavour, makes me want to make my site look more fancy, but I’m kind of happy with my minimalist boring, mostly text websites, for now I’m concentrating on the content, at least the homepage has some mountains in the background
• meli - Open source platform for deploying static sites and frontend applications - Sort of like Netlify, but self-hosted
• The dark reality behind Slack’s billion-dollar sale to Salesforce - Society needs to find a better way for small and big companies to co-exist, there is too much brutality
• Oracle moving headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin Texas

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Friday 11th December, 2020 #

• Web browser Brave introduces integrated privacy preserving news reader, initially just for well known media sites, but will support RSS feeds in the future, all content goes through their private CDN
• Normalization of non-deviance - Serial entrepreneur and solo-developer Peter Levels looks back at his successes, his scrappy but pragmatic, progressive and hands on approach to development, his approach to marketing and promotion, and his future plans to move towards team based development
• 🚀 Deciding when to build a custom solution in web development - It’s really very similar to building a shed
• EbookFoundation/free-programming-books - 📚 Freely available programming books - staggeringly vast collection of programming books in many languages
• OpenFaas - Serverless Node.js that you can run anywhere - Looks like this solution gives you some pretty good portability, with the possibility to execute functions in Google Cloud Run, standard VPS or Kubernetes
• Npm Release v7.1.0 - Two cool new features - npm set-script and npm exec
• How to handle request validation in your Express API - Makes a good case for using JSON Schema (soon to become a standard) to validate your API data instead of libraries like Joi or validate.js, it’s self-documenting and much more portable than library based solutions
• Introduction to Event Loop Utilization in Node.js - Interesting post that gets very technical about some of the core NodeJS dynamics, I haven’t had time to get completely through it, but it’s clear to me that the way some of the components are named is very confusing (to me at least!)

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Thursday 10th December, 2020 #

• I wonder how are website archive services like the Internet Archive dealing with the onslaught of consent forms that have appeared on websites since GDPR was introduced, surely they can’t automatically be accepting all the forms because there is no standard implementation, so won’t all the archives be covered in consent forms?
• Chrome Dev Summit: Google recaps 2020 work on browser privacy, richer web apps, and performance
• Apple and Google to Stop X-Mode From Collecting Location Data From Users’ Phones - More reasons for browser and platform vendors to make better tools for users to see exactly what information is being collected on their devices, I think a lot more attention needs to be focussed on the data brokers layer of the stack
• WhatsApp goes after Apple over privacy label requirements - I hadn’t heard about these privacy nutrition labels until now, I like the idea of users having better tools to see how they are being tracked, but WhatsApo makes a good point, it should apply to all apps including ones pre- installed on devices
• Microsoft confirms Xbox cloud gaming is coming to iOS in spring 2021 - The big news is that it will be via web browser rather than the AppStore, presumably it will be using a progressive web app, it would be interesting to see more technical details, like for instance if they are using web assembly

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Wednesday 9th December, 2020 #

• Software Engineering Podcast - WebAssembly with Brendan Eich (Repeat) - Wide ranging and high information density conversation, covered topics include web assembly, other languages in the browser, the end of javascript (or not!), the Brave browser, the modern digital advertising business, online business models, malware, fraud, conflicts of interest; publishers, users and even advertisers being overrun by parasites, pragmatic approaches to privacy, and browser diversity in a Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft world
• 🚀 The coming revolution in freelance web development - I discuss the changing role of freelance web developers, I think it’s an important topic we should be discussing
• 82 per cent of musicians earn less than £200 a year from streaming
• Red Hat kills off CentOS; users frustrated, angry and annoyed

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Tuesday 8th December, 2020 #

• When you cross post on dev.to you can add frontmatter to set among other things, the canonical_url, turns out that’s important for SEO #backenddevproblems
• Announcing one-click install Next.js Build Plugin on Netlify - Next.js has become one of the favoured frameworks, I’ve played around with it a bit and I like how the routing is done using folders, though when I tried it, I found running the server side JSX code in the debugger was a bit weird, nevertheless this will no doubt be a popular addition to Netlify
• 🚀 Ask IH: How and where would you promote freelance professional services?
• benwilber/boltstream - Boltstream Live Video Streaming Website + Backend - Looks kind of cool
• Apple’s new M1 chip strategy is going to be targeting datacentre adoption in a big way - Though I had heard about Amazon adding macs to their cloud, I hadn’t considered that Apple was about to embark on an advance into datacentres, the next few years will be interesting for the cloud
• Uber sells its self-driving unit to Aurora - The startup company is being valued at $10bn, that seems like a high valuation for a startup company, but I’m not in any way an expert is valuations
• DataOps Is More than ‘DevOps for Data’ - I think this role specialisation makes sense, it’s the evolution of the data automation side of sysadmin roles, there is a lot of variety across industries, my personal experience of it was in the media and entertainment file delivery space

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Monday 7th December, 2020 #

• Radicle - A peer to peer decentralised alternative to github
• I really like John Gruber’s style of ad copy, it rarely seems like a sales pitch, more like an presentation of the exact bit of information that will make you pause and agree, clearly a lot of thought goes into it, I’ve become more interested in it since I’m looking for sponsors for the linkblog, hopefully at some stage I’ll be writing similar pieces, though I guess with my own writing style
• Discogs Thank You! A commercial community site with bulk data access
• 🚀 I’ve added a link to the Newsletter in the linkblog, hopefully that makes it easier for people to find and sign up
• dogsheep/github-to-sqlite - Save data from GitHub to a SQLite database
• Cloudflare is working on Cloudflare Pages, a cloud platform for deploying and hosting JAMstack websites

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Sunday 6th December, 2020 #

• Ride Home Podcast (Weekend Bonus Episode) - Peter Kafka on Media, Hollywood, Substack and TikTok - Covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time including Warner streaming everything on HBO Max, local news is dying, the NYT is the journalism big cheese, Substack scepticism, the some stuff you care about economy and podcast interview styles
• How Microsoft crushed Slack - Worth the read, good bit of analysis, the thing that’s on my mind these days, which believe it or not is related, is who pays for the recruitment process?
• The linkblog is also experiencing the same Internet Archive issue as the blog, no snapshots showing since the beginning of the month
• The Internet Archive is wonderful when it works, but none of my snapshots are showing up since the beginning of the month, and according to the logs in my Github Action that runs daily, they are being saved correctly
• On Trusting Macintosh Hardware - Wirth a read, I’ve ran into very serious problems rebuilding macs in the past, this is definitely an area they need to improve in a very very big way
• Stripe - Platform of Platforms - Ben Thompson goes into an awful lot of detail about Stripe!s future plans, really nice diagrams, I like Stipe!s APIs and the vision sounds cool, but I’ve been burned by them before changing things just when I couldn’t afford things to be changed, the other thing I know from experience is that it takes 10 days for money to clear whereas it takes 2-3 days with competing products, that’s just embarrassing, I could loose a client over such a long delay

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Saturday 5th December, 2020 #

• josdejong/jsoneditor - A web-based tool to view, edit, format, and validate JSON
• Happy birthday, JavaScript 🎂
• Why I keep a personal log of bugs - I could see this might be a useful habit to have, though it would be quite tedious
• teddit - A free and open source alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy - The performance difference is quite impressive

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Friday 4th December, 2020 #

• Corecursive Podcast - The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan - Stories from the early days of UNIX at Bell Labs, shared common room, giant chocolate bars, living in the same computer, working with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
• 🚀 New Post: Reasons to use NodeJS for developing your backend systems - I wanted to up my NodeJS sales game, worth a read if you are developing or thinking of developing backend systems
• What You Need To Know About npm Workspaces - Solves the issue of having enormous node_modules folders by hoisting modules from packages you create into a single top level node_modules folder, still missing some features compared to yarn and pnpm
• Mining your CLI history for good git aliases - Setting up some aliases for your git commands is such a great time and focus saver, I also prefer to create the aliases at the shell level rather than use git aliases
• htdangkhoa/pure-http - The simple web framework for Node.js with zero dependencies
• 🚀 How to become an official sponsor of the linkblog - This post goes into the details of what you get when you become an official sponsor of one of the longest running personal linkblogs on the internet

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Thursday 3rd December, 2020 #

• 🚀 New Feature: Become an official linkblog sponsor! - If you look under today's links you'll see an Amazon AWS logo, they aren't actually a sponsor (yet!), this is just an example so you can see what it *would* look like, imagine your amazing logo there :)
• Using Github Issues as a Hugo frontend with Github Actions and Netlify - Great example of a custom content workflow, streamlines creation and makes collaboration possible, it’s the second workflow that I’ve seen in the last 2 weeks that uses Github Issues as a makeshift CMS
• Podcast startup QCode poaches Apple veteran Steve Wilson to lead strategy - QCode’s series A funding round was led by Sonos, they specialise in scripted fiction storytelling podcasts
• Don't Panic - Kubernetes and Docker - Docker inside Kubernetes is being replaced by a container runtime that is more suited for that environment, you will still be able to run containers created by docker in Kubernetes, so not much should change for developers
• MacBook Pro 2020 M1 Review - Videoblogger Steve Garfield reviews the latest Apple laptop
• 🚀 The eleventy-agile-blog starter project that I wrote is now listing on the starters page :)
• Amazon introduces Proton Container Management Service which aims to make developing microservices easier by enabling developers to create a “stack” which defines everything you need to provision, deploy and monitor a service

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Today's Sponsors:

Wednesday 2nd December, 2020 #

• John Gruber sees a way that the Salesforce - Slack deal could be great for users
• New for AWS Lambda – 1ms Billing Granularity Adds Cost Savings
• Amazon to roll out tools to monitor factory workers and machines - Apparently there are a lot of places in manufacturing that remain to be digitised using sensors, their new tool called Monitron was launched by Anazon's cloud arm AWS
• Amazon unveils 5 new EC2 instance types, the most interesting being the Amazon-made Graviton2 powered instances for compute heavy applications which uses the ARM chip architecture, can deliver a whopping 100 Gbps network speeds at 40% price performance over existing Intel x86 chip architectures - Lots of movement in the chip architecture space at the minute
• Salesforce buys Slack for $37.5 billion - The close date for this deal is still quite a way off but assuming it goes through, it’s a massive deal, not sure if it’s related but I have noticed a rise in job postings asking for Salesforce developers in the past week

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Tuesday 1st December, 2020 #

• 🚀 Mark Smith’s Patreon is creating curated javascript, tech and web development links from the web - I’ve updated my patreon page, it now lists all the things you get, it’s a pay what you want model, I also list other ways you can contribute, any contribution would be hugely appreciated
• Developer Hector Martin announces Patreon funding for bringing native Linux to M1 Macs - Interesting to read his patreon page showing the various tiers, looks like it will be a cool project to follow, how great it would be to have a project with such community support
• Facebook to pay UK news publishers millions to license stories for it’s news tab
• Why AWS is bringing Apple’s MacOS to its cloud - It’s for developers to run their test environments
• The eleventy starter site I built is merged (yay!) but for some reason it’s not showing on the starters page yet :(
• Google’s DeepMind solves the protein folding problem - “AlphaFold 2 can now identify a protein’s three-dimensional structures from its amino-acid sequence to the width of an atom”

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