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2021/04/30 #

Today’s links:

  • Netlify has a new solution to slow build times and it’s called Distributed Persistent Rendering or as I like to call it “Fancy Caching”thenewstack.io #

  • What Should Static Site Generators Be Called? - The author isn’t too into the term Jamstack and so does a little exploration of other possible ways to name the architectural style, I think some of what he is saying is worth considering, the current name doesn’t really highlight the best featurespeakzebra.com #

  • How to Use ECMAScript Modules in Node.js - It’s definitely worth familiarising yourself with how ES Modules work in NodeJS because they are likely going to start getting popular soon, most of the articles I’ve read have left me a bit confused but this article actually does a very good job of summarising the usage and pitfalls, it’s still a bit complicated but it’s not that baddmitripavlutin.com #

  • What's Next, The Future of Node.js - Joe Sepi, Michael Dawson and Bethany Griggs - A short video presentation of the general structure of the NodeJS community, the current and future state of NodeJS and the best and easiest places to get involvedm.youtube.com #

  • Node Todo will guide you through your first contribution to Node.js corewww.nodetodo.org #

2021/04/29 #

Today’s links:

  • Reading Waves - Issue #1 - Newsletter that focusses on publicly traded tech companies, with weekly roundups of the best performers - “Your weekly guide to find stocks that have hit 52-week high”reading-waves.ghost.io #

  • FSF board frequently asked questions (FAQ) - The FSF sent this out earlier today to their mailing list, they are trying to strengthen their governance, and I suppose because of the recent events around the re-appointment of Richard Stallman to the board of directors, it’s an attempt to increase transparency, it’s a good move, I enjoyed reading their FAQ and also the page about the board member responsibilities, they are very well thought out and well written documents, I’m not very familiar with how governance type mandates are defined, and theirs looks like a good example for anyone in similar territory, but it’s also good timing IMO, one thing to note is that Richard’s role has changed considerably, he no longer has the board breathing down his neck, and no longer has to manage staff, it will be interesting to see how things will be in a yearwww.fsf.org #

  • Epic Games lawsuit - Academics from Harvard, Stanford, UCL, and more testify against Apple - It’s nice to see UCL part of a list of prestigious universities (rightly so, it’s a fantastic university), some good quotes and opinions, though the piece includes an economics department giving advice about computer security, which seems a bit dubious9to5mac.com #

  • Mighty wants to ‘make Chrome faster’ by streaming a browser from the cloud, starting on macOS9to5google.com #

2021/04/28 #

Today’s links:

  • Spotify unveils subscription platform for podcasts - Looks like it will be cheaper for creators than Apple’s recently announced paid podcast subscriptions, but the features offered are somewhat differentwww.axios.com #

  • Zuckerberg launches new Instagram features for creators to generate revenue -They include creator shops for selling merchandise and a marketplace for matching up brands with influencersthehill.com #

  • Changelog Podcast Ep #438 - Let's mint some NFTs - The guys interview Mikeal Rogers of Protocol Labs, I decided not to take notes while listening, so I don’t have a summary, but the bottom line is that if you’re a developer and are into crypto even a bit, then this is a must listen episode, it’s the first proper developer centric NFT discussion I’ve listened to and they cover all the relevant tech at a good depth and throw around some fun development experience and ideas, by the end of it you’ll be wanting to get right into some crypto and blockchain projectschangelog.com #

2021/04/27 #

Today’s links:

  • My current HTML boilerplate - Everything these days is focussed on javascript and to a lesser extent CSS, but there’s hardly ever interesting articles about HTML, so I found this an interesting readwww.matuzo.at #

2021/04/26 #

Today’s links:

  • Facebook v Apple: The ad tracking row heats up - Well written piece that summarises what’s happening in AdTech, good read if you are looking to catchup on the main issues and the move towards privacy onlinewww.bbc.com #

  • As Linux 5.12 released, Linus Torvalds warns next version will probably be rather largewww.theregister.com #

  • How Facebook encodes your videos - Very detailed engineering write-up of the video encoding pipeline from the Video Infra Team, it’s an impressive system operating at tremendous scale that automatically decides how to encode videos based on benefit-cost analysis, then uses an AI ML model which uses multiple decision points to prioritise encoding based on predicted watch timeengineering.fb.com #

  • Marscopter - Successful 3rd flight - “On Sunday, the little chopper rose to a height of 5m before speeding off laterally for 50m - half the length of a football field.”www.bbc.com #

2021/04/25 #

Today’s links:

  • Web Performance Recipes With Puppeteer - Programatically load your site using puppeteer and extract various performance statisticsaddyosmani.com #

  • John Gruber - “Apple’s M1 positioning mocks the entire x86 business model”daringfireball.net #

  • Ubuntu 21.04 Shrinks Kubernetes Footprint for Raspberry Pis, GPUs - Great for dev environmentsthenewstack.io #

  • tc39/proposal-js-module-blocks - Interesting proposal which would introduce the ability to create modules inline, which could then be passed directly into workers and workletsgithub.com #

  • TC39 Podcast interview with Guy Bedford - I enjoyed hearing about Guy’s journey as an independent open source developer, being a digital nomad, creating the jspm & SystemJS projects (among others), and how he became a TC39 delegate, also glad to hear the podcast now has a sponsor :)tc39er.us #

  • Indie Hackers Podcast Ep #203 – What You Need to Know About Bitclout with Mubashar Iqbal - Quite a thorough discussion about the pros and cons of this new crypto people trading website, I admit the idea sounds interesting but it still feels scammy to me, like some sort of strange protection racket, and the best excuse for it seems to be “well this is probably happening anyway”, which might be the case but doesn’t justify it, maybe there’s a different way to do something similar that doesn’t feel so fundamentally wrongshare.transistor.fm #

  • Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle (HN Thread)news.ycombinator.com #

  • Disadvantages of Pull Requests - Probably quite controversial, though the author does make a few good points that I hadn’t considered until reading this postblog.arkency.com #

  • FFmpeg cheat sheet - A list of useful commands for the ffmpeg command line tool, so you can script lots of cool things with videogist.github.com #

  • CSS Container Queries - Soon to be implemented in browsers, useful for sites that use components in the frontenddev.to #

2021/04/24 #

Today’s links:

  • Spotify to launch rival podcast subscriptions to Apple - It looks as if Spotify’s pricing model will be better than Apple’s with no charge to creatorsappleinsider.com #

2021/04/23 #

Today’s links:

  • A Complete Guide To Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) With Next.js - Uses caching cleverly to only build changed pages rather than rebuild an entire site, I like the functionality but it still seems overly complex to me, personally I’d like a solution that doesn’t use caching, that has a way to run a build via cli but specify which pages to buildwww.smashingmagazine.com #

  • Mongoose Internals - Schemas, Schema Options, and Models - First part in a tutorial series that looks at Mongoose intervals aimed at getting contributors up to speed in the codebase, I’ve used Mongoose in many projects, it’s good to read docs like this, I think there are many large open source codebases that would benefit from such articles, it’s not always obvious where to find such materialthecodebarbarian.com #

  • sindresorhus/terminal-link - Create clickable links in the terminal - Useful for when building Bash/Shell CLI toolsgithub.com #

2021/04/22 #

Today’s links:

  • Apple antitrust hearing - Tile likens Find My network to a ‘hostage’ program, App Store scam apps, more9to5mac.com #

  • This has just become a big week for AI regulation - Laws being considered by the EU Commission and the FTCwww.technologyreview.com #

  • Podcast Subscriptions vs. the App Store - Some excellent analysis of Apple’s paid Podcast subscriptions announcement yesterday, looking back at how difficult it was to listen to podcasts in the early days (I remember it well!), the introduction of the iPod, iPhone and Podcast support in iTunes, the current podcast landscape, how paid subscriptions fit in for users and creators, it’s a really great piece worth reading if you are at all interested in audio on the webstratechery.com #

  • Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast - Interview with Nick Hinton - Word of warning this podcast is way way out there, but I think they have an interesting discussion about AR/VR, and the reality is that we live in a world with religion and conspiracy theories, the things we build get consumed and remixed at this level too, so perhaps it’s worth being aware of that? I don’t have the resources and increasingly autonomy at the minute to spend weaving this into a narrative, it’s unlikely to make it into the newsletter, maybe someone else can have a go? Mostly linking just so I can get it out if my thought process, just to note that it exists and worthy of considerationwww.duncantrussell.com #

  • Conversations with Tyler Podcast - Shadi Bartsch on the Classics and China - I found this super interesting, though it’s not directly tech related it looks at the relationship between the west and China in the context of classic literature, and I think it could be valuable context as we navigate through rapid tech evolution on the planetcowenconvos.libsyn.com #

  • Google’s main page logo today is pretty cool - Earth Day 2021 Doodlem.youtube.com #

  • How to navigate directories faster with bash - Some useful tips including dot aliases for quickly going up, pushd/popd, and CDPATHmhoffman.github.io #

  • Mozilla reacts to publication of EU’s draft regulation on AI - It isn’t much of a reaction, but it’s good to see that it’s on their radarblog.mozilla.org #

2021/04/21 #

Today’s links:

  • Apple announces new iPad Pro with M1 chip, Thunderbolt, 5G, XDR display9to5mac.com #

  • Apple Launches New Colorful iMac With Powerful M1 Chip And 24-Inch 4.5K Displayhothardware.com #

  • Apple introduces Podcasts Subscriptions to pay creators for content in redesigned app9to5mac.com #

  • Node.js 16 Available Now - The biggest new features is probably the Promises based timer API, which works nicely with top level async/await, I’m linking to the HN which includes a discussion of the possibility of the Node team releasing a set of optional core standard libraries which I found interesting to think about, also lots of commenters working for big tech companies reporting that they use NodeJS in production mission critical applications and are very happy with the performance and developer experiencenews.ycombinator.com #

  • How I Built My Blog - Awesome write-up from Josh Commeau about how he’s built his blog, I’ve always been impressed by the clarity and readability of his blog, in this post he covers the stack, which is Next.js hosted on Vercel, uses both static and dynamic page rendering, with API integrations and interestingly makes use of mdx to embed React components directly in posts, which then can be unique and have cool functionalitywww.joshwcomeau.com #

  • kentcdodds/mdx-bundler - 🦤 Give me MDX/TSX strings and I'll give you back a component you can render - Supports imports!github.com #

  • Linux bans University of Minnesota for sending buggy patches in name of research (HN Thread) - I’d quite like to hear what Linus Torvalds thinks about this matternews.ycombinator.com #

2021/04/20 #

Today’s links:

  • Reddit Talk is the latest to jump on the Clubhouse train - Hopefully it will be better than their support departmentwww.slashgear.com #

  • PiDP-11 is a modern replica of Digital Equipment Corporation’s influential PDP-11 minicomputer - I remember reading much about these ancient and very large pieces of kit in Steven Levy’s classic book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which goes into details about the culture and ethics of the hacker community from the 1970s onwards, it’s awesome that you can now have your own PDP-11 on a Raspberry Pi, what a great accompaniment to the bookretroviator.com #

  • minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented - Some of the hidden norms about Hacker News not otherwise covered in the Guidelines and the FAQgithub.com #

  • The Endless Acid Banger - Algorithmic self-composing acid techno musicwww.vitling.xyz #

  • Watch the first footage of a helicopter on Marswww.msn.com #

2021/04/19 #

Today’s links:

  • Facebook plans to go after Clubhouse and podcasts with a suite of new audio products - Several products are apparently in the pipeline including an audio only version of Rooms, a Clubhouse-style product where users can interact on a virtual stage, a short audio message product for posting to your timeline, and a podcast discovery product that integrates with Spotifywww.vox.com #

  • Show HN: hackernews.roundtable.audio turns HN posts into live audio discussions - Not sure how practical this is for discussions but it’s an Interesting experiment, I’m liking all the developments in the audio space at the minutenews.ycombinator.com #

  • Edward Snowden NFT Sells for $5.4 Million in Ethereum - I’m slowly cooling to the crypto space given that Coinbase is excluding me from their service, I’ve noticed that I’ve started to skip over crypto stories, anyway this one looks newsworthy though I didn’t manage to read through the whole thingdecrypt.co #

  • Linus Torvalds reluctantly issues one more release candidate for Linux kernel 5.12 - “The new version of the kernel will add the ability to run Linux as root partition under Hyper-V, support for the Snapdragon 888, mainlining support for RISC-V boards from SiFive, plus more of Intel’s IOT-centric ACRN hypervisor.”www.theregister.com #

  • A look back at the era when netbooks were introduced in the late 2000s which led to the iPad and Chromebooks - The article makes the claim that all laptops these days are netbooks, that might be the case, I hadn’t realised, I still thought netbooks and laptops were distinct, but I don’t follow that scene so closely, I remember that time though, they were really popular, I never did get one at the time, I’d really like to have one now though, portability is a massive pluswww.theverge.com #

  • Sonantic - Audio editing software for creating scripted dialogue using AI, impressive demo video, and has an API and CLI tool so you can create edits programmatically, very fine grained control of generated voice emotion and tone, I wonder where in the production pipeline production teams are using this software, lots of cool audio tools being developed at the minutewww.sonantic.io #

  • Why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a catastrophe for China and the world - Pretty good writeup of a worse case scenario for tech, seems like it would be a good idea to have a software development plan for a scenario where there will be no new chips for say 10 years, we’d have to go on a very serious software diet, minimalist apps would become very fashionabledoxa.substack.com #

2021/04/18 #

Today’s links:

  • HTTP SEARCH is a new HTTP method, for safe requests that include a request body - Additions to the HTTP methods is super rare, but as outlined in this write-up, search could be really useful, though there are still a few details to get righthttptoolkit.tech #

  • Some Vanilla JS libraries you must trydev.to #

2021/04/17 #

  • Saturday 17th April, 2021 (Issue #22)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2021-04-17)

    In this week’s edition:

    Coinbase goes public, Bitclout, FSF & RMS, LinuxOnM1, tech & society, AI regulations in EU, speech recognition, NodeJS radio server, laptops, PeerTube, digital transformation, missed calls in India...

    Issue details:

Today’s links:

  • The Media Treadmill - Great write-up from Jeff Mayerson the host of Software Engineering Daily, where he reflects on the past few years building projects while also running a media business, lessons learnt, and a description of the grind of producing quality media on a daily basissoftwaredaily.substack.com #

  • Thoughtworks Technology Radar 24 (Latest issue) - I haven’t had a chance to fully read through this yet but skimming through it, I really like how it’s structured, listing trends, technologies, techniques, languages and more in software developmentassets.thoughtworks.com #

  • Introducing OpenSearch - a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibanaaws.amazon.com #

2021/04/16 #

  • The Reddit Account Saga

    I have been a reader of Reddit for many years but hadn’t until late last year posted anything.

    I created my Reddit account sometime back in November 2020. 153 days ago according to my profile page. In my first post, I shared a link to a blog post I wrote about Robust NodeJS architectures. 138 days ago I posted a link to my newsletter in r/javascript and received a private message that it had been removed because it didn’t follow the subreddit guidelines.

    Some time went by and I noticed that my account page appeared strangely when I was logged out. At times it showed a 404 page but other times it rendered a page where my username was replaced with the string ‘undefined’. I figured it was a bug in the rendering of the page, and kept using the account, everything else seemed fine. I could log in, read threads and post to subreddits.

    I continued to occasionally post links to my newsletter, and mostly it was fine though I did receive one other take down notice. I eventually emailed Reddit support several times to ask them about the account, but only ever received automated replies that didn’t solve the problem. It really felt like I was being disappeared, because at this point I started to suspect that none of my posts were being seen by other users.

    I posted on Indie Hackers to ask for advice. I also posted to some help subreddits. It was a landslide diagnosis: I had been shadow banned for posting too many links to my own content. In the process received quite a lot of criticism about how I was posting on Reddit, but also on other sites like Indie Hackers and Hacker News.

    It was quite a blow, I had been sharing my newsletter that I spend many hours every week preparing, and just received criticism in return.

    This wasn’t helped by the fact that the support team wouldn’t answer my emails aside from auto replies. I tried posting to a special subreddit that tells you if your account is banned, but it just didn’t reply anything. People seemed to think this was because I was banned.

    In a separate Indue Hackers thread I had received some advice that Reddit was a good place to look for jobs, but I still couldn’t post. Eventually I decided to post publicly on Twitter and try to get the attention of the Reddit support team. The post never showed up in my timeline, and the only way I found to get it to show-up was to pin it to my Twitter main page. I ended up creating a Twitter thread to chronicle the things I had tried.

    I never received any replies from the support team. Meanwhile my Twitter profile now had a strange Twitter thread attached to it that every job prospect was now reading. Not the best kind of look when you are looking for work.

    Looking at the timeline of events, it still wasn’t obvious to me that my account was banned, because it would have had to be banned since before I ever posted anything, which doesn’t make any sense.

    At some stage I found another Reddit page where you can request that your banned account is re-instated, so I went ahead and filled out the form. After submitting it, the page showed a popup saying that the account was NOT banned.

    I emailed support yet again and this time got a human reply. A few emails later they informed me that my account had been caught in a spam filter, and that the issue had been fixed. I never received any notice from them that this had happened. The account finally started working many months after the issue first appeared.

    Shortly after I posted to a jobs subreddit, my post was immediately removed and I was given conflicting information. I posted again on Indie Hackers to ask for advice. Basically one message said ask the mods, and another said that if I asked the mods I could be banned. I opted to just not use Reddit for job search, and I’ve mostly stopped posting to other subreddits.

    It was a really horrible and drawn out situation that affected my life in many ways, where I was tried, judged, convicted and hung out to dry by the community, where there was no recourse, no procedures to restore my account. It’s really tarnished how I view community and the web. I’ve since had account issues with several other sites, including Freelancer.com, Coinbase.com, big named sites where you would expect account issues not to happen.

    There were a few folks on Indie Hackers that helped and talked to me, interacted on some of my other posts, giving me good advice about my blog, and I’m great-full for their support during very difficult times.

    I’m not out of the woods yet, but I will at least be removing the pinned thread from my Twitter main page later today.

    Here’s hoping 2021 starts to get a bit better, even though the rainy season started a few days ago! There’s nothing better than rain thunder and lightning to remind yourself that you are still alive :)

Today’s links:

  • Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society - The new rules will affect AI systems that manipulate human behaviour, perform indiscriminate surveillance, are used in social scoring and for targeting the vulnerablewww.bbc.com #

  • Google Earth’s historical 3D time lapses show the ravages of climate changewww.theverge.com #

  • GitHub CLI 1.9 enables you to work with GitHub Actions from your terminalgithub.blog #

  • electron-boilerplate - Minimalistic, very easy to understand boilerplate for Electron runtime - Electron is a framework for building cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSSgithub.com #

  • 🚀 Added frontend technology to web development technologies bucketlist for 2021: Electron - In the context of web development it’s a frontend technology because it would be communicating with a NodeJS backend, but it doesn’t necessarily need to connect to a backend, it would be awesome to be able to create Desktop appsblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • Recode Media Podcast - Substack’s next target: Local news - Peter Kafka interviews Chris and Hamish from Substack, they discuss their latest effort in local news, how they compare to traditional media organisations, what in their view platforms should be like, and how the ability to leave is core to their model where they provide great tools for writers, and better valuepodcasts.google.com #

  • 🚀 New Post: The Reddit Account Saga - A write-up of some of the difficulties I’ve faced on the Reddit platform over the past few monthsblog.markjgsmith.com #

2021/04/15 #

Today’s links:

  • Coinbase closes at $328.28 per share in Nasdaq debut, valuing crypto exchange at $85.8 billion - great business, absolutely appalling support, and that in my opinion is a massive red flag, would you trust your money to a company that only sends you automated emails messages? (That’s been my experience with Coinbase so far)www.cnbc.com #

  • Our plans for PeerTube v4 - Glad to see this project is still going strong, it’s an open source decentralised video platform, so similar to YouTube but federated, would be such an awesome addition to the ecosystem if it gets popular, it's based in France, a place that has other great video projects like VLCjoinpeertube.org #

  • Framasoft - These are that folks the develop PeerTube, they have a very interesting portfolio of apps and services, it’s got a very “french” vibe to the way it’s organised, focussed on open source but also on the wider area of “culture”, the other thing that stands out to me is that they have distribution of software via internet but also via DVD and USB key, which might seem old fashioned, but that’s quite a robust setup, using the network but not dependent on the networken.m.wikipedia.org #

  • The engineering task force has been looking at renaming ‘offensive’ terms in software - Ordinarily I would say it’s important to fully understand the problem for the long term, but with this there’s the danger that the solution gets turned into a stick to hit people on the head with, and then where will we be? Proceed with caution, but proceed none the lesswww.nytimes.com #

  • Should You Use GitOps? - I’ve been very bullish on Github cantered workflows, for example CI/CD but also for content workflows, so I find the evolution of DevOps to include the GitOps specialisation very interesting, the article is sort of an overview but also includes some links to other relevant resourcesdzone.com #

  • BitClout - Everything you need to know as an indie hacker - Another crypto related site that’s been making some waves recently, but it feels a bit scammywww.indiehackers.com #

2021/04/14 #

Today’s links:

  • Big Corporations Now Deploying Woke Ideology the Way Intelligence Agencies Do: As a Disguise - Glen Greenwald piece about the strangeness of government secret agencies supporting social justice causes, his article has a very Greenwaldesque slant, so bear that in mind, but whether you like his political views or not, I think he does highlight some very complex areas that societies will need to deal with at some stagegreenwald.substack.com #

  • Introducing Surface Laptop 4 and new accessories for enhanced meeting experiences - These new windows laptops look pretty nice, the touch screen is interesting and the fact that they come in 4 different coloursblogs.windows.com #

2021/04/13 #

Today’s links:

  • FSF doubles down on restoring Richard Stallman to the board after non-apology apology - It’s quite the spectacle, I think the board are probably right about the value in having Stallman on the board, from what I’ve seen in person and via videos and writing, he is unrivalled when it comes to his domain knowledge, the thing that seems weird to me is how this announcement was made, the whole thing feels rushed and improvised, and also there's something else that feels off IMO, perhaps it's that the apology is very un-Stallman-like, I mean for instance why aren't Stallmans actions part of so called 'social queues', it doesn't sound like something he would say, the apology is the sort of thing you'd say followed by '...and they are treating me really well'www.zdnet.com #

  • Microsoft buys speech recognition company Nuance for nearly $20 billion - It’s almost triple what they payed for Github, Though undoubtedly useful, I didn’t realise that speech recognition was such an important areawww.axios.com #

  • Why Brave (the browser) Disables FLoCbrave.com #

2021/04/12 #

Today’s links:

  • 4 Change Management Strategies for Digital Transformation - There’s a lot of movement in this space as companies move to the cloud, the truth is that digital transformation has been happening since we invented computers, but the scale is on a different level these days, and there’s a big effect both in the enterprise and across society at large, it’s great that companies are sharing their experienceshackernoon.com #

  • 🚀 Re-Post: Moving BBC Online to the cloud - I’ve re-posted several write-ups from the BBC recently, there are for sure others doing great work too, I’d like to read their write-ups, anyway this article is a great piece that describes their audit / cloud strategy, a good read if you are involved in any digital transformation projectslinks.markjgsmith.com #

  • Got an email from Coinbase support earlier, they closed my ticket saying it was solved (automated email), when it clearly isn’t solved, I emailed them and their automated email reply said I couldn’t re-open the ticket and would have to open a new support ticket, so I did that, and received the same automated response as last time, with the same instructions, immediately followed by the ‘how did we do email’, same exact email funnel as last time, I tried the instructions again in case they had fixed their website, but it’s the same issue - Coinbase support is terrible, how can this company be worth $100 billion dollars when they can’t even help their customers to setup their accounts? My account is unusable - it appears to me this service is not fit for purpose, the only thing that does work is the captcha challenge I have to fill out on practically every request, honestly Coinbase currently feels very scammy to me at the minuteduckduckgo.com #

  • The Ponzi Career -Looks at some of the latest crypto funding methods people are experimenting with, I think there is still some way to go before we figure out a way to do this that people will be comfortable with, buying ownership of people is going to be a tough sell given human history, and probably not a wise way to go IMO, but I still think there’s a lot of possibility in the crypto spacewww.drorpoleg.com #

2021/04/11 #

Today’s links:

  • Evaluating Modest SaaS Business Ideas (HN Thread) - Good list of questions to answer when evaluating projects, has some overlap with questions VCs ask in funding roundsnews.ycombinator.com #

  • Ink 1.0 – Open-source scripting language for interactive narrative - Interesting category of software that I wasn’t aware of, as games get more complex it totally makes sense to have software tools to build the narrativenews.ycombinator.com #

  • Serverless Playbook For Enterprises - Some high level tips about serverless deploymentshackernoon.com #

  • Don’t pick up! The rise and fall of a massive industry based on missed calls - It’s so interesting to read about markets and software companies developing in places where the dynamics are totally different, by the sounds of it that would have been a very fun place to work during that timerestofworld.org #

  • suryamodulus/pm2-webui - PM2 WebUI, Opensource Alternative to PM2 Plus, Minimalistic App Manager and Logs Viewer - worth checking out this project even just for the ability to view the logs via a web UIgithub.com #

  • Make your own online radio server in pure Node.js - Tutorial that takes you through creating a CLI based interface to a server that presents a simple webpage which can stream audio files to connected clientsblog.logrocket.com #

  • Obituary: HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh - It’s a strong obituary, and although he was somewhat in the background, when you look at his achievements, 70 years married, 4 children, grand children, great grand children, WWII, British Navy, Duke of Edinburgh Award, World Wildlife Fund, Industrial Society, International Equestrian Federation, over 22000 solo engagements, helping to navigate the Royal Family through very complex times, there’s a lot there that had considerable impact to people, that’s quite a life, RIPwww.bbc.com #

2021/04/10 #

  • Saturday 10th April, 2021 (Issue #21)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2021-04-10)

    In this week’s edition:

    Google vs Oracle, Mullenweg vs Wix, CoinbaseIPO, Microsoft AR/VR, english in the EU, TikTok Captions, LG, Yahoo Answers, hacking/cracking, JS classes, MediaQueries, blogrolls, Clubhouse, self-hosting

    Issue details:

Today’s links:

  • A lingua franca  'Frankish tongue'; also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language or dialect systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languagesen.m.wikipedia.org #

2021/04/09 #

  • The evolution of my javascript, technology and web development newsletter

    I started the newsletter back in November 2020, and I’ve published an edition every week since. That’s 21 editions so far!

    In the beginning, I would extract the best links from the linkblog, prepend them with a short single paragraph intro section, usually a bit about what I had been up to that week, and that was it.

    However It was apparent to me that 20-30 links in an email was quite a lot to parse through, so to draw attention to some of the links that had made an impression on me that week, I started to link to them from the intro. This worked well, though over time, the collection of links grew in size, and so did the intro section.

    Eventually, though the content remained high quality, the intro section became a bit unwieldy in length and had a ‘wall of text’ problem. Readers commented that it was difficult to parse and find the content they were interested in. Since the intro was turning into a sort of meta index to the links, I added some subheadings, a few re-occurring ones and a news section that changes based on the latest trends.

    Ideally I would link internally from the intro section to the relevant link further down the page, but Substack doesn’t yet have a way to do internal linking. I contacted their support to ask if it was possible, they have passed on the suggestion to the product team.

    In the interim all the intro links are to the relevant post on the linkblog, which contains any comments I made when I posted it, and the link to the article. By looking at the surrounding links you can also get a sense for the ‘context’ when that link was posted.

    It’s a work in progress, I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions via email or in social media comments.

  • Experiments with the newsletter structure and content

    In the last few newsletters I have been experimenting with the structure and content quite a bit. The result is a much better newsletter that is easier to parse, where it’s easier to find interesting content, and where it’s possible to see the context around individual links.

    My newsletter is evolving, slowly but surely, things are starting to take shape.

    The current newsletter structure:

    • Intro
      • News
      • Tutorials
      • Technologies
      • Write-ups
    • Special mentions
    • The best links from the linkblog’s last 7 days
    • Footer

    The last 2 editions have been particularly strong, with a focus on the news section, which is further subdivided into the latest trends, and changes week to week based on what I’ve been seeing.

    Last week for example the trends were Congressional Hearing, Social Media Features, Chips, NFT and crypto currencies getting real, Other Bits and Pieces. These were different to the week before, but there is some similarity, because the topics developed and evolved.

    The other sections are re-occurring and a way to more quickly find content you might be interested in. These categories seem to cover most things, but they might change a bit in the future. There’s structure but I’m not going to be militant about it and will add / remove sections as needed.

    Navigating through a massive link dump is tedious, so the intro section aims to be a sort of meta index, to make it a more pleasant experience finding articles to read. It vaguely mirrors what was going on in my head when I found and posted the link, though that evolves throughout the week, culminating in a synthesising of the topics and trends.

    Generally I’ve been very happy with the news narratives that emerged and also with the sprinkling of interesting javascript, technology and web development articles. I’m still working on getting the balance right, but I’m into the new format.

    The other thing I’ve been experimenting with is to use linkblog hash links in the intro section. The idea here is that I want to somehow make accessible the context around a linkblog link, hopefully over time you’ll get a better sense for how the narratives emerged.

    Since I choose all the links and write the copy, I have a lot of editorial control, but you can see the reasoning and source material behind a particular narrative and so you can more easily judge for yourself what to think on a particular topic.

    Something that has been mentioned is the ‘double jump’, i.e. you have to click twice to get to the article: once to get to the linkblog link and then again to get to the actual article. It’s a little unusual, and there might be a better way to make the context available and have a way to get to the article more quickly. Who knows, it might even become ‘the thing’ that sets it apart from other newsletters.

    Another aspect I experimented with in February was a Javascript Core Special Edition. That was a fun edition to put together.

    As for the future, I’ve really been enjoying Twitter Tweet Threads recently, IMO it’s one of the platforms best features. I want a similar feature! :)

    I’ve been pondering how to update the linkblog to create something similar, a way to group a collection of linkblog links on a timeline. I’ve got some ideas of how this could enhance the newsletter. There are a couple of wrinkles still to iron out, but that might be happening sometime in the future.

    The newsletter is a work in progress, I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions via email or in social media comments.

Today’s links:

  • Wix and Their Dirty Tricks - Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress and Automattic takes aim at Wix for their tasteless ad campaign and shady business modelma.tt #

  • The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup - Great writeup of a Tony Stark level solo developer setup, very impressive, lots of similarity with my NodeJS architecture but since it uses Kubernetes it’s next level, includes diagrams and snippets of the various configs so you get a really good idea how everything is connected, and some good commentary describing architectural decisions, pro & cons, ultimately it’s a mostly self-hosted setup that supports multiple apps, load balancing, caching, logging, deploys, provisioning and a whole lot moreanthonynsimon.com #

  • 🚀 New Post: The evolution of my javascript, technology and web development newsletter - I look back at the past 21 editions and tracing the evolution to the present dayblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • 🚀 New Post: Experiments with the newsletter structure and content - A look at the most recent things I’ve been experimenting with in my javascript, technology and web development newsletterblog.markjgsmith.com #

  • Hackers are trying to sell stolen data from 500 million LinkedIn users - Another massive user data mess-up to go with the very similar Facebook user data mess-up - Aside from the fact that these are serious breaches, I’m struck by how these numbers are almost too big to even conceptualise, imagine being in 1950 telling someone that your company had 1/2 a billion customers, it just would not compute in that realitywww.onmsft.com #

2021/04/08 #

Today’s links:

  • TikTok adds automatic captions to videos in accessibility push - Cool new feature, this potentially opens up the possibility of some interesting translation workflowswww.theverge.com #

  • Screw it, I’ll host it myself - Great developer writeup of his personal self hosted setup, including network diagrams and a fantastic list of apps that enable him to be fully self hosted and fully backed upwww.markozivanovic.com #

  • HN Thread - Screw it, I’ll host it myself - I’m adding the HN thread because there are some useful comments there, it’s definitely not super easy to self host infrastructure yet, but I think in a few years these setups will be made a lot easier, especially when Kubernetes becomes for streamlinednews.ycombinator.com #

  • Make is crap - Imagine a world where all software feedback was this goodm.youtube.com #

  • 7-Figure Small Podcast - The Rise of the Personal Enterprise - A look at one of the latest trends for self employed individuals, often something that freelancers move towards as they grow, includes some useful insight based on real world experiencewww.spreaker.com #

  • First Public Working Draft of WebCodecs today - “The specification defines interfaces to codecs for encoding and decoding of audio and video. It does not specify or require any particular codec or method of encoding or decoding but provides JavaScript interfaces to implementations of existing codec technology developed elsewhere”www.w3.org #

2021/04/07 #

Today’s links:

  • Coinbase Posts Blowout Q1 Profit of $730-$800 Million, Days Before Public Listing - I still haven’t heard back from their support team, it’s been 10 days nowdecrypt.co #

  • Short discussion thread I had with author from yesterday’s link to the Web Browser Engineering book, centred around the possibility of a version of the book with the browser written in NodeJS, how awesome would that be? Hint: Very awesome :)news.ycombinator.com #

  • fselect - Find files with SQL-like queriesgithub.com #

  • Google vs. Oracle: The ruling at the US Supreme Court - Quite a good summary of the case and what it means for software development and the software industry in generalwww.zdnet.com #

  • Make your own Smarthome Server with NodeJS - Now I’m thinking what awesome homemade NodeJS clients could be built :)dev.to #

  • It’s been 10 days since I opened a ticket with Coinbase support, I only so far received an automated email with my ticket number, I sent them an email today asking if they had read my support ticket, about an hour later I received a “How did we do email”, not so good, also I read in a recent article about their direct listing that they had a public conference call before the listing (unusual apparently) because things were quiet, yet on their support site there is a popup that says they are experiencing “an increase in inquiries” and “there may be a delay in responses from Coinbase Support”, that’s quite a lot of mixed messages, looked on the website but there is no way to find out the status of the ticket, emailed them again but no reply so farhelp.coinbase.com #

  • Why does so much news about the European Union still come out of London, even post-Brexit? - It’s a difficult situation for sure, and as the article points out it’s awkward, but from a technical point of view it’s a tremendous opportunity to build some really ground breaking media production workflows, there is already lots happening in this space notably from the BBC, and much of it is written up publically and open sourcewww.niemanlab.org #

  • 🚀 Re-post: How the BBC World Service migrated 31 million weekly readers to an isomorphic react app - Pretty great writeup from the engineering team about their migration from a PHP monolith, it’s cool that they are running server rendered React now, they do a lot of great work when it comes to accessibility since their sites are published in so many different languages and are optimised to run in a huge variety of network connectivity conditions, I’d like to know more about the backend the new system is using, something the article doesn’t cover, did they change backend language? They mention it’s running on cloud infra, but where? And are they using serverless?links.markjgsmith.com #

  • 🚀 Re-post: bbc/simorgh - Github repository for the BBC's open source ReactJS single page application - Used across the BBC World Service News websites, with tens of millions of users, these are some of their biggest websites - It's written in javascript and runs in NodeJS!links.markjgsmith.com #

  • Why there really aren’t 2 million podcast series - The whole way through this article I was wondering about a specific statistic, then right at the end it mentions said statistic, then pulls a “you’ll have to wait for our next article”, needless to say that was a bit annoying, but there’s also some good info in there if you are into podcastswww.amplifimedia.com #

  • Apple to unveil new AR/VR headset later this year - There are a variety of approaches that companies are using in their AR/VR, the Apple approach: “Pass video of the real world through the visor and display it to the user, offering a ‘mixed-reality effect.’”www.theapplepost.com #

2021/04/06 #

Today’s links:

  • Supreme Court rules that Android Java usage is fair use in win for Google over Oracle9to5google.com #

  • Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever on May 4th - The end of a long and storied internet era (of bad questions and even worse answers)www.theverge.com #

  • HN Thread on the Google vs Oracle Java APIs case, lots of interesting points raised in the commentsnews.ycombinator.com #

  • Blogrolls - Making Writer Discovery Seamless - Medium is going retro and re-introducing a feature that was popular in the early blogosphere, I think it’s a cool idea, especially since they have re-imagined it somewhat, adding some automation so it’s easier to manage, I don’t really remember whether it was a feature I used very much back in the day, I had a blogroll on my blog but that’s something you generally just setup once and rarely make changes, and I suppose I clicked around a bit on other people’s blogrolls though I don’t remember it being ‘second-nature’, it will be interesting to see how it changes the flow of thingsblog.medium.com #

  • Software Innovation Prevails in Landmark Supreme Court Ruling in Google v. Oracle - “An important victory for software developers”blog.mozilla.org #

  • Introducing Clubhouse Payments - The have implemented a very generic Stripe integration so users can pay creators directly, it will be interesting to see how people use the featurewww.joinclubhouse.com #

  • Web Browser Engineering - Web browsers are ubiquitous, but how do they work? This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a thousand lines of Python.browser.engineering #

  • NASA Startup Studio - “The NASA Startup Studio offers entrepreneurs an opportunity to launch the next big NASA spinoff. It is a unique program that pairs entrepreneurs (and those who want to be) with NASA technologies that are prime for commercialization.”www.fedtech.io #

  • 🚀 New recommendation from Ian Hamilton - I worked with Ian while at Signiant where he is Chief Technical Officerblog.markjgsmith.com #

2021/04/05 #

Today’s links:

  • Trump wishes happy Easter to radical left crazies - Say what you like, it’s remarkably “on brand”www.theguardian.com #

  • Ingenuity helicopter is officially sitting on the surface of Mars - First non-Earth helicopter flight scheduled for 11th April, we will have the data back on Earth on the 12th, I didn’t know that the Perseverance rover had a nuclear power systemwww.slashgear.com #

  • Facebook, Inc / Giphy, Inc merger inquiry, by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) - “The CMA has referred the completed acquisition by Facebook, Inc. of GIPHY, Inc. for an in-depth investigation, on the basis that, on the information currently available to it, it is or may be the case that this merger has resulted or may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition within a market or markets in the United Kingdom. Facebook was given the opportunity to offer undertakings to the CMA to address these concerns. Facebook informed the CMA on 25 March 2021 that it would not be offering any such undertakings.”www.gov.uk #

  • @antirez (Author of Redis) - “I look at the web today. Not as a programmer, but as a user of broken sites that are unable to obey the most basic rules of navigation and usability, terribly slow despite the hardware progresses. And I can only think that modern frontend development has failed.”mobile.twitter.com #

  • LG confirms it’s getting out of the smartphone business - I don’t know that much about mobile development aside from as a user, but I guess the disappearance of a manufacturer is somewhat similar to the disappearance of a browser, but probably worse because you also loose all the hardware possibilities, and I always thought that LG had some interesting phone designs, especially the dual screen devices, a bit experimental, but it seemed though at some stage one of them would lead to something really novelwww.theverge.com #

  • 42 - the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams - This looks amazing, a crowd funding campaign for a book that pulls together all the best bits and pieces from Adams’ notes, scrap books, hard drives etc, reading HHGTTG for the first time was a bit like if the philharmonic orchestra was smashed together with everyone of your all time favourite dinners you have ever eaten, I just devoured each book back to back in a reading mega binge, it was still to this day my best ever book reading experiencewww.kickstarter.com #

  • Microsoft is supplying 120,000 HoloLens-based headsets to the US Army - The AR/VR space has been making steady progress in recent years but such a big government contract, ~$20 billion over 10 years, is probably an indication that the pace is about to increase, there are many companies making consumer products too, lots of applications such as training, heads up displays, and many sectors especially industrial and manufacturing, I’m interested to see what software tools and workflows will get built in these environmentswww.theverge.com #

  • What really is the difference between AR / MR / VR / XR ?medium.com #

  • The NFT Canon is a go-to resource for artists and creators, developers, corporations and institutions, communities and other organizations seeking to understand or do more with non-fungible tokensa16z.com #

2021/04/04 #

Today’s links:

  • GitHub investigating crypto-mining campaign abusing its server infrastructure - Looks like it’s possible to get a repo to run a new action just by creating a PR, it’s not even necessary to have the PR merged, they don’t mention any way to stop it happening, and it sounds like it’s been happening for many months, surprising that’s it’s only surfacing now, looks like crypto based attacks are on the risetherecord.media #

  • Ride Home Podcast - (Bonus) Friday 04.02 Twitter Space - Special experimental live talk radio style episode, a bit rough around the edges but generally a very interesting discussion about the AR/VR space, with an unexpected appearance from AR/VR connoisseur Robert Scoble, I like this format quite a bit, it’s a nice complement to the main show, reminds me of some of the earlier days of podcasting when things were more informal and unprepared, it’s also fun to listen in to the show as it evolveswww.ridehome.info #

  • 533 Million Facebook Users' Phone Numbers and Personal Data Leaked Online - That’s a lot of user datathehackernews.com #

2021/04/03 #

  • Saturday 3rd April, 2021 (Issue #20)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2021-04-03)

    In this week’s edition:

    Congress, YouTube protection, Facebook feeds, Substack funding, Intel vs TSMC, NFT&Crypto surge, Deno, Apple privacy blocks, Google Maps, Cryptojacking, AirBnB training, NodeJS certification, Fastify

    Issue details:

Today’s links:

  • Class static initializer blocks - For all the OO lovers out there, this feature gives you the ability to have some code in a class definition execute exactly oncev8.dev #

  • Using media queries with JavaScript - Could be useful for example to only load a specific library on larger devicesdev.to #

  • Chris Coyier writes his thoughts about The Deno Company - Looks like people are mostly interested in the native Typescript support, but for me that’s the least interesting part, the security part is much more interesting, but also there seems to be a very strong tooling set, and being able to import via urls is coolcss-tricks.com #

  • Coinbase To Go Public on April 14, Announce Q1 Earnings Beforehand - They are opting for a direct listing rather than an IPO, by the sounds of this article there are several other factors that make this transition non-typical, anecdotally I have been waiting for a reply from their support team for over a week now, hasn’t been the best on-boarding experiencedecrypt.co #

2021/04/02 #

Today’s links:

  • Casio G-Shock GSW-H1000 smartwatch rocks Wear OS - It’s priced at $700, I’m curious about what the display looks like and what type of apps it haswww.slashgear.com #

  • TSMC Unveils $100 Billion 3-Year Plan To Fuel R&D, Chip Fab Expansion - Looks like it might be a response to Intel’s plans announced recently, their investment will be 5x that of Intel’s, that’s a lot of investmenthothardware.com #

  • Lex Fridman Podcast Ep #173 - Nic Carter - Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates - I decided to not take notes on this one so I could really concentrate on the content, so I don’t have a summary, I can say though that it’s a great episode, very different pace and style to other recent crypto / blockchain podcasts I’ve been posting recently, it’s got a nice balance of the history, economics, politics and software development topics at play, and concentrates on the hear and now of Bitcoin, very pragmatic and practical with good explanations, you’ll be left with a clear view of the landscape and a good sense for what shape the near term Bitcoin future will havelexfridman.com #

  • Apple rejecting apps that collect data for 'device fingerprinting' - The purge beginsappleinsider.com #

2021/04/01 #

Today’s links:

  • Facebook is making it easier to turn off algorithmic ranking in your News Feed - You’re in control again, wow such features!www.theverge.com #

  • Incremental Static Regeneration - Its Benefits and Its Flaws - Good to know what this is since you hear people talking about optimising static sites a lot, article does a good job describing it, tldr some rather big disadvantages - “A pretty big footgun that ultimately is confusing for users, and frustrating for developers”www.netlify.com #

  • Almost a fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and ARwww.theverge.com #

  • How to Develop Your Talent Stack - I like the mental model the author describes in this article, it’s simple, makes a lot of sense, and is achievablewww.elmghari.com #

  • Node.js Certifications and Training Sale + New Preview of Testing Environmentnodejs.medium.com #

  • Redefining what a map can be with new information and AI - The indoor navigation called LiveView looks pretty coolblog.google #

  • Here's How I'm Fighting Cryptojacking and Doing Good Things with Content Security Policies - Great writeup from a security researcher that looks at an old domain that was previously used for cryptojacking, the author buys the domain, does some analysis of the traffic still hitting the site and shows why it’s a really good idea to set a CSP policy on your website, including adding a report-uriwww.troyhunt.com #

  • The Deck We Used to Raise Our Seed - Great to see a real world example preparation needed for raising fundingairbyte.io #

  • Source Code Podcast - Fixing the internet one browser at a time - Interview with Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker that I found really interesting because she has a wealth of experience in open source communities, has seen things develop from the early utopian web to today, and leads an organisation that is unique in its approach, and is adapting to the modern realities of the world wide websourcecode.simplecast.com #

  • How We Enable Airbnb Team Members to Code Like a Mobile Engineer - The two things that struck me from this great writeup, is how important mobile is becoming in modern development, but also, based on how amazingly well thought out the training program appears, how different working at a startup and a medium sized company is compared to working for a large established tech giant, it’s literally two different worldsmedium.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.