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2020/12/31 #

Today’s links:

  • Big news in the podcast space - Amazon to acquire the Wondery Podcast Network, the deal is reported to be worth $300 millionwww.aboutamazon.com #

  • 🚀 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!blog.markjgsmith.com #

  • 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 Querysoftwareengineeringdaily.com #

  • How we built the GitHub globe - I hadn’t seen the new homepage, it looks pretty cool!github.blog #

  • 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 sidem.youtube.com #

2020/12/30 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 experiencecss-tricks.com #

  • Google Short Videos Carousel Displays TikTok & Instagram Videos - I’m not seeing this in my search results yetwww.seroundtable.com #

  • Apple patents ‘reconfigurable’ Mac keyboard with small display for each key9to5mac.com #

  • 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 OpenStreetMapjoemorrison.substack.com #

  • 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 optimisedlog.rockerest.com #

  • CandyMail makes it easy to trigger and send multi-step email sequences in Node.js using a single JSON filesaasbase.dev #

  • 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?"github.com #

  • 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 projectsweb.eecs.utk.edu #

2020/12/29 #

cat << EOF > Building websites and workflows

I like to be up to date on the latest tech trends, and I read a lot of online tech publications. I post many of the interesting articles I find to my linkblog every day. Some of these trends start to become a bit buzzwordy, like artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), blockchain and autonomous vehicles. All these technologies are everywhere these days, and they are great, but I realised today that I’m happy just building websites and workflows. When it comes down to it, that’s what I do.

The world of websites is massive, with different approaches necessary for both client-side and server-side code. What I love is that both in their own way require creative ways of solving problems. It’s incredible to me how much progress has been made in just the past decade on both sides of web development. New frameworks, libraries, cloud infrastructure, architectures, design patterns, tooling, governance models. It’s amazing.

And workflows have become so central to what and how we do things in a digital world that we hardly notice them anymore. It’s a very broad category, sometimes it’s just called automation, but the essence is the same, analysing how we are doing things, then streamlining and in some cases creating entirely new processes by stitching together a variety of off-the-shelf and custom software. Whether it’s file based media production, extract-transform-load (ETL) pipelines, continuous integration & continuous delivery (CI/CD) build systems, or infrastructure provisioning systems, there’s an enormous variety.

The boundary between the two disciplines is fuzzy, with quite a lot of cross-over, and new trends like the Jamstack and static site generators, because you can build websites using workflows! The boundary is an interesting place to be.

It’s totally possible that I might get involved in some of the buzzwordy trends in the future, but I’m happy creating efficiency, stability, robustness, and growth through technology by building websites and workflows. #

Today’s links:

  • Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Contestable and Fair Markets in the Digital Sector (Digital Markets Act) - Dec 2020ec.europa.eu #

  • 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 novelscottbelsky.medium.com #

  • 🚀 Building websites and workflows - It's nice when a clear narrative comes into viewblog.markjgsmith.com #

2020/12/28 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 websitesitnext.io #

  • 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 websiteapenwarr.ca #

  • 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 workflowswww.wired.com #

  • Bash HTTP monitoring dashboard - Simple bash script that monitors many sites in parallel using curl and generates a static site that displays the resultsraymii.org #

  • A rundown of the main items from the Brexit deal, not so great for UK broadcasters and video-on-demand companieswww.theguardian.com #

2020/12/27 #

Today’s links:

  • European tech accuses US of using sanctions to shut it out of Chinawww.ft.com #

  • Kit FUI - User interfaces from film, television, video games and the designers that created themwww.saji8k.com #

  • 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 applicationsdev.to #

  • 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 projectsgithub.com #

  • 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 2021daverupert.com #

  • Create Reusable Web Components in HTMLdev.to #

2020/12/26 #

cat << EOF > Saturday 26th December, 2020 (Issue #6)

This week’s newsletter is out! (2020-12-26)

In this week’s edition:

Microsoft ARM chips, SapiensAsBlog, Proxima Centauri, FBvsApple, SPACs, Raspberry Pi Server, modern chips, Apple Car, IoT+NodeJS, Jamstack workflows, NYSE, Zoomail, Elon Alphabet, SSGs, podcasts...

Issue details:

  • Title: Saturday 26th December, 2020
  • Issue: 6
  • Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Today’s links:

  • 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 rankingsengineering.pinterest.com #

  • 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”www.theverge.com #

  • 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 Immortalitym.youtube.com #

  • 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 watchingm.youtube.com #

2020/12/25 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 popularitybusiness.pinterest.com #

  • 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 gadgetslunchmoney.app #

2020/12/24 #

cat << EOF > Web design that focusses on text content is the best

I love text focussed website. There are no annoying consent forms, paywalls or popups. The reading experience is the best. If there is an ad it’s usually relevant and unobtrusive. They load extremely fast, and are great for technical content.

The best ones:

  • Load extremely fast, and are readable immediately
  • Have a font that is well balanced and easy to read
  • Have spacing between paragraphs, images and lists that looks nice
  • Don’t re-render several times as javascript loads and fonts get swapped out
  • Render really well on mobile devices without needing to zoom or pan the screen
  • Render on mobile devices in such a way that the text takes up the entire screen with just a small margin at the edges
  • Have the right font size that is easy to read
  • Content layout that resizes correctly if you do need to zoom
  • Have regular text that is visibly distinct from hyperlinked text
  • Have tag or category pages making it easy to find other content
  • Have easily findable links to information about the author

There are some big publications that have these types of websites but lots of smaller sites too. They aren’t always perfect, but that’s okay. It’s actually quite difficult to successfully create such a simple design. I do my best with my blog but I know the reading experience could be improved, perhaps with a different font.

Anyway I’m going to keep an updated list here of such sites that I really enjoyed reading:

Sexy design is great, but I find purely text sites refreshing these days. #

Today’s links:

  • 🚀 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 readblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • Five easy ways for Elon Musk to combine his companies into a superconglomerate -Quite a lot of wild fantasy theorising in this fun piecewww.theverge.com #

  • 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 codewww.webdevdrops.com #

2020/12/23 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 accountwww.wsj.com #

  • 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 Gbpswww.jeffgeerling.com #

  • 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 publicationscss-tricks.com #

  • 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 approvalwww.codegram.com #

  • emqx/emqx - EMQ X Broker - Scalable Distributed MQTT Message Broker for IoT in 5G Eragithub.com #

  • 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”www.reuters.com #

2020/12/22 #

Today’s links:

  • Apple could begin producing its own car with a 'next level' battery in 2024appleinsider.com #

  • SoftBank launches blank-check company to join SPAC crazewww.cnbc.com #

  • 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 ceremonywunderbucket.io #

  • 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 UIskeenethics.com #

  • Twitter expands its new API with conversation and reply controls9to5mac.com #

  • rwaldron/johnny-five - JavaScript Robotics and IoT programming framework, developed at Bocoupgithub.com #

  • NodeJS and IoT - An Overviewdev.to #

  • 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 havesequoia.makes.software #

2020/12/21 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 SPACwww.axios.com #

  • Raspberry Pi Server Mark III - Create a rack for raspberry pi servers using a 3D printeruplab.pro #

  • 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 chipserik-engheim.medium.com #

  • 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 cpuerik-engheim.medium.com #

  • Ask IH: What tech stacks are you using for your internet-of-things (IOT) projects?www.indiehackers.com #

2020/12/20 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 todayneilkakkar.com #

  • 🚀 Housekeeping Note: I’ve created a separate page for my policy on job interviews, based on the original blog postblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • 🚀 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 sponsorblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • 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 feedwww.rss-specifications.com #

  • 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 onwww.slashgear.com #

  • Facebook’s Laughable Campaign Against Apple Is Really Against Users and Small Businesseswww.eff.org #

  • 10 Must do Jekyll SEO optimizations - I need to do some SEO work on the blog in my quest to increase traffic to the siteblog.webjeda.com #

2020/12/19 #

cat << EOF > Saturday 19th December, 2020 (Issue #5)

This week’s newsletter is out! (2020-12-19)

In this week’s edition:

Valley exodus, Slack, cool repos, personal websites, knowing shell, Tesla huge, Torvalds-style, Amazon Robotaxi, Privacy, MDN Jamstack, MS on M1, EU rules, Facebook Super, FB vs Apple, videos+podcasts

Issue details:

  • Title: Saturday 19th December, 2020
  • Issue: 5
  • Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Today’s links:

  • Create a Dynamic Sitemap with Next.jsdev.to #

  • Microsoft may be developing its own, in-house ARM CPU designsarstechnica.com #

  • 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 linkswww.amediaoperator.com #

  • 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 linkwww.tree.fm #

  • 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 devicesamizdat.dev #

2020/12/18 #

cat << EOF > The art of the minimal example

I’ve been putting together a Portfolio of my work this past week. It’s been really interesting re-visiting the web development, workflow/automation and devops/sysadmin projects I’ve been involved with over the years. One thing that stood out was all the minimal examples I’ve built in order to either learn a technology or debug a feature.

Creating minimal examples is particularly enlightening, it’s actually quite a skill to be able to extract just the code you need to demonstrate a problem you are experiencing. It’s useful because you get rid of much of the complexity of the code you are working on and can focus in on discovering the root cause of an issue.

Stackoverfkow even has a special minimal reproducible example page which has guidelines on how to create one. For stackoverflow questions you would likely have just a few small snippets of code to demonstrate an issue

I’ve included a Minimals section in my portfolio, that links to many of the repos I’ve created over the years when I was looking to learn a particular feature or troubleshooting an issue I was experiencing. These aren’t strictly speaking minimal examples in the stackoverflow sense of the term, they tend to be a little bit more involved. In my case they are often small apps that implement just the feature I was exploring or debugging. They get rid of the complexity of the surrounding code, making it easier to reason about. I find myself often revisiting these minimals when I need to implement similar functionality somewhere else.

The ability to easily create runnable minimal examples I feel is one place NodeJS really shines, especially when you are building Express based web applications. This makes it easier to debug complex problems and communicate your findings to others you are working with.

Related post: Reasons to use NodeJS for developing your backend systems #

Today’s links:

  • goldbergyoni/nodebestpractices - The Node.js best practices list - Huge number of best practices curated by the communitygithub.com #

  • Github removed all non essential cookies from it’s websites so it no longer needs cookie popup consent forms - Thank you!github.blog #

  • 🚀 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 techniqueblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • 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 meetingsm.youtube.com #

2020/12/17 #

Today’s links:

  • Tech Giants Face New Rules in Europe, Backed by Huge Fines - Two major new bills that focus on illegal content and anti-competitive behaviourwww.wsj.com #

  • 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/X11www.mozilla.org #

  • 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 toowww.cnet.com #

  • Twitter is returning retweets to the way they used to be - They are removing the automatic quote tweet promptwww.theverge.com #

  • Next.js CI / CD on AWS with GitHub Actionsdev.to #

  • 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 proceedbitbucket.org #

  • 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 eitherwww.wsj.com #

2020/12/16 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 architectureswww.zdnet.com #

  • Google acquires CloudReady OS that turns old PCs into Chromebooks w/ plans to make official offering9to5google.com #

  • 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 everywheremobile.twitter.com #

  • AWS shifts focus to removing system complexity and observability - They want to focus less on developers and more on operators, more “systems thinking”siliconangle.com #

  • 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 sitewww.indiehackers.com #

  • 🚀 Updated Portfolio - I’ve added a bunch of web development, workflow automation and devops projects from previous work and personal open source projectsblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • Minimal safe Bash script template - Some useful bash techniques presented in this writeupbetterdev.blog #

2020/12/15 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 75mphwww.cnbc.com #

  • 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 enlighteningwww.protocol.com #

  • Mozilla launches campaign in support of Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 privacy features9to5mac.com #

  • 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 datawww.cnbc.com #

  • 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 modelswww.integrant.com #

  • 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 sitecss-tricks.com #

  • 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 momentblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • mdn/content - The content behind MDN Web Docsgithub.com #

  • 🚀 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 yearsblog.markjgsmith.com #

2020/12/14 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 companiesdatamentary.net #

  • 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 contributelkml.iu.edu #

  • 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 agowww.slashgear.com #

2020/12/13 #

cat << EOF > Choosing your web development stack

This is a bit of an aggregation piece, pulling together several thematically related posts that I think work quite well together to inform on the topic of choosing your web development stack. I’m a NodeJS developer so that’s my focus, but even if you are using a different language, a lot of the information might be useful in terms of building a broader understanding of the web development landscape.

Make it personal - When you are just starting out, a good place to start is to build your own website. It’s your chance to create your own place on the web. Nice recent css-tricks article that’s gets to the core of why building your own personal site is a worthwhile endeavour.

Deciding when to build a custom solution in web development - Sometimes referred to as the Build vs Buy dilemma, if you are developing websites, it’s important to be able to focus your efforts in the right place, this article gives you a mental model to help you decide when to build and when to use off-the-shelf products.

Reasons to use NodeJS for developing your backend systems - Self explanatory title, worth a read if you want to learn why people specifically use NodeJS.

Robust NodeJS Deployment Architecture - If you are leaning towards self-hosting, this article might be of interest, it’s more effort initially but you gain considerable portability.

I'm going to keep updating this post with other relevant articles I write or find online and I'll post to the linkblog when the article gets updated, so you might want to add the linkblog RSS to your feed reader. #

Today’s links:

  • 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 websitedrewdevault.com #

  • A few ways to make money in FOSS - Reviews some tried and tested business models, some sane business advice and a few lead generation techniquesdrewdevault.com #

  • 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 obviousnews.ycombinator.com #

  • 🚀 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 choicesblog.markjgsmith.com #

2020/12/12 #

cat << EOF > Saturday 12th December, 2020 (Issue #4)

This week’s newsletter is out! (2020-12-12)

In this week’s edition:

Cool tools, buglogs, Cloudflare Jamstack, Discogs, p2p Github, dataops, M1 in datacenters, Next.js on Netlify, CentOS killed, browser Xbox, privacy labels, event loop, solo-devs, Brave, podcasts...

Issue details:

  • Title: Saturday 12th December, 2020
  • Issue: 4
  • Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Today’s links:

  • Oracle moving headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin Texaswww.zdnet.com #

  • 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 brutalitywww.fastcompany.com #

  • meli - Open source platform for deploying static sites and frontend applications - Sort of like Netlify, but self-hostedgithub.com #

  • 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 backgroundcss-tricks.com #

2020/12/11 #

cat << EOF > Deciding when to build a custom solution in web development

The web has been around for just over 3 decades now, with the capabilities of the sites we build increasing every year. With that forward movement there’s a corresponding rise in complexity. For website builders this presents somewhat of a dilemma. When you start out, you don’t have the experience to build things for yourself, but you still want to have an online presence. Luckily it’s easier than ever to get started quickly with many website builder tools available. But how do you know when building something custom is appropriate?

Answering that question when you are deep in the weeds of designing and building a site, can be challenging. I think it’s useful to have a mental model that enables you to step back and see the woods for the trees.

Building a website is a bit like building a shed. Right off the bat you can choose to buy a prefab shed, and that’s a perfectly good solution. The suppliers of these often have several models to choose from, so if one of them meets your needs, it’s going to be quick to get up and running. There is of course also the option to customise your prefab shed, make it look a bit more like your favourite style. However you might have some very specialist requirements, because of where the shed will be located, or maybe you need some electrical wiring for your home office which you plan to have in your new shed. In those situations it might make sense to build a complete custom shed that fits your requirements exactly.

It’s similar with software. There are many off-the-shelf solutions that might fit your needs. There are hosted services and also open source frameworks like Wordpress that will make it easy to get a site up and running, and enable tweaks using themes and plugins. In situations where this meets your needs, that’s probably going to be the best route.

Of course the web isn’t just sheds. The analogy scales up too. There are houses, hotels, community centres, sky scrapers, towns, cities and we can continue scaling up. As your infrastructure grows, your requirements will evolve. You’ll want to create resiliency, by splitting your backend into several components. To some extent you might be able to modify your Wordpress sites to fill these needs. But don’t assume that Wordpress will solve all your problems, it’s totally possible to build a custom Wordpress monstrosity, same goes for any custom software.

One of the downsides of the prefab solutions that large frameworks offer is complexity. Along with all the useful heavy lifting that the frameworks offer, comes a big increase in the amount of code. If you ever need to get into the code yourself, rather than have a developer modify it for you, it might be a challenge.

Having a custom solution that is very focussed on solving exactly the problem you are trying to solve, has the possibility to be much much more streamlined, less code, easier to understand if you ever need to get into it yourself. Starting small and growing progressively as your needs change can ensure that you don’t suddenly find yourself in a sea of complexity, overwhelming your efforts to get a site live.

If you are considering a custom solution, you might want to look at NodeJS. It’s designed specifically for network based applications, and it’s possible to build very focussed low code applications that are extremely performant and easy to maintain. I recently wrote about the reasons for using NodeJS for building your backend systems, you might find that interesting.

The analogy in this post was inspired by a recent Shop Talk episode. Great podcast that covers frontend and increasingly backend web development topics.

Hopefully this gives you a bit of a better idea of the software development landscape, and a neat macro way to think about your web development projects.

This post is part the choosing your web development stack series. #

Today’s links:

  • 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!)nodesource.com #

  • 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 solutionssimonplend.com #

  • Npm Release v7.1.0 - Two cool new features - npm set-script and npm execblog.npmjs.org #

  • 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 Kuberneteswww.openfaas.com #

  • EbookFoundation/free-programming-books - 📚 Freely available programming books - staggeringly vast collection of programming books in many languagesgithub.com #

  • 🚀 Deciding when to build a custom solution in web development - It’s really very similar to building a shedblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • 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 developmentlevels.io #

  • 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 CDNbrave.com #

2020/12/10 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 assembly9to5mac.com #

  • 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 deviceswww.axios.com #

  • 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 stackwww.wsj.com #

  • Chrome Dev Summit: Google recaps 2020 work on browser privacy, richer web apps, and performance9to5google.com #

  • 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?en.m.wikipedia.org #

2020/12/09 #

cat << EOF > The coming revolution in freelance web development

For most of the early web, freelance web development has been the norm. If you needed a website you hired a Wordpress developer and they hand crafted a beautiful website that met your needs. These developers had some backend development skills, but their real strength was frontend development, wrangling the html, css and javascript necessary to manifest your soon to be online property.

The web has evolved, and the websites people are building are in some cases becoming more complex, they aren’t only concerned with a nice place to present things digitally, but in addition with backend systems to handle various tasks, either through integrations with 3rd party cloud web services or fully fledged SaaS web applications.

Whereas previously these types of websites and applications were only built by large organisations' in-house developers, the tooling, frameworks and technologies have progressed to the stage where it’s possible to embark on such projects with freelance developers. The world of freelance web development is broadening, and this is a great progression.

The wider industry still has to mature and reshape to accept this new reality. Developers doing this type of development have been siloed inside organisations, who’s hiring practices are anti-freelancer. This is something you realise pretty quickly as a freelancer when you apply for regular jobs. The recruitment process is structured in such a way that the freelancer has to pay for it. Organisations expect applicants to perform tests and take-home projects in addition to many rounds of interviews, and they don’t pay a penny. It’s a totally unsustainable backwards situation. Large organisations are expecting their recruitment process to be funded by individuals who are often struggling to get by. They are completely shocked when you suggest that they should be paying for your time. This keeps freelancers poor and in-house developers locked-in.

In my opinion freelancing should be the norm everywhere. Joining a company more permanently should be possible but the norm should be to start as a freelancer and then transition to a full time position. The work force should be more mobile, it should be easier for individuals to move between companies, or to operate independently, and to plant roots when it makes sense to do so.

The move towards remote work is accelerating this shift. Dan Andrews and Ian Schoen serial entrepreneurs and hosts of the TMBA podcast, in a recent Q&A episode (24:00) spoke about the myth that freelancers are more likely to leave, freelancer and business owner incentives and the improved innovation that freelancers can offer.

Dan is “Long freelancers”, he thinks the role that freelancers play is being redefined, and that in many ways the interests of business owners and freelancers are more aligned, with long term partnerships growing from initial low friction and flexible freelance engagements.

I’m on the freelance road, and it’s especially tough in these uncertain times, but I thought it might be useful to others to share my strategy as I move forward. I wrote about it on Indie Hackers. It’s very much like marketing and promoting a product, a multi pronged campaign to highlight my freelance services. I’ve also implemented a job interview policy that I am sticking to. It’s something that I have to do. It’s not sustainable otherwise. I encourage you to take a similar approach that makes sense for you.

I aspire one day to have an organisation that can fund it’s own recruitment process. One which works with freelancers as a normal way of doing business. I believe new ways of working have the possibility to improve the whole ecosystem. I think it’s an important topic that we should be discussing.

I would love to hear your thoughts about how you see freelancing will evolve over the next 10 years. #

Today’s links:

  • Red Hat kills off CentOS; users frustrated, angry and annoyeditwire.com #

  • 82 per cent of musicians earn less than £200 a year from streamingwww.nme.com #

  • 🚀 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 discussingblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • 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 worldsoftwareengineeringdaily.com #

2020/12/08 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 spacethenewstack.io #

  • 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 valuationswww.cnbc.com #

  • 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 cloudventurebeat.com #

  • benwilber/boltstream - Boltstream Live Video Streaming Website + Backend - Looks kind of coolgithub.com #

  • 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 Netlifywww.netlify.com #

  • 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 #backenddevproblemsdev.to #

2020/12/07 #

Today’s links:

  • Cloudflare is working on Cloudflare Pages, a cloud platform for deploying and hosting JAMstack websitestwitter.com #

  • dogsheep/github-to-sqlite - Save data from GitHub to a SQLite databasegithub.com #

  • 🚀 I’ve added a link to the Newsletter in the linkblog, hopefully that makes it easier for people to find and sign uplinks.markjgsmith.com #

  • Discogs Thank You! A commercial community site with bulk data accessblog.archive.org #

  • 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 styledaringfireball.net #

  • Radicle - A peer to peer decentralised alternative to githubradicle.xyz #

2020/12/06 #

cat << EOF > Motorbike Food Guy 1 (Recorded Sounds #15)

2020-12-06 16:09:56 +07:00 by Mark Smith

A mobile food stand on a motorbike

Episode details:

Another awesome episode of the podcast. #

Today’s links:

  • 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 delaystratechery.com #

  • 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 waysneak.berlin #

  • 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 correctlyweb.archive.org #

  • The linkblog is also experiencing the same Internet Archive issue as the blog, no snapshots showing since the beginning of the monthweb.archive.org #

  • 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?www.theverge.com #

  • 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 stylesart19.com #

2020/12/05 #

cat << EOF > Saturday 5th December, 2020 (Issue #3)

This week’s newsletter is out! (2020-12-05)

In this week’s edition:

UK legal, Electron, Back/forward cache, Next SSG, serverless ML, M1 for devs, devs in India, Substack, odd redesign, protein folding, M1 for Linux, Docker deprecated, cool GitHub Actions, podcasts...

Issue details:

  • Title: Saturday 5th December, 2020
  • Issue: 3
  • Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Today’s links:

  • teddit - A free and open source alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy - The performance difference is quite impressivecodeberg.org #

  • Why I keep a personal log of bugs - I could see this might be a useful habit to have, though it would be quite tediousjosemdev.com #

  • josdejong/jsoneditor - A web-based tool to view, edit, format, and validate JSONgithub.com #

2020/12/04 #

cat << EOF > Reasons to use NodeJS for developing your backend systems

There are a lot of programming languages to choose from when it comes to writing server-side code. What makes NodeJS a good choice for this task? Whether you are embarking on a new project or extending an existing one, it’s a very relevant question. In this post I’m going to cover the main reasons for choosing NodeJS for your backend application.

Javascript the programming language runs in two main environments:

  • The web browser which runs client-side javascript
  • The server which runs server-side javascript

When programmers talk about server-side javascript they call it NodeJS, and when they write a NodeJS application they are actually writing javascript code. NodeJS is more than just the language though, it’s a whole environment (called a runtime) that, among other things, can execute javascript code, but it also provides a way for the code to access hardware like the storage and the network adapters.

The NodeJS runtime achieves this using an architecture that is optimised for creating network applications. This architecture is called the event loop.

The event loop looks very much like a collection of queues. As the code runs, anytime something has to happen asynchronously, i.e. that will take a while to complete, the code to be run on completion, called a callback, is placed in a queue, so that the remaining code to be run can continue executing without blocking.

Asynchronous tasks would be for example writing to storage or making an API call across the internet. The event loop architecture makes it possible for the NodeJS runtime to be single threaded, and we say it’s event driven because the data input/output (I/O) from the hardware doesn’t block the code. Instead of blocking, events are triggered once the result of the I/O operation is ready.

This means that NodeJS is particularly good for applications that operate over a network, because it can handle many simultaneous requests very easily.

That’s the big architectural advantage that NodeJS offers, but there are quite a few other reasons to build your backend using NodeJS.

Here is a summary:

  • Runtime environment is particularly well suited and optimised to network applications, the event loop architecture makes it possible for single threaded code to execute in a non-blocking way, resulting in a high capacity for handling concurrent requests and realtime data
  • The NodeJS foundation is particularly well organised with a very regular release cycle, including long term support (LTS) releases that have a published schedule
  • There are working groups such as next10 and web-server-frameworks that collaborate publically, they have a clear strategic direction for the NodeJS project
  • Npm hosts a vast collection of community built modules, with mostly open source licenses, greatly speeding up development
  • Of all the interpreted languages it is one of the fastest. It uses the v8 javascript engine written in C++ by Google also used in the Chrome web browser, very regularly updated, always being improved
  • There are a huge number of javascript developers worldwide since javascript also runs in the browser. This means finding developers is easier
  • It’s possible to use javascript throughout the entire application stack, from the client-side code that runs in the browser, to the code running on the server, and also with NoSQL databases many of which use javascript as the query language. The elimination of context switching results in massive boost in developer productivity
  • There is a vibrant tooling ecosystem with developers around the world continuously building and sharing the best development tools
  • NodeJS is cross platform, running on Windows, Mac and Linux
  • Using libraries like Electron and Cordova it’s possible to write desktop and mobile apps using NodeJS so you can have a single code base across mobile, desktop and web applications
  • Typically promotes fast development, robust testing and code refactoring
  • All serverless hosting providers have NodeJS implementations, microservices are very often written in NodeJS

It’s also worth reading the nodejs website about page for more details.

Companies such as Netflix, PayPal, Trellio, LinkedIn, Uber, eBay, Groupon, NASA, Mozilla, Twitter and Walmart are examples of big tech organisations that run significant amounts of their infrastructure on NodeJS. More details here and here.

NodeJS makes it possible to build extremely robust network applications quickly and at low cost, that are then easier and cheaper to refactor, extend and maintain.

This post is part the choosing your web development stack series. #

Today’s links:

  • 🚀 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 internetblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • htdangkhoa/pure-http - The simple web framework for Node.js with zero dependenciesgithub.com #

  • 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 aliaseshttptoolkit.tech #

  • 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 pnpmhyperfoo.io #

  • 🚀 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 systemsblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • 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 Thompsoncorecursive.com #

2020/12/03 #

cat << EOF > How to become an official sponsor of the linkblog

UPDATE (2020-12-20) - This blog post has been turned into a separate page, check out the sponsorships page for the latest.

It’s now possible to become an official sponsor of the linkblog!

I’ve spent time working for feature film visual effects companies and an enterprise software startup, and I’ve been running the linkblog for close to 10 years. It's one of the longest running personal linkblogs on the internet.

The readership is very tech and developer focussed, lots of smart people working for big tech related companies.

What do you get as a sponsor?

  • Your logo displayed on each linkblog day that you sponsor
  • A special blog post at the end of the week thanking you and linking to your website (for 7 day sponsorships)
  • A special mention in the newsletter that gets sent out on Saturday (for 7 day sponsorships)

The logo is right under all the links for the day, grouped with the patreon button.

It will appear on the main linkblog page which displays the most recent 50 days. It will also live on in the day and month archive pages.

Here’s an example of what it would look like for the month and day archive pages. It will look very similar on the main linkblog page

If you’d like to become a sponsor then get in touch with me via email. #

Today’s links:

  • 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 servicewww.zdnet.com #

  • 🚀 The eleventy-agile-blog starter project that I wrote is now listing on the starters page :)web.archive.org #

  • 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 developerskubernetes.io #

  • 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 podcastsappleinsider.com #

  • 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 CMSshazow.net #

  • 🚀 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 :)links.markjgsmith.com #

2020/12/02 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 weekwww.itnews.com.au #

  • 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 minutewww.zdnet.com #

  • 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 AWSwww.ft.com #

  • New for AWS Lambda – 1ms Billing Granularity Adds Cost Savingsaws.amazon.com #

  • John Gruber sees a way that the Salesforce - Slack deal could be great for usersdaringfireball.net #

2020/12/01 #

cat << EOF > Live Music From Small Boat 2 (Recorded Sounds #14)

2020-12-01 09:35:01 +07:00 by Mark Smith

More live music from the guy on the small river boat

Episode details:

Another awesome episode of the podcast. #

Today’s links:

  • 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”towardsdatascience.com #

  • The eleventy starter site I built is merged (yay!) but for some reason it’s not showing on the starters page yet :(github.com #

  • Why AWS is bringing Apple’s MacOS to its cloud - It’s for developers to run their test environmentswww.protocol.com #

  • Facebook to pay UK news publishers millions to license stories for it’s news tabwww.theguardian.com #

  • 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 support9to5mac.com #

  • 🚀 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 appreciatedwww.patreon.com #

For enquiries about my consulting, development, training and writing services, aswell as sponsorship opportunities contact me directly via email. More details about me here.