markjgsmith

Big news in the podcast space - Amazon to acquire the Wondery Podcast Network, the deal is reported to be worth $300 million 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 Query softwareengineeringdaily.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 side m.youtube.com #

Css Tricks Design v18 - I love that Chris Coyier redesigns his website so often, it’s very on-brand, but also his writeups are great and the sites are proof you can have both fun design and a good reading experience css-tricks.com #

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

Apple patents ‘reconfigurable’ Mac keyboard with small display for each key 9to5mac.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 OpenStreetMap joemorrison.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 optimised log.rockerest.com #

CandyMail makes it easy to trigger and send multi-step email sequences in Node.js using a single JSON file saasbase.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 projects web.eecs.utk.edu #

Online Harms White
Paper - Full Government
Response to the
consultation (Dec 2020) assets.publishing.service.gov.uk #

Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Contestable and Fair Markets in the Digital Sector (Digital Markets Act) - Dec 2020 ec.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 novel scottbelsky.medium.com #

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

We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow - lots of interesting data and correlations, the standout bit of information for me was that JQuery is still on 40% of websites, React/Angular/Vue only on ~0.9% of websites itnext.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 website apenwarr.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 workflows 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 results raymii.org #

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

56 Online Communities for Entrepreneurs indiehackers.com #

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

Kit FUI - User interfaces from film, television, video games and the designers that created them 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 applications dev.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 projects github.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 2021 daverupert.com #

Create Reusable Web Components in HTML dev.to #

A Short History of Capitalism neilkakkar.com #

Demystifying SEO with experiments - The Pinterest engineering team describe their SEO testing framework, they run experiments whenever they make major changes to the frontend of the website to make sure that there aren’t any SEO regressions resulting in negative search rankings engineering.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” 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 Immortality m.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 watching m.youtube.com #

Pinterest Predicts - They have gone through their search data and produced this very nice looking website that has some predictions for trends in 2021, each trend page describes the trend with stats about relevant keyword popularity business.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 gadgets lunchmoney.app #

IH Thread - Solo founders, what if you get hit by a bus? indiehackers.com #

🚀 Web design that focusses on text content is the best - I have realised recently how much I like web design where the focus is on the text content, even if it’s really simple design, it doesn’t matter as long as some of the points I cover are implemented, the site is pleasurable to read blog.markjgsmith.com #

Zoom is reportedly developing email and calendar services siliconangle.com #

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

FreeBSD has migrated from Subversion to Git for source control cgit.freebsd.org #

UK and EU agree Brexit trade deal theguardian.com #

A look at what happens to the various presidential Twiitter accounts when Trump leaves office, al the @POTUS tweets get archived and moved to an account called @POTUS45, then new accounts are created for the next president starting with 0 followers, Trump keeps his personal account 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 Gbps 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 publications css-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 approval codegram.com #

🚀 Re-post: GitHub Actions for custom content workflows blog.markjgsmith.com #

emqx/emqx - EMQ X Broker - Scalable Distributed MQTT Message Broker for IoT in 5G Era github.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” reuters.com #

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

SoftBank launches blank-check company to join SPAC craze 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 ceremony wunderbucket.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 UIs keenethics.com #

Twitter expands its new API with conversation and reply controls 9to5mac.com #

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

NodeJS and IoT - An Overview dev.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 have sequoia.makes.software #

SoftBank to file for SPAC on Monday - SPACs are companies created for the sole purpose of buying another company, the SPAC IPOs and then later merges with the company to be purchased, these investment vehicles have become popular over the past few years, but it’s Soffbank’s first time using a SPAC axios.com #

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

FFmpeg is 20 years old today mobile.twitter.com #

How Does a Modern Microprocessor Work? - Well written article that covers the main parts of a modern chip architecture, and looks at how they operate by describing the a fictional RISC-V microprocessor called the Calcutron-33, it’s a minimal example but for hardware chips erik-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 cpu erik-engheim.medium.com #

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

If Sapiens were a blog post - Summarises Yuval Harari’s book, all about the evolution of humans, very broad perspective on how things got to where we are today neilkakkar.com #

🚀 Housekeeping Note: I’ve created a separate page for my policy on job interviews, based on the original blog post blog.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 sponsor blog.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 feed rss-specifications.com #

Ask IH: How do you generate stats for your RSS feeds? indiehackers.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 on slashgear.com #

Facebook’s Laughable Campaign Against Apple Is Really Against Users and Small Businesses 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 site blog.webjeda.com #

Create a Dynamic Sitemap with Next.js dev.to #

Microsoft may be developing its own, in-house ARM CPU designs arstechnica.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 links amediaoperator.com #

What 2020 accomplishments are you proud of? (IH Thread) indiehackers.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 link 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 device samizdat.dev #

goldbergyoni/nodebestpractices - The Node.js best practices list - Huge number of best practices curated by the community github.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 technique blog.markjgsmith.com #

Pretty amazing stop motion animation of Tom Cruise linkedin.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 meetings m.youtube.com #

Tech Giants Face New Rules in Europe, Backed by Huge Fines - Two major new bills that focus on illegal content and anti-competitive behaviour 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/X11 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 too cnet.com #

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

Next.js CI / CD on AWS with GitHub Actions dev.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 proceed bitbucket.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 either wsj.com #

Microsoft unveils new native M1 support for many it it’s Microsoft 365 for Mac apps, including One Note, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook - They have all been rebuilt to be Universal apps, working on multiple architectures zdnet.com #

Google acquires CloudReady OS that turns old PCs into Chromebooks w/ plans to make official offering 9to5google.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 everywhere mobile.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 site indiehackers.com #

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

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

Amazon Zoox unveils self-driving robotaxi - Looks pretty cool, with carriage style seats that face each other, no driver and can reach speeds of up to 75mph 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 enlightening protocol.com #

Mozilla launches campaign in support of Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 privacy features 9to5mac.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 data 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 models 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 site css-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 moment blog.markjgsmith.com #

mdn/content - The content behind MDN Web Docs github.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 years blog.markjgsmith.com #

Tesla may soon be as big as all other automakers combined - Looks at how insane the auto maker market is at the minute, with an outstanding gif that shows how market cap has evolved over the past 20 years for the biggest companies datamentary.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 contribute lkml.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 ago slashgear.com #

Become shell literate - Concise and well written piece about why knowing how to use the shell can be extremely productive, with some neat pipeline examples to illustrate - As a side note, what a fantastically readable minimalist text based website drewdevault.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 techniques drewdevault.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 obvious news.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 choices blog.markjgsmith.com #

Oracle moving headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin Texas 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 brutality fastcompany.com #

meli - Open source platform for deploying static sites and frontend applications - Sort of like Netlify, but self-hosted github.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 background css-tricks.com #

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 solutions simonplend.com #

Npm Release v7.1.0 - Two cool new features - npm set-script and npm exec blog.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 Kubernetes openfaas.com #

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

🚀 Deciding when to build a custom solution in web development - It’s really very similar to building a shed blog.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 development levels.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 CDN brave.com #

Microsoft confirms Xbox cloud gaming is coming to iOS in spring 2021 - The big news is that it will be via web browser rather than the AppStore, presumably it will be using a progressive web app, it would be interesting to see more technical details, like for instance if they are using web assembly 9to5mac.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 devices 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 stack wsj.com #

Chrome Dev Summit: Google recaps 2020 work on browser privacy, richer web apps, and performance 9to5google.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 #

Red Hat kills off CentOS; users frustrated, angry and annoyed itwire.com #

82 per cent of musicians earn less than £200 a year from streaming 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 discussing blog.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 world softwareengineeringdaily.com #

DataOps Is More than ‘DevOps for Data’ - I think this role specialisation makes sense, it’s the evolution of the data automation side of sysadmin roles, there is a lot of variety across industries, my personal experience of it was in the media and entertainment file delivery space thenewstack.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 valuations 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 cloud venturebeat.com #

benwilber/boltstream

• Boltstream Live Video Streaming Website + Backend - Looks kind of cool github.com #

🚀 Ask IH: How and where would you promote freelance professional services? indiehackers.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 Netlify 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 #backenddevproblems dev.to #

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

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

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

Discogs Thank You! A commercial community site with bulk data access blog.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 style daringfireball.net #

Radicle - A peer to peer decentralised alternative to github radicle.xyz #

Stripe - Platform of Platforms - Ben Thompson goes into an awful lot of detail about Stripe!s future plans, really nice diagrams, I like Stipe!s APIs and the vision sounds cool, but I’ve been burned by them before changing things just when I couldn’t afford things to be changed, the other thing I know from experience is that it takes 10 days for money to clear whereas it takes 2-3 days with competing products, that’s just embarrassing, I could loose a client over such a long delay stratechery.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 way sneak.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 correctly web.archive.org #

The linkblog is also experiencing the same Internet Archive issue as the blog, no snapshots showing since the beginning of the month web.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? 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 styles art19.com #

teddit - A free and open source alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy - The performance difference is quite impressive codeberg.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 tedious josemdev.com #

Happy birthday, JavaScript 🎂 mobile.twitter.com #

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

🚀 How to become an official sponsor of the linkblog - This post goes into the details of what you get when you become an official sponsor of one of the longest running personal linkblogs on the internet blog.markjgsmith.com #

htdangkhoa/pure-http - The simple web framework for Node.js with zero dependencies github.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 aliases httptoolkit.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 pnpm hyperfoo.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 systems blog.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 Thompson corecursive.com #

Amazon introduces Proton Container Management Service which aims to make developing microservices easier by enabling developers to create a “stack” which defines everything you need to provision, deploy and monitor a service zdnet.com #

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

MacBook Pro 2020 M1 Review - Videoblogger Steve Garfield reviews the latest Apple laptop offonatangent.blogspot.com #

Don't Panic - Kubernetes and Docker - Docker inside Kubernetes is being replaced by a container runtime
that is more suited for that environment, you will still be able to run containers created by docker in Kubernetes, so not much should change for developers kubernetes.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 podcasts appleinsider.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 CMS shazow.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 #

Salesforce buys Slack for $37.5 billion - The close date for this deal is still quite a way off but assuming it goes through, it’s a massive deal, not sure if it’s related but I have noticed a rise in job postings asking for Salesforce developers in the past week 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 minute 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 AWS ft.com #

New for AWS Lambda – 1ms Billing Granularity Adds Cost Savings aws.amazon.com #

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

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 environments protocol.com #

Facebook to pay UK news publishers millions to license stories for it’s news tab 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 support 9to5mac.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 appreciated patreon.com #

Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? news.ycombinator.com #

About the Rosetta translation environment - tldr; It’s a translation layer, not emulation layer daringfireball.net #

Chris Coyier is intrigued by Substack, but not convinced that people will make a living from writing on it chriscoyier.net #

The apps keeping Rio’s residents safe from stray bullets technologyreview.com #

🚀 New Post: What it’s like working for an enterprise software startup - Following on from my post last week about working in the vfx industry, I wrote a similar piece about working for an enterprise software startup blog.markjgsmith.com #

Vimawesome - Awesome vim plugins
from across the universe vimawesome.com #

🚀 eleventy-agile-blog just got merged into 11ty/11ty-website! :) github.com #

Remi Sharp writes about Heydon Pickering’s “Please disable JavaScript to view this site” redesign - I had seen Heydon’s site earlier in the week but didn’t spend much time thinking about it, now I can see there are a lot of ideas worth pausing to consider, should browser javascript default to being on? Should web browsers make it easier to turn javascript on/off? Would we even need consent forms if browsers had better tools for seeing what a website is doing under the hood? remysharp.com #

Back/forward cache - Optimize your pages for instant loads when using the browser's back and forward buttons web.dev #

What is Static Site Generation? How Next.js Uses SSG for Dynamic Web Apps freecodecamp.org #

How I Built and Deployed a Fun Serverless Machine Learning App - Uses serverless cli to create an AWS backend with API Gateway and Lambda triggering Python scripts that fetch and run the pre-trained models from S3, and deploys the React frontend to Netlify towardsdatascience.com #

I’m always impressed by Flavio Copes’ content, what I like about his new NodeJS course is the selection of apps that you get to build: Trip Planner using MongoDB, Google Analytics Dashboard, Newsletter Manager using Airtable, and a Telegram Bot thenodecourse.com #

Apple Silicon M1 - A Developer's Perspective - Must read for any developers that use Apple hardware, overall the speed increases and fanless systems are great but there are some software issues that will most likely be resolved in the next few months steipete.com #

Indian developers are racing to replace TikTok - I’d love to assemble a team of developers that were experts in recreating SaaS products restofworld.org #

AWS API Architecture - Overview of some of the main resources that go into setting up a containerized application on AWS, with a great diagram that illustrates how regions, availability zones, VPCs, subnets, security groups, application load balancers, Route 53, internet gateways, and Fargate instances can be configured to run a backend API dev.to #

Software Engineering Podcast - Computer Architecture with Dave Patterson - I’m usually more interested in cloud architectures but I found this episode about chip architectures enlightening because the area is currently experiencing a cambrian explosion of sorts, the discussion passes through lots of interesting places including a bit of history, the new RISC 5 open architecture, the reasons for the recent domain specific chip architecture trend,
how machine learning workloads compare to those of other types of computing, and a prediction that the current period of chaos will lead to a golden age over the next 10 years softwareengineeringdaily.com #

UK to impose new rules to limit tech giants' power - They will be creating a new unit called the Digital Markets Unit (DMU) within the existing Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) bbc.com #

Why I chose Electron.js for my side business - Reasons why Electron is a good choice for small business owners to write on-device software getloaf.io #

🚀 Housekeeping note: I’ve updated the about page on the blog so that it hopefully paints a clearer picture of me, I’ve updated the navigation links, and created a separate services page from the original blog post that described my services blog.markjgsmith.com #

Working Copy - Powerful Git client for iOS m.youtube.com #

Advice for newsletter-ers - The author makes the case that newsletters should be structured into seasons, which sounds a bit strange at first but he does make quite a compelling argument, I guess my newsletter technically would be right in the middle of season 1 right now robinsloan.com #

🚀 New Post: Announcing my new Custom Training Service blog.markjgsmith.com #

How Community Prevailed at Python’s Virtual Core Development Sprint - Some uplifting community news, nice to hear their new governance model is working well, I sort of miss writing Python, it’s a nice language, looks like they have some good foundations built thenewstack.io #

Software Engineering Podcast - Cruise: Self-Driving Engineering with Mo Elshenawy - I’m not massively interested in self driving cars, but I found this podcast fascinating - The navigation and computer vision domain is very unique and new, and they have considered many aspects at a very deep level including how to construct teams and processes, how to compose the overall organisation structure to maximise collaboration across units, as well as the product architecture, next level CI/CD, and the advantages of multi-cloud serverless deployments softwareengineeringdaily.com #

Netlify Edge Handlers - I’ve been recently using Cloudflare workers to do some tasks on the edge, edge computing is pretty cool, the Netlify implementation is nice because it’s packaged in a very Netlifyish way, making it very easy to integrate into your existing projects css-tricks.com #

Netlify Background Functions - Another interesting feature from Netlify, making it super easy to run background serverless functions that take a long time, like generating a pdf, resizing an image, that type of thing css-tricks.com #

🚀 New Post: Looking back at linkblog.io - A look back at the linkblog.io implementation blog.markjgsmith.com #

The origins of the unix shell - Louis Pouzin: “I reached the stage where I felt that commands should be usable as building blocks for writing more commands, just like subroutine libraries. Hence, I wrote RUNCOM” - That’s were the rc in bashrc comes from multicians.org #

Run commands - The phrase is believed to have originated sometime in 1965 at a runcom facility from the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) en.m.wikipedia.org #

Is Salesforce about to buy Slack? enterprisetimes.co.uk #

Elon Musk overtakes Bill Gates to become world’s second richest person behind Jeff Bezos theverge.com #

Microsoft Edge improved copy and paste will cause headaches - Pasting a URL into the browser address bar will paste the page’s title as a link to the real URL instead of just pasting the URL slashgear.com #

Linus Torvalds on the new Mac M1 chips - “I’d absolutely love to have one if it just ran Linux” zdnet.com #

Ethereum 2.0 confirmed for Dec. 1 launch just hours before deadline cointelegraph.com #

Spinlaunch's ginormous centrifuge plans to slingshot rockets into space syfy.com #

The curl web infrastructure - Great writeup, they handle a lot of data! daniel.haxx.se #

🚀 New Post: Linkblog.io is dead, long live linkblogging - Death is so overrated blog.markjgsmith.com #

Safari 14 Released - Safari Web extensions, webpage translation, performance improvements, website privacy reports, website login via Touch ID and Face ID, image and video WebP support, Picture-in-Picture support on iPhone, support for high-dynamic range (HDR) video playback, several new javascript features (BigInt, logical assignment operators, optional chaining operator, custom EventTarget instances), web inspector debug and resources tabs combined and several cool sources tab capabilities webkit.org #

Media Session API - This new web platform API looks interesting, I’m wondering if it could be used to power a podcast player remote control, I had one on my old sharp mini disk player back in the 90s, it was so great developer.mozilla.org #

Upptime - the open-source uptime monitor and status page, powered entirely by GitHub Actions and Issues - Checks your site is up, creates a Github issue if it isn’t, which you can use to create an incident report, also graphs daily average response time github.com #

🚀 New Post: What it’s like working in tech in the visual effects industry - I took a small trip down memory lane and wrote a piece that gets into some of the tech but also the general vibe of being a techy in vfx blog.markjgsmith.com #

How Twitter Is Redefining Itself for a Post-Trump Future onezero.medium.com #

Committing to collaboration - How the early open-source movement and version control paved the way for today’s remote software development processes - Great piece that tracks the history of version control focusing on the remote collaboration features of CVS, Subversion and Git increment.com #

Corecursive Podcast - Interview with Jim Blandy one of the original designers of the open source version control software Subversion - A bit of a trip down memory lane with some fun stories of how development used to be corecursive.com #

🚀 New Post: Why are people chopping off their legs with consent forms? blog.markjgsmith.com #

Autodesk acquired urban city planning AI firm Spacemaker ($240m) - It’s interesting to me because Autodesk was the big player when I worked in the visual effects industry building systems for artists, engineers and producers to collaborate on big budget movies, here they are building systems for architects, engineers and construction professionals to collaborate on big city building projects venturebeat.com #

Automated workflows are eating the world venturebeat.com #

Systemd’s Lennart Poettering Wants to Bring Linux Home Directories into the 21st Century - I think his migratable home directory or “home-on-a-stick” idea is quite cool, I’m less bullish on his idea to use JSON for /etc/passwd thenewstack.io #

🚀 New Post: I've started a Newsletter - A weekly roundup of some of the best javascript / tech / web development links posted to my linkblog - I hope you like it :) blog.markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Mark Smith’s Newsletter - Saturday 21st November, 2020 - This is the web version that got sent out earlier today in case you missed it markjgsmith.substack.com #

panva/jose - Universal "JSON Web Almost Everything" - JWA, JWS, JWE, JWT, JWK with no dependencies github.com #

What’s the difference between Event Handlers & addEventListener in JS? medium.com #

Why Japanese Web Design Is So… Different randomwire.com #

YouTube will run ads on some creator videos, but it won’t give them any of the revenue theverge.com #

Nvidia is bringing Fortnite back to iOS with new cloud gaming web app - This is most likely good news for the web platform since they will be pushing forward progressive web app capabilities, also worth noting that Microsoft and Google have announced similar strategies theverge.com #

The iPhone 12 Pro Max - Real Pro Photography - I’m not super knowledgeable on cameras and photography, but it seems the cameras in these phones have advanced significantly - “The iPhone 12 Pro Max is a Pro photographer’s iPhone” blog.halide.cam #

🚀 IH Post: New Trends in Web Development - The Jamstack indiehackers.com #

isomorphic-git/isomorphic-git - A pure JavaScript implementation of git for node and browsers! - Looks like a pretty amazing library, I can think of a lot of use cases where it would come in handy github.com #

The state of the AWK - This systems level tool and text processing language has been around for around 40 years and it’s still used heavily in processing big data - “AWK reads the input a line at a time. A line is scanned for each pattern in the program, and for each pattern that matches, the associated action is executed” lwn.net #

Writing a technical book - from idea to print - Great author writeup of the whole process of writing an Oreilly programming book sararobinson.dev #

🚀 New Post: My policy on job interviews blog.markjgsmith.com #

What Is The Best Day To Publish An Email Newsletter? - I’m trying to decide which day to publish my newsletter, currently I’m feeling that Saturday morning would be good because then I can include links from the week gone by, and also it’s a nice way for me to delineate to myself that the weekend has started indiebusinessnetwork.com #

20000 Hz Podcast - Space Audity - Another amazing journey into sound, this time it’s all about space, every single one of the 20k podcasts is a master piece 20k.org #

M1 Macs can now run Windows apps and games through CrossOver 20 9to5mac.com #

🚀 New Post: Mozilla MDN Docs are going full Jamstack blog.markjgsmith.com #

Jimmy Wales on Systems and Incentives (Ep. 109) - Interesting interview that covers a lot of topics, there are very few websites left from the early stages of the web that still have the utopian ideals, I don’t know that much about the technology behind Wikipedia - I’d like to know how it’s versioning system differs from git, presumably it’s in ways that make it more suited for editing written word content as opposed to computer code medium.com #

Is it time to SoC the CPU? - Some good comparison details of the new Mac M1 chip architecture vs Intel chips architectures om.co #

My Shortish M1-based MacBook Pro 13-inch review om.co #

🚀 Mark Smith’s Newsletter - “Javascript, tech and developer links from around the web” - I’ve started a newsletter where I will share a selection of the links that I post on my long running linkblog, just a few clicks to subscribe :) markjgsmith.substack.com #

🚀 I’ve just re-organised the tags on my blog so it’s easier to find articles blog.markjgsmith.com #

Ep. #67, JAMstack Handbook with Colby Fayock of Element 84 - A movement isn’t really in motion until there’s a handbook heavybit.com #

What is your go-to place for looking for remote developer jobs? dev.to #

Playing on Hard Mode - Some interesting analysis from Ben Thompson comparing the relative difficulty level of the ascent of Facebook, Airbnb and Doordash stratechery.com #

Introducing the Apple Podcasts Web Embed - Makes it really easy to add a show player directly on your website itunespartner.apple.com #

nelsontky/gh-pages-url-shortener - Minimal URL shortener that can be entirely hosted on GitHub pages - It uses the repos Issues page as a database, storing the url in the title, a bit hacky but also kind of cool github.com #

Does Serverless WordPress Make Sense? Shifter vs HardyPress - Turns out there are several serverless / jamstack solutions for Wordpress, this article does a good job of covering all the pros and cons, there are some cases where it doesn’t make that much sense but there are other situations where it totally makes a lot of sense, and you can always mix and match quite easily by running different pieces on different domains or subdomains codeinwp.com #

Static Site Generator Gatsby recently introduced an incremental builds feature where only the content you modify gets rendered rather than re-rendering the entire site - I wouldn’t be surprised if Wordpress introduced a similar feature in the near future, if that happens Jamstack adoption will dramatically increase gatsbyjs.com #

10 Awesome Github Repos Every Web Developer Should Know - A good selection especially for working on your javascript skills dev.to #

What Changed In Blogging Wizard’s Latest Redesign (And Our Updated Tech Stack) - It’s interesting to me to see what the current tech stack trends are for digital marketers, very Wordpress centric, very focused on theming and plugins, and a move to cloud services driven by the need for infinite scalability, I wonder if there are Wordpress + Serverless integrations being built bloggingwizard.com #

Rosetta 2 - A brief look at the projected performance of the emulation layer in the new M1 Macs to run legacy applications tenfourfox.blogspot.com #

Everything You Need To Know About Message Queues - Modern cloud architectures offer scalability and fault tolerance at low cost, this article covers these and many of the other benefits of this type of approach to building backend systems sunilkumarc.in #

TMBA571 - There is Only One Kevin Kelly - This week’s episode is an interview with one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, I found this episode super interesting, eclectic mix of geeky tech sci-fi futurism, but also history, anthropology and world cultures tropicalmba.com #

Good Linux distros for new users dev.to #

Privacy concerns have been raised by developers about how Apple’s latest OS verifies app certificates blog.jacopo.io #

How to debug Netlify serverless lambda functions using VS Code dev.to #

Exploring the Unusual Properties of Quantum-sized Materials - There have been many technological advances in the recent past from discoveries of how materials at the nanometer scale interact, scientists are now exploring the sub-nanometer scale, and they are discovering materials that have very unexpected electrical properties, they see a new frontier titech.ac.jp #

Inside The End-Of-Year IPO Rush - Companies including DoorDash, Airbnb and Wish protocol.com #

Guido Van Rossum (creator of Python programming language) - “I decided that retirement was boring and have joined the Developer Division at Microsoft” mobile.twitter.com #

Socket.IO 3 Released socket.io #

Sir.DB - A simple database on the file system - This quite interesting as it’s based entirely around JSON files, human-readable
git-diffable, and therefore versionable, and
text-based, everything is a JSON file github.com #

Freakonomics Podcast - Please Get Your Noise Out of My Ears (Ep. 439) - Really liked this latest episode, it’s all about sound, what we think about it, how it affects us, the history of sound, and lots more freakonomics.com #

🚀 New Post: Robust NodeJS Deployment Architecture markjgsmith.com #

Callbacks vs. custom events in vanilla JS - The custom events pattern is definitely more flexible though at times, depending on how it is implemented it can feel a bit more difficult to follow the code gomakethings.com #

Introducing the next generation of Mac - All new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini - Pitched towards video producers, music makers and DJs, and programmers compiling code + building AI/machine learning models, these machines have the new Apple made M1 chips, super long battery life (~20 hours), speed, also with latest OS called macOS Big Sur, javascript runs 1.5 times faster, old apps will run fine using a compatibility layer called Rosetta 2 apple.com #

Om Malik’s notes on Apple’s M1 Chip om.co #

JavaScript async and await in loops zellwk.com #

Next 10 years for collaborators - Discussion about the next 10 years of Node.js, I’m getting mildly fascinated by all the ways the node community is using GitHub actions to create modern ways of collaborating, it includes contribution workflows, weekly meeting agenda generation, consensus seeking models, leadership models, to name just a few, all of which are applicable to so many other types of projects github.com #

Europe is adopting stricter rules on surveillance tech technologyreview.com #

Attention Is My Most Valuable Asset for Productivity as a Software Developer zwbetz.com #

🚀 Mark Smith's Payments - I’ve added a place where you can pay me money! It uses the latest version of Stripe Checkout, you get taken to their website, then after making the payment you get brought back - I might start selling some products to go with my Software Services :) payments.markjgsmith.com #

Apple defends Xbox streaming block on iPhones bbc.com #

Perl One-liner Cookbook - Though you don’t hear much about Perl these days as a programming language, it’s still very good at processing text similar to sed/awk/grep but more powerful, very useful for automation purposes, this chapter covers the basics of using perl to execute one liners learnbyexample.github.io #

Older Android Phones Will Be Cut Off From a Large Chunk of the Web in 2021 - The Letsencrypt root certs are changing, and they are used by a very large portion of the web’s websites - Affects all android versions pre-7.1.1 Nougat which is 1/3 of Android users, the only workaround, and it’s only a partial workaround is to install Firefox because it has it’s own certificate store (that’s interesting, I didn’t know that) which has the new Letsencrypt root cert gizmodo.com #

Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg - Lot’s of ffmpeg in the news since their recent wasm release which runs in the browser, this cli tutorial gives an idea of the types of things you can do with the tool ottverse.com #

What's the deal with SvelteKit? - The creator of the Svelte framework discusses the future of the framework which will undergo lots of modernisation, a move away from bundles, file system based routing, static rendering and serverless integrations, on the whole it sounds very Jamstack-like svelte.dev #

Some more details about ffmpeg.wasm which got released recently, including examples jeromewu.github.io #

tomnomnom/gron - Make JSON greppable - Having a simple grep-like interface to json files could be very useful because using jq is complicated github.com #

Apple among companies interested in acquiring podcasting company Wondery - I hadn’t heard of this podcast network before, by all accounts they are quite big in podcasting, Sony is also in the running, Spotify has dropped out, the podcasting world continues to heat up 9to5mac.com #

I went out for a late night stroll just before midnight because the internet went down, someone had placed 2 yellow flower heads just outside the neighbours house on our very clean street, some people are so thoughtful, it really brightens up the place duckduckgo.com #

Converting the Vue.js markdown editor demo to vanilla JS - Looks like the author might be starting a series of these vanilla javascript minimal apps, great idea for a series gomakethings.com #

More People Dipping Toes Into Web Monetization - This sounds like it could be quite cool, I’d like to add some sort of monetization / sponsorship to the linkblog, something minimalist and unobtrusive, possibly even useful css-tricks.com #

Node v15.1.0 Release - Quite a lot of new features including a generalised diagnostics channel, and new child process 'spawn' event nodejs.org #

How Node.js Is Addressing the Challenge of Ryan Dahl’s Deno thenewstack.io #

next-10 - A repository to work collaboratively on the strategic directions for the next 10 years of Node.js (Building on the successful first 10) github.com #

AdminBro is an admin panel for apps written in node.js - Looks very useful, plus release 3.3 just out github.com #

NodeBB / NodeBB - Node.js based forum software built for the modern web github.com #

Memory Life cycle, Heap, Stack and Call Stack in JavaScript - Some very useful knowledge about the javascript core dev.to #

Ask HN - What can replace my iPod for podcast listening? - Quite a lot of useful info about iPod modding and repair, I feel like there should be a specialist sturdy podcast listening device with super long battery life, WiFi, web interface, maybe also ethernet news.ycombinator.com #

Why we are building a CLI first PaaS without a web frontend - Makes some pretty convincing arguments, this is something I have been pondering recently too, cool to see someone actually doing it crufter.com #

Having re-read my GitHub actions article from a couple of days ago, I’ve made several edits to make it more readable, I hadn’t realised until now that writing on small screens has a big effect on the content blog.markjgsmith.com #

GitHub Actions: - Deprecating set-env and add-path commands - Seems like the vulnerability might already have been addressed a few weeks ago github.blog #

Just a friendly reminder to everyone that sometimes when you eat a pie, as I did earlier, it has small rocks in it! (mine had 2 small rocks) Be careful everyone :) duckduckgo.com #

How to Write Loops with Preprocessors - Quite handy, I didn’t know pre-processors could do looping css-tricks.com #

ffmpeg.wasm is a pure WebAssembly / JavaScript port of FFmpeg - It enables video & audio record, convert and stream right inside browsers ffmpegwasm.github.io #

Amazon Launches New RabbitMQ Message Broker Service - RabbitMQ is a very popular open source message broker used for creating lots of different types of backend message queues aws.amazon.com #

Should I use Linux? dev.to #

There is a GitHub Actions security problem that is being uncovered, this is the HN thread, it’s related to one of the mechanisms the workflows use to trigger commands, l am very interested to see how Github handle this situation and to hear from them the best way to avoid being affected news.ycombinator.com #

BBC makes switch to AWS, serverless for new website architecture - But when are they going to go Jamstack? :) theregister.com #

🚀 I just added a tags page to my blog! blog.markjgsmith.com #

Thanks to Zhihao Li for his tutorial on how to add tags to GitHub Pages Jekyll sites :) codinfox.github.io #

BetaList is a community of makers and early adopters showcasing their startups and exchanging feedback - It’s similar to Product Hunt, a good place to launch your product betalist.com #

Using Cloudflare workers to localize a website by rewriting the HTML - Quite a versatile tool to have in your Jamstack toolbelt developers.cloudflare.com #

MDN Web Docs evolves! - the folks at Mozilla are going Jamstack + GitHub for their new MDN docs content contribution workflows, great writeup of the planned architecture, this is definitely an interesting space to keep an eye on, it will be really cool to see the collaboration workflows they build hacks.mozilla.org #

Google have released a new search product that you can use on your site called Programmable Search programmablesearchengine.google.com #

🚀 New Post: Self-hosted web based tool to get tasks done efficiently markjgsmith.com #

Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Professionals - High level overview of some of the modern architectures available when building cloud / serverless applications medium.com #

Elsa is a minimal, fast and secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript written in Go - Interesting to see another implementation, this one uses QuickJS rather than v8 as the javascript engine, it’s not as fast as v8 but it has a faster startup time so there are some scenarios where it could be beneficial github.com #

JAMstack WTF - Single page website that highlights the essential concepts of jamstack website architectures and includes links to lots of resources jamstack.wtf #

Is the pain worth the gain? Writing webapps in C - Benchmarks Facil vs Flask vs Nodejs dev.to #

10 Useful Vanilla Javascript Plugins 2021 dev.to #

Apple One now available, bundling Apple’s services into a single subscription theverge.com #

Apple Podcasts Identity Guidelines -These are the docs you need if you are adding one of the Apple podcasts icons to your website apple.com #

Cloudinary is famous for great image hosting, but it’s also really useful for simple things like resizing images cloudinary.com #

I’ve added an “Listen on Apple Podcasts” image link below each day on the podcasts page so you can add the podcast in a just couple of clicks! markjgsmith.com #

Also I’ve updated the links on the podcasts page to be the file page in archive.org as I haven’t had time to create nice looking post pages yet, their file pages are actually kind of cool because you see a visual of the audio signal similar to on Soundcloud markjgsmith.com #

I’ve just been browsing through the Apple News app for the first time, first thing is that there is no linking to any articles across the web, which is for me a massive negative, however it’s immediately apparent one huge benefit, there are no annoying pop-ups / consent forms, none, zero, it’s quite something, after months stop/start/interuptions, it’s a bit like gliding on a cushion of air, also they’ve figured out that I like tech and there’s an entire tech section with lots of good content from a lot of the sites I read anyway, but no linking apple.com #

IH - GitHub Actions for custom content workflows indiehackers.com #

Where do content creators have their discussions online? dev.to #

Interview with Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek who is a maintainer of the JQuery project - It’s interesting to read about what he likes about maintaining such a project, sure it’s not the so called modern javascript but JQuery is still running in something like 70% of the most popular websites github.com #

esbuild - An extremely fast JavaScript bundler - Appears to be gaining some traction, the docs look well written and well structured esbuild.github.io #

Running Node.js on iOS and iPadOS via iSH 2ality.com #

Neat tutorial on how to build a url shortener using Express, MongoDB and vanilla javascript, and lots of async/await dev.to #

🚀 New Post: GitHub Actions for custom content workflows blog.markjgsmith.com #

The latest in my experimental podcast is a collection of recordings of a man playing his trumpet in the park markjgsmith.com #

Surprise! The Section 230 Hearing Wasn’t About Section 230 - By the sounds of it Twitter’s Jack Dorsey got an earful from some of the senators wired.com #

From the that looks interesting department, the LG Wing is a dual screen smart phone where one screen swivels / rotates into position, looks like it could be quite nifty for gaming, and the example of playing a game while watching a YouTube video has me wondering if some online code editors could make good use of this configuration theverge.com #

Comparing Static Site Generator Build Times - Really interesting article especially if you are at all into websites that are built using jamstack architectures and techniques, would be great if they also published the actual build times as well as the relative results css-tricks.com #

I wish I had an rss reader that was scriptable, what I’d like todo is automatically subscribe to the feed of any blog that I post to my linkblog, then at a later date have some way to re-evaluate whether to stay subscribed or not, maybe there could be some stats that would make that decision easier, just thinking out loud en.m.wikipedia.org #

If not SPAs, What? - Some general all round commentary on the current state of web development macwright.com #

actions/cache - Cache dependencies and build outputs in GitHub Actions - Looks like this action could be very useful for optimising GitHub actions, making it possible to cache assets between workflow runs github.com #

Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab - They are responsible for among other things developing Wikipedia, so it’s relatively big news when they make a big technology decision, they also recently decided to start using Vue as their front end framework m.mediawiki.org #

Zuckerberg And Facebook Throw The Open Internet Under The Bus - There is a lot of talk about reforming a bit of law called “Section 230”, it’s what has made it possible for smaller startup companies to build their products and services without fear of being squashed by existing companies, it’s become synonymous with the “Open Internet”, but some people feel it’s leading to disinformation spreading too easily - It doesn’t paint Zuckerberg in a very good light, but it also is quite thin on what the proposed reforms might be techdirt.com #

Amazon is turning Audible into a true podcast app - Always good to see the podcasting landscape moving forward, meanwhile I was able to upload another recording to the internet archive, which should drop in the feed by tomorrow, tried to upload another, and uploads are blocked again :( theverge.com #

SpaceX prices Starlink satellite internet service at $99 per month, according to e-mail cnbc.com #

Reddit worries it’s going to be crushed in the fight against Big Tech - Interview with Reddit’s general council Benjamin Lee, the thing that strikes me is how he’s saying what chance do they have against the tech giants if section 230 is repealed, well if he’s saying that about Reddit, the so called “front page of the internet”, what chance do the rest of us have? protocol.com #

RIAA’s YouTube-DL Takedown Ticks Off Developers and GitHub’s CEO torrentfreak.com #

There is some pretty radically futuristic bits in the ToS for Starlink’s new internet service, the governing law section contains the following words: earth, moon, mars, free planet, transit, starship, colonisation spacecraft, earth-based government, Martian activities, and of course Martian settlement - wow the bar for ToS's just got raised rather significantly mobile.twitter.com #

3 days of trying to upload a 300KB file to the internet archive, finally found an internet connection where the upload succeeded, tried to upload another equally small file, uploads are all failing again, so the pretty great recordings I got of a rain storm and of a man playing the trumpet will have to wait, until when I just don’t know archive.org #

Music industry forces widely used journalist tool offline - This is about the youtube-dl cli tool which is widely used for many important non copyright infringing use cases freedom.press #

Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla news.ycombinator.com #

Freelance Web Developer, Consultant, Automation Engineer - I’ve just added a profile to my GitHub main page, check it out! I am available for hire to work on interesting projects :) github.com #

YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA - I’ve used youtube-dl a lot over the years, as far as I know pretty much always for non copyright infringing use cases, so it’s really sad to see this great cli tool get taken down news.ycombinator.com #

DevOps best practices Q&A - Automated deployments at GitHub github.blog #

Differences Between MacOS and Linux Scripting - There are quite a lot of differences between the two platform when it comes to scripting, this article does a good job of highlighting some of the differences you are likely to encounter dev.to #

RSS feeds for your Github releases, tags and activity - Cool that there are repo RSS feeds, it would be awesome though if there was a feed for issues & PRs, which there doesn’t appear to be ronaldsvilcins.com #

Introducing the npm public roadmap and a new feedback process - This seems like a good move, I previously opened some bug reports on the npm project and it felt more difficult than it needed to be, had to open a separate account on their website and never got much feedback, so it’s good to see all these public roadmap git repos github.blog #

I was hoping to add a few more audio recordings to the podcast feed today, now that I’m in iTunes, but I can’t upload any files to the internet archive (where I am hosting the files), I’ve tried 3 or 4 different internet connections today, and none of my uploads complete :( archive.org #

Writing new websites the old fashion way - A short exploration into getting rid of the compile step while keeping a modern javascript setup by using ES modules dev.to #

What’s New In Node.js 15? - N-API Version 7, npm 7, AbortController, QUIC, Updated handling of rejections reddit.com #

Node.js v15.0.0 is here! - The official notes for the release, also mentions an upgrade to v8 8.6 which brings Promise.any(), AggregateError, String.prototype.replaceAll(), and Logical assignment operators &&=, ||=, and ??= nodejs.medium.com #

Mark Smith’s Podcast is now in iTunes! podcasts.apple.com #

Airbnb announces multi-year partnership with Jony Ive and LoveFrom, his new independent design firm - “LoveFrom has amassed a creative team including designers, architects, musicians, writers, engineers and artists” 9to5mac.com #

Twenty Thousand Hertz Podcast
#107 | Dies Irae - Great episode, includes chants! 20k.org #

How to check if a URL exists with bash and curl stackoverflow.com #

Keeping track of live code with Netlify - Remi Sharp shares a neat workflow that uses some of the Netlify environment variables to embed a GitHub link in the webpage of his site that compares the code from the current build with that if the previous build so you can see what changed, and thus quickly find code that broke something remysharp.com #

Mark Smith's Podcasts - Early days with this new site, it’s only up in the last hour, some things still to fix, but it’s up :) markjgsmith.com #

Everything Labeler - A GitHub action that makes it easy to A sign labels to issues and pull requests based on text that appears in the title and /or description github.com #

Atlassian to end sale and support of on-premise server products by 2024 They make a lot of very popular developer products including Bitbucket, Jira and Bamboo zdnet.com #

Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It - Very thorough roundup of the landscape with wanderings into music history, video, broadcast, podcasting, gaming and virtual - Very long though, I drifted off towards the end matthewball.vc #

Getting started with a history, skill guide and how-to of web standards wpc.guide #

Do you prefer subdomains or subdirectories? dev.to #

Which Programming Languages Use the Least Electricity? - Of the interpreted languages, javascript is right up there in terms of energy efficiency, lots of interesting data points and comparisons between language categories and programming paradigms thenewstack.io #

The Node.js web server frameworks team are putting together some examples that show how the next generation http libraries could work github.com #

GitHub public roadmap - Worth keeping an eye on this as they are developing interesting new features - I am particularly interested in Actions features github.com #

Organization and enterprise workflows -One of the items on the GitHub roadmap that looks interesting, the ability to run an Actions workflow against any repo in an organisation github.com #

Workflow visualization - Another interesting looking Actions feature in development github.com #

Google’s new ‘hum to search’ feature can figure out the song that’s stuck in your head theverge.com #

Why Get Involved in Web Standards? dev.to #

whatwg//html
HTML Standard - The repo where the html standard is managed github.com #

tc39/ecma262 - Repo that hosts the Javascript specification, this where proposals for new language features are discussed github.com #

Ever wondered why the TC39 is called that? It stands for technical committee of ECMA, here is a list of all the other technical committees and steering groups ecma-international.org #

Npm CLI v7.0.0 released - This release has what looks to be a really useful feature called workspaces, which make it much easier to work on several packages inside a project at the same time github.blog #

RFC for the new npm 7.0.0 workspaces feature - Skip to the examples where you will get a good idea of how these workspaces function by seeing the symlinks that get created in the project file system github.com #

I'm Slow And That's Okay - Great post about a certain aspect of development that is crucial but often overlooked dev.to #

Some life advice from developer and podcaster Dave Rupert - “Leverage something you’re already doing“ daverupert.com #

What type of computer do Linux Developers use? dev.to #

Contract to run .eu domain-name registry is up for grabs - Rumours of corruption, and do people really want .eu domains anyway? Brussels wants the domain to represent multi-lingualism theregister.com #

Netflix discontinues free trials across all territories slashgear.com #

What do you use shell scripts for? dev.to #

Creating GitHub actions - After creating several GitHub workflows composed of community actions, eventually you will want to reuse those workflows, and the way to do that is to turn the workflows you created into your own actions, which you can then use as the building blocks of subsequent workflows you build docs.github.com #

Run an action from another action? - Being able to create your own actions is great but based on this post, it’s not currently possible to use already created actions from within your own actions, so for now at least, actions you create can only contain your own code, which is actually quite a big limitation github.community #

Google might be forced to sell Chrome off if US government has its way slashgear.com #

Talking Up Native Web Technologies blog.jim-nielsen.com #

A curation of CC licensed music from various artists and genres for you to use, however you like with correct attribution, in your creative projects cchound.com #

John Gruber writes a piece about Microsoft’s recently published position on the whole platforms are too powerful conversation - A good reminder that there are always many ways to parse the things that tech companies say about their motives and actions daringfireball.net #

Some pretty good analysis of the recent popularity of Stories type features on all major social media platforms medium.com #

Civilization on the Moon - and what it means for life on Earth ted.com #

Do you think GitHub Actions has an overwhelm problem? dev.to #

House Democrats say Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple enjoy ‘monopoly power’ and recommend big changes - This report is making quite a lot of tech people pay attention, it’s interesting stuff and it’s probably time some of these practices are scrutinised, I’ve been wondering lately because the future is rather unpredictable with the rapid advance of AI for everyone, I’m wondering if there aren’t some counter intuitive scenarios where having a few big players would in fact be better, what does the future look like when every small business is as powerful as these big 4 tech giants? The description of Google as “an ecosystem of interlocking monopolies” is kind of worrying, what does that look like in the future? cnbc.com #

find-pull-request-action - A GitHub Action for finding pull requests github.com #

merge-pull-request-action - A simple GitHub Action for merging pull requests github.com #

create-pull-request - Does what it says on the tin, create a pull request, easy and simple github.com #

I’ve been doing a lot of work using GitHub Actions the past few days - It’s really quite a cool automation framework geared specifically around developer workflows, so anything that involves source code repos, but what’s really surprising is the variety of things you can implement, and it doesn’t have to be just for code, but it can also support all kinds of interesting content workflows - The volume of published workflows is a little overwhelming though, what follows is some of the links I found useful docs.github.com #

Building Gatsby with GitHub Actions and deploying to Netlify - A good example of how to deploy your app to Netlify sung.codes #

How to Manually Trigger a GitHub Actions Workflow - The manual triggers seems to have been introduced quite recently, and makes it possible to launch your workflow from the web UI after filling out a form with the workflow inputs levelup.gitconnected.com #

Deploying to Heroku from GitHub Actions dev.to #

Publishing actions in GitHub Marketplace docs.github.com #

Triggering GitHub Actions across different repositories - After reading this post you start to see a lot more of the power of these workflows, you get all sorts of webhooks with payloads in each repo, and the payload is available to use inside the triggered workflow, which runs in a container, and you can easily build up whichever runtime environment you need, be it NodeJS, Bash, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby etc... blog.marcnuri.com #

awesome-actions - A curated list of awesome actions to use on GitHub - Be careful here as it’s where the overwhelm sets in, I wouldn’t go too deep into these until you have built several simple workflows, still though it’s nice to see some of the possibilities github.com #

merge-me-action
Automatically merges Pull Requests - It’s possible to implement some pretty neat workflows that use pull requests and repo branches as sort of queues for inbound content, to be reviewed and approved by real people, then published into statically rendered sites, this action auto-merges PRs github.com #

automerge-action - Another auto-merge action that looks interesting github.com #

If you are looking to build some custom content based workflows, feel free to get in touch with me anytime, as well as web development, I have years of experience building workflows for big media companies markjgsmith.com #

igel - machine learning tool that allows to train, test and use models without writing code github.com #

Eleventy and Vue, a match made to power Netlify.com - This looks pretty cool, Eleventy has been adapted so you can write Vue single file Components that get rendered to HTML by Eleventy netlify.com #

TypeScript is slow - What can we do about it? - Turn out that type inference in typescript is very very performance intensive dev.to #

Creating a site unlinked to a repo community.netlify.com #

Exploring Node.js Async Hooks - New since version 8 of Node async-hooks provide a way to create lifecycle style logic, with functions that execute before and after a main function blog.appsignal.com #

Who needs Javascript symbols? - I’ve been seeing Symbols in various code based recently, this article covers the essentials without getting swamped in implementation details dev.to #

Just a test post, nothing to see here, my thanks to Marge for helping with this test giphy.com #

It’s Marge again, doing her testing thing, thanks again Marge :) giphy.com #

Google Demands 30% Cut From App Developers in Its Play Store nytimes.com #

The Flavors of Object-Oriented Programming (in JavaScript) - I mentioned interest in javascript classes as well as getters and setters 3 days ago, and today a well written article about exactly that, and it’s at just the right level of detail, though it is rather long, which is more emblematic of the nature of javascript than it is the quality of the article - On the one hand it is quite nice to have several ways of doing things, especially for experienced developers, but for learning I feel it makes it more difficult, though perhaps once you finally do understand it, you know it better because you’ve had to think about it from so many different angles, but even then I suspect the weeds are always just a short distance away, maybe the vigilance necessary eventually becomes second nature css-tricks.com #

Given the incredible efficiency of the internet to deliver incredible javascript articles covering exactly the topic I am currently interested in, it’s probably a good time to mention that I offer NodeJS development services, it’s a great time to start as project, feel free to get in touch with me! blog.markjgsmith.com #

I also have a patreon account, it you like the links I post, and even if you don’t particularly like them, it would be great to have you as a member of this very exclusive club :) patreon.com #

Back-end Developers RoadMap - Quite a comprehensive list, there is a lot to learn, but the best way is to build a complete app while you are learning these topics dev.to #

How do you deploy your Node.js back end? news.ycombinator.com #

There is some talk about the UK repealing GDPR and creating its own data protection legal framework theguardian.com #

GitHub Actions - Looks to me like the docs have had a bit of a restructuring, at least today I was able to quickly find the actions config syntax docs.github.com #

Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums 2003 vs. 2012 vs. 2020 - Really liked this list, very fun news.ycombinator.com #

Vime is a customizable, extensible, accessible and framework agnostic media player - Pretty cool library if you are looking to integrate a media player to play videos from multiple places like Vimeo, YouTube etc, based on web components, should be easy to integrate into most frontend frameworks vimejs.com #

The failed promise of Web Components - Based on the title, you would think this article was a bit of a downer as far as web components go, but it’s actually quite a good read, with some good points made and some constructive suggestions, and it has resulted in some interesting discussion in the comments lea.verou.me #

Elon Musk slams Microsoft exclusively licensing OpenAI's text-generating software - I like that Elon is standing up for openess, but I’m not sure what the best approach is for AI, on the one hand the power gained from these new AI technologies is in such a massive scale that it might be quite dangerous, but is it safer to have all that power in one (or a few) company, or just have it widely available to everyone and hope that everything balances out for the better businessinsider.co.za #

How Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service compares to Stadia, xCloud, and GeForce Now - Interestingly the iOS version of Luna is a progressive web app so they don’t have to pay Apple 30% or use their payments provider, also because it’s a progressive web app, it is completely cross platform and you can switch between any devices mid-game just by opening a URL theverge.com #

16,000 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use under the terms of the RemArc Licence bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk #

New Field Recording: Motorbike Sales Guy 1 archive.org #

Coalition for App Fairness unites developers to fight Apple's App Store fees and policies appleinsider.com #

Google plans crackdown on major developers circumventing Play Store in-app purchase rules 9to5google.com #

Employees threaten to strike if Spotify refuses to censor Joe Rogan mmamania.com #

Dark mode with only 1 css property dev.to #

How does one lead a team in a hackathon? news.ycombinator.com #

Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house theverge.com #

graffiti - Minimalistic GraphQL framework - According to the docs this library makes it super simple to implement a graphql endpoint in node with just some mongoose models and configuration placed in a directory tree github.com #

Feature watch - ECMAScript 2021 - I was most interested in the candidate features adding public and private fields to classes, having read through most of the description here I am left with the overall impression that it introduces a lot of complexity, maybe it’s because so much of the implementation is visible and that in practice once you start using them it will be kind of obvious, but this article doesn’t make me want to dive in, plain old javascript objects get you pretty far 2ality.com #

JavaScript properties, getters and setters - Ever wondered why javascript has special getter and setter properties, couldn’t you just use a regular method? Turns out you totally can, but it’s not “modern”, after reading this article you will at least know the different ways, and what is modern programmingwithmosh.com #

A Podcaster’s Guide to RSS - Has the specification details for the iTunes specific tags you have to add to the feed so that it can be read by Apple help.apple.com #

Podcast feed validator tool castfeedvalidator.com #

How’s my feed? - Another podcast feed validator tool podba.se #

The Dream Team Tapes - Really enjoyed this 8 part podcast series chronicling the stories around the greatest team in NBA history, various impromptu interviews from some of the best - Michael Jordan,
Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley,
Scottie Pippen, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone,
Clyde Drexler and the others, if you were watching basketball in the early 90s you’ll probably really like this series iheart.com #

Todoist launches ‘Boards’ for big picture view of projects for iOS and Mac - Quite similar time Trello 9to5mac.com #

Linux Journal Is Back news.ycombinator.com #

The vanilla Javascript basics to know before learning React JS dev.to #

Ben Thompson does an overview of the current state of bundles in 2020, Microsoft, Disney, Apple, Amazon and Netflix - I haven’t read this through yet because my head is in a low level javascript space with very different abstractions right now, plus noisey cafe, and I’m not able to parse his analysis well enough, but Ben always has good analysis in both his audio and written content, so I’m hoping to read this later, it’s got a good opening and it’s a topic I’m very interested in stratechery.com #

The Era of Visual Studio Code - Well written thought piece about editors and VSCode in particular, interesting to me is the fact that I had hardly any issues parsing this in a increasingly noisey cafe even though arguably the complexity of the text is higher than the previous bundles piece posted, I suppose it’s just familiarity / fluency with the concepts blog.robenkleene.com #

New Field Recording: Noisey Cafe archive.org #

New Field Recording: Noisey Cafe 2 archive.org #

An Introduction to Multi-Platform Design Systems - Looks interesting, another one for reading later... dbanks.design #

What I realised after learning Python, TypeScript and Kotlin - A lot of languages have very similar roots and it’s relatively easy to switch between them once you know one of them well dev.to #

10 Niche Ideas for Web Developers to Get Clients - Some good tips on market segments to target as a web developer dev.to #

Creating a podcast website using GitHub and the Internet Archive wiobyrne.com #

How to Get your Podcast on iTunes / Apple Podcasts thepodcasthost.com #

A field recording of some chanting I made around 2016, somewhere in south east asia, most probably quite early in the morning archive.org #

Apple podcast feed technical requirements itunespartner.apple.com #

Let's Encrypt's New Root and Intermediate Certificates - Quite technical but well written and relatively easy to understand, interesting to see their architecture and how they handle migrations over long periods of time letsencrypt.org #

NetNewsWire 5.1 for Mac - New release of the open source RSS reader, has a neat Feedly sync feature nnw.ranchero.com #

I’m having tremendous trouble reading this article about fish sticks because as a Brit these are called fish fingers and fish sticks just sounds silly to me, but as an adult fish finger sounds a bit off because really you don’t want to be eating fingers of any kind, as a kid none of this stuff ever mattered because the name is obviously just a pointer to the thing that is nice to eat thehustle.co #

I’m 42 today so I’m thinking about the Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy simple.m.wikipedia.org #

What is Microdata? dev.to #

10 useful HTML5 features, you may not be using - Some if these have neat functionality that works without javascript dev.to #

Bootstrap Templates - Open-Source and Free - If you are looking to create an admin panel or dashboard these could be a good way to go dev.to #

Reef - A lightweight library for creating reactive, state-based components and UI - I had not seen this framework before, docs are easy and quick to read, worth considering for smaller projects reefjs.com #

How vanilla JS Proxies work - I’d been reading about proxies recently but I couldn't think of many real world examples of where to use them, turns out you can create reactive UI components with them gomakethings.com #

GitHub CLI 1.0 is now available - I’ve always wanted to be able to manage PRs, issues etc from the command line, turns out there is a cli tool for that, the latest version has just been released github.blog #

Hiding a 10,000 Year Clock inside a Mountain messynessychic.com #

Raspberry Pi project adds Boot from USB feature github.com #

Apple is making Shazam a bigger part of your iPhone - I had missed the news that Apple had bought Shazam last year, so this is a nice surprise, in upcoming iOS you’ll be able to identify a song you’re currently listening to, even when you are using headphones, so it theoretically should work while you’re listening to podcasts, IMO probably the best feature to be added to the phone in the past 5 years theverge.com #

undici - An HTTP/1.1 client, written from scratch for Node.js github.com #

To All The Jobs I Had Before - the author summarises the things she learnt in the jobs she had before becoming a developer, well thought out and nicely written elisabethirgens.github.io #

Amazon Music Joins Podcasting Fray wsj.com #

Writing even more CSS with Accessibility in Mind, Part 1 - Progressive Enhancement - This article does a great job of explaining progressive enhancement with neat examples, I wish there were more articles like this because progressive enhancement is brilliant but it’s difficult to imagine how to actually implement features matuzo.at #

Interview with Andrew Bosworth (VP of AR and VR) about Facebook's Project Aria, they are test-driving tech for AR glasses - I’m wondering what cool developer tools you could create in an AR world cnet.com #

material-shell - A modern desktop interface for Linux - It’s a Gnome extension that implements a tiling UI that sort of resembles tmux but it’s more modern, the official website is quite cool looking, there is also a floating mode if the tiling is getting annoying github.com #

I just created a Patreon page, not quite sure if I did it right, an experiment that probably won’t go anywhere, but if you like the links I post, it would be nice to have some patreons! :) patreon.com #

Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons - I wonder how they expect the western countries to react, seems like they are betting either the west already has a similar database, or it will build one, or do they expect them to just do nothing, it’s the worst kind of race to the bottom, where we all end up imprisoned by the technology we are building theregister.com #

What is the Value of Browser Diversity? - Well written and thought out piece about the danger to the web of loosing Firefox, with only one rendering engine the web sort of becomes another App Store, I hope they keep the URLs daverupert.com #

Would you use a mobile device with no App Store, where you could only use apps you wrote yourself? dev.to #

Apple accuses Epic of ‘starting a fire and pouring gasoline on it’ in new Fortnite filing - I can say from personal experience that it’s definitely the gasoline pouring that’s the problem not the fire starting, it’s really something to experience, the fire doesn’t give a shit about gravity and will ignite the gasoline all the way right back up into whatever pouring device you are using, and now you have to dispose of pouring device full of gasoline which is on fire, not very easy to do safely (makes me wonder a bit about the quality of this analogy) - Anyway, very fucking scary, very fucking dangerous, if you’re thinking “yeah but it’s just a small bit of gasoline”, nope doesn’t matter, and it happens lightning fast theverge.com #

Building YouTube Shorts, a new way to watch & create on YouTube - This looks interesting blog.youtube #

How I became a certified Scrum Master in 3 days - A lot of companies I speak with these days are doing some form of SCRUM, this article has lots of relevant links to learn the methodology and get a certification dev.to #

Raspberry Pi as a local server for self hosting applications cri.dev #

Deep Dive - Next Gen low level Node HTTP APIs - A look at the low level QUIC protocol implementation, mention of possible web-sockets replacement, and also a discussion around a unified http library and how the higher level frameworks could use this next gen API m.youtube.com #

How TechCrunch took Disrupt virtual - and grew for its tenth anniversary digiday.com #

Why Apple’s anti-tracking move hurts everyone … but Apple - There are some compelling arguments in this article, but as a user I feel like there should be an option to just turn off tracking all together in case the tracking gets too oppressive, and as a developer I would argue the same thing because if it’s always on you might not be able to debug issues completely venturebeat.com #

Apple changes App Store rules to allow streaming game services cnet.com #

Blue/Green Node.js Deploys with NGINX - Great write up, I have built very similar setups myself - It does get quite complicated, but you get the ability to deploy anywhere - Maybe some better open source tools will be developed to make the process easier dev.to #

React 17 - Why it's so important ? - Quite a good summary of the changes arriving in the latest version of the framework dev.to #

I'm writing this on my phone - Dave Rupert experiments with writing blog posts on a mobile device and writes about his perceptions as he writes daverupert.com #

Minitel - The Online World France Built Before the Web - I remember the Minitel numbers on TV and Radio, they were everywhere, very much like how Twitter hash tags are today, interesting comparison to the Apple app store ecosystem - Nice bit of computing history, well written article spectrum.ieee.org #

Wes Todd did a Twitter poll to find out what preference folks have for the .use() syntax for NodeJS next generation HTTP APIs mobile.twitter.com #

Chris Coyier does a roundup of recent progress in web components, disappointing to hear that with the way people seem to be using them, we are just as locked as using a framework css-tricks.com #

Apple counter-sues Epic - The high profile case continues, I hope all the users are ok, I guess mostly it’s probably fine because it’s just games, but these days some people rely on these platforms to make a living cnbc.com #

Working with JavaScript Media Queries - I’ve used media queries in CSS a lot but I didn’t know you could use media queries from javascript - Cool! css-tricks.com #

Mongoose 5.10 -Optimistic Concurrency - Another new and interesting Mongoose feature is around concurrency which ensures that you don’t corrupt data by modifying two copies of the same document at the same time thecodebarbarian.com #

Mastering Hard Parts of JavaScript - A participant in the frontend masters course is writing up notes on GitHub as he completes the course - Worth a read because imo this course looks like best in class dev.to #

Designing a JavaScript Plugin System - I really liked this article because though we use libraries every day that have plugin systems, there isn’t that much material on how to go about actually building a plugin system for your app - the tutorial builds the “world’s smallest plugin system”, it’s a calculator where you can register new functionality by writing a plugin, by the end of it you have a good idea of how to structure plugin systems and the trade-offs inherent in designing such functionality css-tricks.com #

Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy - Short John Gruber privacy rant, he makes a lot of very valid points daringfireball.net #

How to program with wingdings dev.to #

What podcasts do you listen to? dev.to #

JavaScript Runtime and Its Components For Web Developers - ECMAScript, DOM, and the BOM dev.to #

React is becoming a black box - The discussion around this article is quite informative, it’s mostly about React classes vs hooks, but also more generally about the React community dealing with changing mental models as the framework evolves news.ycombinator.com #

GitHub introduces the GitHub Container Registry github.blog #

The problem with C - Interesting article that covers the relationship between C and C++ and the two developer communities - I think there could be a similar dynamic developing between Javascript and Typescript, that’s why I previously asked what the TC39 committee thought of Typescript, well the point to note is that as far as C++ developers are concerned they want C to not evolve as a language, they want to keep it simple, they don’t want C to have new features, and then they also blame C for all the problems in C++, “many C++ developers wait for the day when C finally burns in the hot flames of hell”, that’s not a good dynamic cor3ntin.github.io #

The Architecture of Open Source Applications -Interesting sounding book, but also some interesting ideas for developer podcasts in this HN thread news.ycombinator.com #

Facebook Threatens to Cut Off Australians From Sharing News - The australian government is trying to pass legislation forcing Google and Facebook to pay media companies bloomberg.com #

Twitter releases feature to create Tweets about a Tweet and calls them “Quote Tweets“ - Cool feature name 9to5mac.com #

Facebook - “we are left with a choice of either removing news entirely or accepting a system that lets publishers charge us for as much content as they want at a price with no clear limits” about.fb.com #

WebRTC for the curious - A book about the protocols and APIs of WebRTC webrtcforthecurious.com #

webrtc-for-the-curious - WebRTC for the Curious: Go beyond the APIs - The github repo for the book, you can build your own version using the Hugo Static site generator github.com #

How to read a log scale - Does a good job of explaining log scales using some interesting examples blog.datawrapper.de #

bytenode - A minimalist bytecode compiler for Node.js github.com #

Algorithms and data structures are pretty important, this article covers the various tree data structures, how they are implemented and how to traverse them - I haven’t had a chance to fully read the article but it looks good based on the Intro, diagrams, animations and linked pre-requisit material dev.to #

Building a website doesn’t need to be complicated, the approach outlined here has a static site feel to it though it does have a basic web server to serve the pages - Markdown files, plain CSS and HTML dev.to #

John Gruber comments on the ongoing Apple - Epic situation daringfireball.net #

Debug Visualizer - A VS Code extension for visualizing data structures while debugging github.com #

Why use Node.js? Scalability, performance and other benefits of Node.js based on famous apps - Does a fantastic job of highlighting all the reasons to choose Node.js for projects, also a very impressive list of companies running Node.js tsh.io #

Streaming Data Using Node.js - The general discussion about Node.js streams in this article is quite informative dzone.com #

Manage your agile development backlog using markdown files reddit.com #

This guy is building a VSCode plugin for managing daily tasks, something similar to my agile blog repo I posted yesterday - Managing coding tasks via markdown files is trending :) dev.to #

Why is node.js fast? Libuv & epoll & fcntl - Gabriel Zimmerman continues his video series on node internals, awkward in places but the high level approach is good imo, showing the c++ code next to a flow diagram is very illustrative, I hope he does more of these, I think he’ll find a great way to pass his knowledge on to others reddit.com #

Fortnite splits into two different games tomorrow because of Epic and Apple’s fight theverge.com #

script-httpd - Turn a command line script into a web service - “invokes your script and writes the request body to your process' stdin. Stdout is then passed back to the client as the HTTP response body” - Neato github.com #

Mongoose 5.10 -Improved Transactions - The previous transactions implementation did not fully implement all the MongoDB driver functionality, this release adds support for the session object withTransaction feature thecodebarbarian.com #

Show HN - Eleventy blog template to manage agile web development news.ycombinator.com #

Mastering Git Stash Workflow - Great article about what is undoubtably one of the most useful git workflows, it’s a technique I use all the time medium.com #

Apple and Epic square off in preliminary hearing on Zoom daringfireball.net #

How to write in plain English - Over the years I’ve picked up a similar style, It’s certainly something I try to do, worth taking the time to read plainenglish.co.uk #

Facebook accelerates News tab launch abroad - countries include the U.K., Germany, France, India and Brazil - notably absent from the list is Australia axios.com #

radEventListener - a Tale of Client-side Framework Performance css-tricks.com #

HTML Web Workers in Depth dev.to #

Web workers vs Service workers vs Worklets bitsofco.de #

The Apple vs Epic case is in session and I guess it’s on zoom and people are live tweeting it, anyway one of the attorneys was the judge for the Silk Road case, also they are not allowed to screenshot the zoom call so people are posting sketches of the zoom call - is this the real world? mobile.twitter.com #

More tweets from zoom court - “The judge is expressing deep doubts about Apple’s walled garden ecosystem - If you have an iphone you can't buy [apps] from anyone else“ mobile.twitter.com #

More from unreal zoom court - the judge is muting participants in order to force them to answer yes/no questions [for some reason Twitter is currently displaying this link differently based on referer, so copy and paste it to see the tweet what I am actually trying to link to] mobile.twitter.com #

React's default way of appending itself to a DOM tree considered harmful - Makes a case for why separation of concerns is still a best practice worth remembering in front end development dev.to #

New Repo: mjgs/eleventy-agile-blog - A minimal blog template using Eleventy, this one implements a simple agile development workflow so you can get stuff done github.com #

Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice in less than 30 years theguardian.com #

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong theregister.com #

Mystery of Interstellar Visitor ‘Oumuamua Gets Trickier - Could potentially be aliens scientificamerican.com #

Top Bootstrap Alternatives dev.to #

Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases after all theverge.com #

Moving from YouTube to PeerTube - I wasn’t aware of PeerTube, it’s a way to self host your videos, uses a variant of BitTorrent that runs directly in the browser, the article makes the case that it’s a good way to have functional backups of your YouTube hosted videos battlepenguin.com #

Deftones - Rivière - An example PeerTube hosted video, I don’t consider myself a Deftones fan, though I do like the soundgardeny guitars that kick in mid way through this quite raunchy video, I guess part of me misses the 90s peer.tube #

WordPress founder claims Apple cut off updates to his completely free app because it wants 30 percent theverge.com #

Apple fires back in court, says Epic Games CEO asked for special treatment cnbc.com #

Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own customized Linux system entirely from source - I really like the philosophy behind this project, it would be great to build a minimal Linux distro specifically for NodeJS development linuxfromscratch.org #

An Update on MDN Web Docs - Mozilla outline how the recent job cuts will affect the MDN docs hacks.mozilla.org #

Migrating from Node and Express to the Jamstack (Parts 1-3) - Quite rambley piece but interesting because it highlights the many difficulties in migrating from a server-side Express app to a JAMstack/serverless architecture, all the issues highlighted are problems I have also encountered, I feel like the JAMstack still can’t gracefully handle the functionality needed for many web applications raymondcamden.com #

Chapter 3 -The Website - The latest instalment from the web history series, looks at the very early web - In 1993 there were only 100 websites, in 1994 there were 10000, I started browsing websites in 1996, I miss those early disorganised websites css-tricks.com #

A Community-Driven Site with Eleventy: Preparing for Contributions - Nice article that covers setup, configuration and workflows necessary to build a contribution based statically generated website css-tricks.com #

What if the Statue of Liberty went on tour? It’s a silly idea, but I think it could be quite fun en.m.wikipedia.org #

What’s Flying Above Us? - Interesting project that tracks planes overhead that are not going places, but instead are being used in a variety of data gathering operations, code is open source, there is even a Siri shortcut news.ycombinator.com #

SkyCircles Twitter bot for NYC
@SkyCirclesNYC, each post has a detailed description of the plane, map screenshot and any available photography of the vehicle mobile.twitter.com #

The Market For Discontinued Photographic Film leejo.github.io #

Shortish video presentation covering the NodeJS internals (V8, Heap/Stack, Libuv) - I watched this on a mobile device so it was a bit difficult to read all the details in the slides, however it goes into quite a lot of depth from the NodeJS code right down to the C++ while loop code that implements the event loop reddit.com #

Decorators for ES6 classes - The description from the proposal “Decorators make class declarations programmable” does sound interesting, however reading the description and examples I am not convinced that the added language complexity is worth it, classes are already decorators and these new decorators are meant to be applied to classes, feels a bit like an “implement everything” feature - How many of the examples could be implemented using existing language features? github.com #

An example of code that imo makes good use of javascript classes is the eleventy code base, the cli script imports one class that builds the rest of the app structure by importing a bunch of other classes, good for readability and testing github.com #

Apple, Epic, and the App Store - App makers want a direct relationship with their customers and for Apple to stop favouring it’s own services stratechery.com #

How To Start Using Microservices - It’s a rather complex landscape, this piece does a good job of summarising the environment and suggests many useful concepts, design philosophies as well as services and tools hackernoon.com #

moleculer - Progressive microservices framework for Node.js - I wasn’t aware of this framework, the feature set looks interesting github.com #

An Introduction to Moleculer JS - The local dev experience looks pretty great, and it’s easily deployable to any cloud provider via docker, supports api gateway and message broker type components, so you get load balancing and fault tolerance, also event based architecture m.youtube.com #

How Apple's and Google's defenses to Fortnite maker Epic Games' antitrust lawsuits over their app store policies will likely differ - Explores the landscape of the case with a minimum of legalese fosspatents.com #

Linux Commands frequently used by Linux Sysadmins - Most of these are beginner level but it’s a very good summary and part 2 has a nice list of system monitoring tools haydenjames.io #

Looks at how much influence Google has on the open web in the current moment landshark.io #

India to run optic fibre to 450,000 villages in 1,000 days and give 1.3bn a digital Health ID theregister.com #

Linear, Binary, and Interpolation Search Algorithms Explained dev.to #

Promise.allSettled() VS Promise.all() in JavaScript dev.to #

Hermann Hauser co-founder of ARM says sale to Nvidia would be a disaster for UK tech sector bbc.com #

Mutt email client is 25 years old - it’s cool to see old projects still going strong and still with happy users news.ycombinator.com #

US DoD reveals official task force to investigate UFOs after releasing videos slashgear.com #

React v17.0 Release Candidate - Focuses on improving upgrades, it’s now possible to run different versions of React in the same component tree, also some changes to make integrations with other frameworks easier reactjs.org #

Some larger companies including Microsoft, Salesforce and Indeed have set up FOSS funds and have started awarding recipient, ESlint the very popular linting tool has received $10,000 - iIt would be great if this trend continues as there are many important projects that need support eslint.org #

Interesting writeup of the push to move Node.js EventTarget to a browser standards compliant implementation nearform.com #

The NodeJS core team are redesigning the main nodejs.org website to Gatsby/React/Typescript mobile.twitter.com #

Shifting from Express.js to Azure Functions - I quite like the Azure functions implementation, at least for relatively simple endpoints, it looks very straight forward to setup docs.microsoft.com #

Amazon launches Braket quantum computing service in general availability venturebeat.com #

Typing is coming to Ruby - You can define your types in separate files so the typing doesn’t clutter up the Ruby code, which is nice developer.squareup.com #

Epic Goes to War With Apple Over the App Store - Something that occurred to me while reading this piece is that In days gone by it was royal families that had to deal with such dilemmas, I have no idea whether the current situation is better or worse, but it’s interesting nonetheless daringfireball.net #

Web history, Chapter 2: Browsers - I’m about 1/2 way through this, really great read so far css-tricks.com #

Thank You MDN! - There has been a lot of layoffs at Mozilla the past few weeks, so someone built a website to remind everyone how wonderful the MDN docs are ilovemdn.org #

Illustrated JS - Promises - Some more cake based javascript cartoons dev.to #

The EU is launching a market for personal data - This could be quite interesting, it would be great if every citizen could have a small bit of cloud storage guarantied for their whole life and beyond technologyreview.com #

Twitter is for real rolling out its reply-limiting feature to all users theverge.com #

4 Lessons Web App Designers Can Learn From Google - They do make exceedingly great web applications smashingmagazine.com #

I've been running through the Next.js tutorials, I like how the framework is put together, so far all the abstractions feels quite natural - The one area that feels weird though is debugging, the debugger stops at all the breakpoints, which is great, but I'm not sure I even know what it actually means to be paused in the middle of some serverside running JSX, the level of mysteriousness of what seems to me at this point to be a layer of magic, the potential instability feels uncomfortable dev.to #

Started reading about CSS Modules, gave up at "CSS Modules compile to a low-level interchange format" - Really, is that what we do these days when current tech does not do what we want, just create a superset, surely we just end up with binary (the superest?) eventually github.com #

Linux 5.8 - “one of our biggest releases of all time” lore.kernel.org #

How to find anything on the Internet - Some pretty neat advanced googling techniques alec.fyi #

Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School Of Medicine release music video for The Last Big Gulp Script punknews.org #

To Head Off Regulators, Google Makes Certain Words Taboo - Sort of unsurprising in a lot of ways, of course they are going to be careful when it comes to future legal problems, but also some of the training material communication rules of thumb are actually quite good for users themarkup.org #

Introducing DevNews - A New Podcast From DEV! dev.to #

TypeScript, Minus TypeScript - Turns out your can use Typescript with vanilla javascript by creating the type definitions in JSDoc comments, that’s pretty cool css-tricks.com #

Illustrated JS - JavaScript asynchronous behaviour - I liked this article, it’s about baking chocolate cakes, and also javascript dev.to #

Browser developer tools timeline otsukare.info #

Breaking Down Serverless Anti-Patterns - Honestly I lost interest mid way through this article, so perhaps that’s an indication of the quality, however it’s an important topic dzone.com #

It’s been a while since I watched some movie trailers, these a pretty good theverge.com #

Let's Debug a Node.js Application - Describes some very useful advanced debugging techniques, tools and libraries blog.heroku.com #

c8 - output coverage reports using Node.js' built in coverage github.com #

airtable.js - Airtable javascript client - Airtable is very popular with small to medium sized companies, with this library you can easily build custom cli tools and backend Integrations github.com #

Some people are saying that with the introduction of it’s Reels feature, Instagram is becoming too complicated to use bloomberg.com #

Automattic (makers of Wordpress) launches a team communication and collaboration product called P2 venturebeat.com #

Twitter to label state controlled media accounts bbc.com #

How NodeJS revolutionised software development - High level overview of the qualities that make it one of the fastest growing runtimes out there aswinrajeev.in #

A searchable index of public APIs public-apis.io #

HarperDB - Building a Database Written in Node.js from the Ground Up - I wouldn’t have thought NodeJS was a good choice for implementing a database but there are surprisingly many benefits dev.to #

Top-Level Await is now enabled by default - Appears to only be applicable to ES modules reddit.com #

Interesting discussion around which large companies (PayPal, Netflix etc) use NodeJS for their backend services reddit.com #

Disney is launching a new Star-branded streaming service internationally theverge.com #

In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved over time nngroup.com #

Apple Maps’ Look Around feature gets first international expansion - It’s Apple’s version of Google Street View theverge.com #

Future MacBook Pro trackpads may be larger, adjustable, and backlit - Based on the diagrams in the patent it looks like a giant trackpad that spans the entire width of the device, and if I’m understanding the description correctly, the active region of the trackpad could change size based on the app being used, and perhaps even have different regions somehow drawn / backlit onto the trackpad - Sounds like it could be quite cool appleinsider.com #

AWS Serverless LAMP stack - There are a lot of PHP websites out there, so this new serverless offering in this space is noteworthy aws.amazon.com #

A bit of self promotion - if you are looking for a developer, or know someone else that is, consider reaching out to me with freelance / contract projects - Now is a great time to start a project :) blog.markjgsmith.com #

A deep dive into queues in Node.js - Great article that covers the runtime’s core queues, it’s also worth noting that NodeJS has some great libraries for implementing application level queues, I recently implemented a very robust and fault tolerant backend queuing system for handling inbound Stripe webhooks blog.logrocket.com #

New Repo: Implements a Books API for a Library, intended to be run on AWS Lambda/DynamoDB using serverless - From a recent demo project I completed, get in touch with me if you are looking to build serverless APIs github.com #

Microsoft’s operations will be zero waste by 2030 theverge.com #

Microsoft Teams adds support for 20K participants in meetings slashgear.com #

Introduction to web APIs - I hadn’t seen this MDN article before, it’s a pretty good overview of web APIs developer.mozilla.org #

SpaceX looks for government approval to serve broadband to 5 million customers mostly in underserved areas of the US zdnet.com #

On some of the unexpected benefits of using a PowerPC (really old) mac howtogeek.com #

Web apps aren't tech. They're "tech" - Rather average article but it has a very good Douglas Adams quote in it questinglog.com #

Creative Coders are the Celebrities of the Future - Sees a future where celebrity coders running algoraves is the next big thing - I don’t know about this exact vision but there is something to the idea that watching a programmer mid-flow is interesting, seeing the ideas stream out into the editor and the software slowly take shape bram.substack.com #

Is TypeScript the future of web development? dev.to #

William English, Who Helped Build the Computer Mouse, Dies at 91 nytimes.com #

Brexit fuels brain drain as skilled Britons head to the EU theguardian.com #

Azure Static Web Apps are Awesome dev.to #

Two Nasa astronauts prepare to make first splashdown for 45 years theguardian.com #

Wordsafety - Check a name for unwanted meanings in foreign languages wordsafety.com #

European Court of Justice (ECJ) rules US Cloud services fundamentally incompatible with EU Privacy laws nextcloud.com #

Jeff Bezos gets approval for project Kuiper, a satellite broadband constellation to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink zdnet.com #

AI-Generated Text Is the Scariest Deepfake of All - The comparison made to the introduction to Photoshop is interesting, though I’m having a tough time imagining a future where AI generated articles is sort of ok and accepted wired.com #

The Big Tech Hearing Proved Congress Isn't Messing Around wired.com #

My monolith doesn't fit in your serverless - On the difficult choice developers have between serverless and monoliths dev.to #

A new funding model for open source software - Getting open source projects to a place where they are sustainable is important, though I wonder how such a direct approach like the one proposed here would distort the project environment as people flick to popular projects, I fear it would run the risk of making already strained environments more toxic vriad.com #

It felt like a good time to drop in on Richard Stallman’s political notes, this one is is about a Treaty Against Space Weapons, important stuff - Side note I really like his notes but I wish there was an RSS feed that grouped all the posts into daily posts, the current firehose is too much, might be an interesting feature for an RSS reader to implement stallman.org #

How to review a software architecture diagram dev.to #

You don’t need to use UML - Discusses the C4 model for visualising software architecture dev.to #

Dynamoose - Modeling tool for Amazon's DynamoDB inspired by Mongoose npmjs.com #

A Mental Model to think in Typescript - Typescript articles often don’t put across the benefits succinctly, but this article manages just that with some real world examples combined with an easy to read style leandrotk.github.io #

Are we in an AI overhang? - I don't know that much about AI aside from some neural network classes I took at college, and I'm not super into AI as I much prefer web development, on the other hand the numbers mentioned in this article are kind of mind boggling lesswrong.com #

Sony’s wearable air conditioner - It looks kind of neat but I can't help but wonder if this sort of thing is all that good for the planet, surely it can't be very good for the environment if everyone wears a personalised air conditioner theverge.com #

A review of the various funding models used in open source projects plausible.io #

Latest Javascript features to reach Stage 4 - Logical Assignment and Promise.any look interesting dev.to #

V8 release v8.5 v8.dev #

15 years of MDN Web Docs - Such a phenomenal web development resource, it’s great to read about their recent successes, very impressed that they have open sourced their entire infrastructure configuration in a github repo hacks.mozilla.org #

Serverless Rendering with Cloudflare Workers blog.cloudflare.com #

There is a bug in the most recent VSCode (1.47.2) that breaks the debugger - Workaround by unsetting debug.javascript.usePreview github.com #

Introducing Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture - I found this writeup by the Uber engineering team to be a very good read, it describes their microservices architecture and covers their experiences developing it, also includes a suggested roadmap for teams looking to transition to microservices eng.uber.com #

Today is the 9 year anniversary of my linkblog, thanks to all that have visited, thanks to everything :) links.markjgsmith.com #

Yaml for Web Developers - I’ve used yml files a lot but I did not know about the anchors functionality, used to inject data into a configuration object, which makes configuring deploy environments easier dev.to #

Lesser-Known JavaScript Tricks - there isn’t anything earth shattering in this article but I kind of like the ‘with’ example even if it’s not recommended, there is something quite neat about being able to change the environment just for one statement, though there is probably good reason (not mentioned here) it is not recommended dev.to #

JavaScript’s with statement and why it’s deprecated - “It’s because one cannot predict whether arg will refer to a real variable or to a property inside the with argument” 2ality.com #

Fast Vue SSR experiment with QuickJS and Rust - Interesting experiment to create a nodejs-like request/response server in rust github.com #

What serverless computing enthusiasts like about serverless, and how they use it zdnet.com #

There was a rather catastrophic hack of Twitter the past few days where many high profile accounts were taken over including President Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, now people are worried that an attacker could try to socially engineer a nuclear war getrevue.co #

GitHub Archive Program - the journey of the world’s open source code to the Arctic github.blog #

Multimesh with Luke Kysow - This podcast episode dives into the world of service meshes and how for large infrastructures, they are moving towards federated multi-mesh systems softwareengineeringdaily.com #

Hosting your entire web application using S3 + CloudFront sankalpjonna.com #

SiriusXM to Buy Stitcher Podcasting Unit From Scripps wsj.com #

GitHub Actions - Manual triggers with workflow_dispatch - Adds the ability to trigger a workflow from a button + form for inputs github.blog #

NodeJS compiled on Apple Silicon mobile.twitter.com #

Rust for JavaScript Developers - Functions and Control Flow - If you are a JS developer thinking of learning Rust then this tutorial might be of interest, lots of similarities between the two languages sheshbabu.com #

Kanye West declares he will run for US president in 2020 theguardian.com #

Web Design Museum - Discover Forgotten Trends in Web Design webdesignmuseum.org #

Terraform simply explained dev.to #

Software architecture diagrams - which tool should we use? dev.to #

BBC Sport website at 20 - How the site has changed over the past two decades - Hoping to find some time to read this later, I do like a good retrospective and the BBC has been doing web for a long time bbc.com #

Github launch docs.github.com - last time I was reading the github docs (about actions) they felt a bit fragmented to me, so I’m glad to see there is a push in this area, it’s really important to have clear documentation github.blog #

Mozilla Common Voice updates will help train the ‘Hey Firefox’ wakeword - I didn’t know that Mozilla had an open source voice recognition project venturebeat.com #

HN Thread - DuckDuckGo browser seemingly sends domains a user visits to DDG servers news.ycombinator.com #

Burrito Delivery Makes No Sense - I didn’t make it through this whole article because after a good start it jumps around all over the place, but the commentary on the food delivery business is interesting nytimes.com #

Building a decentralized web is hard. Who's in? - worth a read if you are into all things decentralised, quite a few relevant projects mentioned dev.to #

Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns zdnet.com #

Mastering JQ - Part 1 in a series that looks at the jq command line tool, which is an essential tool if you are handling lots of json data, contains impressively short and simple examples that you can copy and paste directly into your shell codefaster.substack.com #

Chrome has a new CSS Overview feature css-tricks.com #

Bootstrap Icons Alpha 5 - bootstrap icons, svg sprite, icon web fonts blog.getbootstrap.com #

Interesting article that discusses some of the benefits and challenges of the scrum agile development methodology stackoverflow.blog #

Remembering slice vs splice in JavaScript - Covers the functionality of these well used functions but also a handy mnemonic to remember which is which dev.to #

The end of the Redis adventure - @antirez Is stepping back as the (excellent) project maintainer to concentrate on other things - Best wishes antirez.com #

A visual chronicle of Tokyo’s disappearing jazz bars thevinylfactory.com #

unim.press - a reddit reader that looks like the front page of a newspaper unim.press #

Refactoring optional chaining into a large codebase - lessons learned - I’ve been waiting for this javascript feature to start becoming mainstream for a while now, so it’s super interesting to read about real world experience, turns out there are several subtle gotchas to watch out for when you are refactoring existing code to use the feature lea.verou.me #

How fast are Apple’s new ARM Mac chips? It’s hard to tell theverge.com #

Github rolled out a new design, I noticed it yesterday, quite a big deal since so many developers use the tool every day - The discussion on HN isn’t on the whole all that positive, though not overly negative either - Hopefully they will find and fix the bits that people are having issues with news.ycombinator.com #

Riot which is a client for the real-time decentralised messaging platform called Matrix, is being renamed - I was always put off a bit by the current name so I think this might be a good move - I like that they are announcing the up-coming change, some interesting tech developing in France at the minute blog.riot.im #

Data Intensive Applications with Martin Kleppman - There’s a lot of interesting ground covered in this podcast, I’m hoping to listen to it again, it brought together a lot of concepts that I wouldn’t necessarily have put together and in quite a novel fashion softwareengineeringdaily.com #

You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are? - Some interesting and strange facts about how the human brain, eyes and visual system work mobile.twitter.com #

Google’s latest Chrome extension lets users link to specific text slashgear.com #

Put your bash code in functions - It makes it easier to parallelise execution of parts of the code ricardoanderegg.com #

mongoose-api-generator - Automatically generate a REST API from Mongoose models - It’s an early stage project that looks interesting, to add an endpoint just create a new mongoose model and add a permissions object export, also has auth built-in github.com #

From the experiments in web technologies department - Chrome Experiments - "A showcase of work by coders who are pushing the boundaries of web technology" experiments.withgoogle.com #

Twitter releases new audio feature for short voice recordings - This new feature reminds me of the early days of podcasting, I’m interested to see what the implementation looks like, and what kind of experiments people will try out nbcnews.com #

What is the deadly India-China border dispute about? - The border is called the Line of Actual Control (LAC) which sounds like a blockbuster movie IMHO theguardian.com #

Apple's Beefiest MacBook Pro Has a New, Speedier GPU Option theinventory.com #

Introducing AWS Snowcone – A Small, Lightweight, Rugged, Secure Edge Computing, Edge Storage, and Data Transfer Device - Edge computing is starting to become a pretty hot space at the minute, this new product from Amazon reminds me of my days in film VFX and digital cinema, shipping USB drives all over the place, it’s the next generation of that haphazard system, now you can install EC2 instances on the drives to pre-process data, the other edge computing area that’s interesting is the Cloudflare workers edge computing technology aws.amazon.com #

Could Blockchain Be a Solution to the Issue of Misinformation Online? - I'm not all that convinced by this study, but it's interesting to see some MVPs being developed that use blockchain in new ways, because it feels like a technology we still don't fully know how to use in the things we are building open.nytimes.com #

Introduction to CloudFormation - Cover a lot of the basics of how AWS cloud formation templates are structured ncona.com #

The rise of embarrassingly parallel serverless compute - I like this article, a good mix of facts and "think of the possibilities", the most useful idea for me was the ability to parallelise integration tests, the one thing I was thinking could be interesting, and this is telling of when I arrived to the www party, would be a serverless RSS reader, and I can think of several music related tools that could also be quite cool davidwells.io #

What JavaScript Developers Should Know About Curl - Nice article that highlights exactly the commands you need to know as a web developer to test your endpoints, I'm always searching for these commands, so it's nice to have them in once place thecodebarbarian.com #

Using ES6 arrow functions in Mocha remarkablemark.org #

Bootstrap 5 alpha! blog.getbootstrap.com #

VSCode prevent file Explorer from jumping - This was causing a lot of issues for me, I'd sort of just accepted it as another vscode quirk, but it turns out there is a setting stackoverflow.com #

Javascript promises are great and so is async/await, makes code much more readable, but there are several gotchas when writing tests for such code, and this article covers these imaginativethinking.ca #

Kayeb - Simple serverless processing workflows, on any cloud - I like the "backend processes as a service" pitch koyeb.com #

A Javascript Module for KeyDB and Redis - Gives you the ability to extend these datastores with functionality using Javascript rather than Lua - Pretty cool - Would be great to have something like this in Nginx github.com #

Disney Almost Bought Twitter in 2016 - Kind of interesting to think about how different things might be today had that happened daringfireball.net #

New Horizons sends images to Earth from a vast distance slashgear.com #

Snapchat is launching Snap Minis - Small apps built by third-party software developers that can be opened within Snapchat - Sounds sort of interesting cnbc.com #

Strange radio bursts from space are back and they’re following a pattern slashgear.com #

Software is a superpower flaviocopes.com #

Repl.it - The online code sandbox now supports Deno repl.it #

GitHub Etiquette - Worth reading if you interact with any open source projects github.com #

Meet the new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft? - Bit of a Microsoft hit piece and it appears to me to be a bit thin on substance, but there is a somewhat interesting angle that is mentioned - the recently announced Slack initiative in Amazon zdnet.com #

SpaceX launched 60 Starlink satellites with sun-blocking visors slashgear.com #

BBC launches Beeb voice assistant in partnership with Microsoft venturebeat.com #

US challenges 'unfair' tech taxes in the UK and EU bbc.co.uk #

Firefox 77 Released - Continued roll out of the new rendering architecture called WebRender, better web certificate management page, improvements to the javascript debugger mozilla.org #

Trusted CGI - It’s old school CGI but made into modern lambda style functions, all self hosted and without all the complexity of docker, I can see this being very handy for a lot of small scale projects trusted-cgi.reddec.net #

The rise of React increment.com #

Type safety with native JavaScript - With all the recent attention to typing in javascript it’s interesting to see an approach that tries to use native javascript, it’s in no way as complete a solution as Typescript but interesting none the less mmikowski.github.io #

tc39er.us a podcast where we talk to the TC39 delegates about JavaScript and everything else! tc39er.us #

Smashing Magazine review of their recent adventures and exploration in hosting re-imagined online events and conferences smashingmagazine.com #

Tina a.k.a. swissmiss shares some of her favourite blogs on the 15 year anniversary of her blog - I really like reading her Linkpacks and design focussed content, I also like the bring back blogging trend that I’ve been seeing in some places around the web recently swiss-miss.com #

Facebook’s latest TikTok-inspired app is a music-making platform called Collab theverge.com #

SpaceX is launching some astronauts into space later today (20:33 UTC) youtube.com #

Chris Coyier weighs-in on the recent discussion about the state of the “Modern Web” css-tricks.com #

Meanwhile, Here’s David Lynch With the Weather vulture.com #

Nasa SpaceX launch - Who are the astronauts? bbc.com #

Bringing back the 90s Internet reddit.com #

Tim Burgess of The Charlatans Picks His Bandcamp Favorites - I haven't been listening to enough music lately, I am reminded how much I love music by this post, thanks Tim :) daily.bandcamp.com #

Microsoft Azure gets into the Jamstack - Introducing App Service Static Web Apps techcommunity.microsoft.com #

The Third Age of JavaScript - Interesting opinion piece summarising the past and future of javascript swyx.io #

5 Differences Between Arrow and Regular Functions - Well written article that covers all the bases in a very neat fashion dmitripavlutin.com #

Joe Rogan’s podcast is becoming a Spotify exclusive theverge.com #

Joe Rogan helped create a podcast culture on YouTube, and now he’s leaving it theverge.com #

Microsoft Edge’s latest update can finally sync your extensions theverge.com #

John Gruber commentary about how Amazon Audible is competing with Spotify as the podcasting landscape changes daringfireball.net #

Handy description of all the javascript console.log variants dev.to #

Your First Deno Server in 60 Lines - Uses the oak library which looks very similar to express but using context objects dev.to #

Node.js v14.3.0 has an experimental implementation of top level async/await, meaning you can use await outside of an async function nodejs.org #

Microsoft’s Project Reunion bridges Win32 and UWP divide, again - This time they are using a similar technique to polyfills which gained popularity in web development venturebeat.com #

Introducing Facebook Shops - Helping Small Businesses Sell Online - Looks like a very comprehensive suite of tools for selling products online and it’s free about.fb.com #

New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data axios.com #

Blogging is not dead garron.blog #

Styling Components In React - I’ve always gravitated more towards javascript than css in web development, while it’s great to see things are moving along, these new css techniques appear quite strange to me smashingmagazine.com #

Disney’s Head of Streaming Is New TikTok C.E.O. nytimes.com #

Deezer release music source separation engine called Spleeter under MIT license deezer.io #

Amazon’s AI tool can plan collision-free paths for 1,000 warehouse robots venturebeat.com #

The NASA hunt for dark energy and exoplanets has some big news - Announcement tomorrow - Wednesday, May 20, at 11 AM EDT / 8 AM PDT slashgear.com #

Power Tool Manufacturers and Who Really Owns Them - I find these industry brand charts quite fascinating, but also potentially very useful if your line of business overlaps protoolreviews.com #

It’s Time to Get Back Into RSS danielmiessler.com #

Edward Saatchi on virtual beings - AI is the next great art form - This isn’t an area I’ve been particularly interested in to date, but having listened to this interview, I feel there might be some interesting avenues to explore - it appears to be relatively new ground, probably a lot of possibilities venturebeat.com #

Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips - It’s interesting to get concrete examples of how modern social medias help to further the conversation and discussion, and the experiment seems to show that blogging still is one of the best ways css-tricks.com #

I thought of a cool GIphy integration, turns out it already exists, but I think it could be implemented in a much better way, you really want to have something similar to a soundboard that you can load up with gifs in advance so you can drop them in at the right time using a keyboard shortcut support.zoom.us #

Create your own snippets in VS Code dev.to #

Facebook to buy Giphy for $400 million - I’ve loaded this page about 20 times today while doing some testing but my eyes stopped scanning after the first word (I think I’m completely mentally checked out of Facebook), but now I’ve finally a bit of time for a cup of tea and actually read the whole headline, and I’m like wow that’s a phenomenal acquisition, Giphy is such a cool website and the synergy with Instagram feels like it could go in a lot of interesting directions axios.com #

How Facebook Could Use Giphy to Collect Your Data - This article takes the privacy angle, which is a totally valid concern, but honestly I kind of glazed over this piece because I'm more interested in wondering how the deal could lead to some cool products onezero.medium.com #

Smashing Meets! - the online webdev magazine is holding an online meet-up next week with talks and interactive activities, it looks pretty cool smashingmagazine.com #

In defense of the modern web - A response to the article from Tuesday, I like when there is a worthwhile public discussion about javascript and the web like this, I’m not exactly sure where to find these lately, I feel like it was more commonplace in the early days of blogging, I’m wondering whether a webdev Techmeme would be a good idea (webdevmeme?) dev.to #

First issue of Deno Weekly - Deno 1.0 has shipped denoweekly.com #

npm v7 Series - first in a series of posts detailing the future of npm, interesting to see their direction now that they are backed my a big company blog.npmjs.org #

Debug anything - Series exploring how to use the VSCode debugger, I'm keen to see the rest of the articles in this series as I use the debugger a lot, based on this article looks like it could be a good series charlesagile.com #

Draw.io VS Code Integration github.com #

Second-guessing the modern web - An opinionated article that asks some questions about the direction of modern development macwright.org #

Multicloud MySQL - Podcast from Software Engineering Daily, worth a listen just to hear discussion, language and concepts around deployment of apps on multi-cloud architectures of highly available Kubernetes clusters - this is how things are setup at YouTube softwareengineeringdaily.com #

Creating A Real-World CLI App With Node timber.io #

Node.js CLI Apps Best Practices - A collection of curated best practices on how to build successful, empathic and user-friendly Node.js Command Line Interface (CLI) applications github.com #

How Facebook’s oversight board could rewrite the rules of the entire internet - The thing that’s interesting about this new oversight board is how they’ve structured it, its much more than a Supreme Court style moderation board, it’s a factory for spinning off multiple such moderation boards, and that could indeed be quite a big deal protocol.com #

The Original Cookie specification from 1997 was GDPR compliant - An interesting read, the article highlights relevant parts of the original specification, showing how it was intended to work and what actually ended up happening - It feels to me that the browsers could have better cookie management tools baekdal.com #

A Collection of One-Line JS Snippets 1loc.dev #

New Repo: minimal-express-typescript - Everyone is banging on about Typescript like it's going out of fashion, but after searching for several hours for clear examples of dev environment setup, it's apparent that there aren't many that are in a real life context, so I made this repo that sets up a basic dev environment for an Express app written in Typescript that you can run in the VSCode debugger github.com #

I'm looking for medium sized Express apps written in Typescript - This is the typescript implementation from the Realworld demo project github.com #

Tackling Webdev as a Bioinformatician: why is it so hard? - This is such a wonderfully level headed post, full of situations that have happened to me many times too - webdev really is difficult, an endless list of things that don’t work, progress is really slow at times jessimekirk.com #

Production ready Node.js REST API Setup using TypeScript - I like the app structure used in this tutorial, feels like a domain driven architecture, using layers to separate concerns itnext.io #

Why a “Shelter in Place Film Festival” beats bingeing video right now - More explorations of online / virtual conferences, there is a lot of nuance to organising a film festival that I was unaware of, the web designer in me found this really interesting rolfpotts.com #

Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk co-founder, dies aged 73 theguardian.com #

Github Codespaces - "Codespaces sets up a cloud-hosted, containerized, and customizable VS Code environment" - According to the description, it will be possible to step through code in a debugger right in your browser, and you will also be able to connect your local VS Code directly to a Codespace github.com #

Apple to host virtual Worldwide Developers Conference beginning June 22 free for all developers apple.com #

Google Podcasts will give podcasters more data about their listeners theverge.com #

It's cool to see the online conferences space get re-invented, SmashingConf Live are putting together something that looks pretty interesting, live collaborative note-taking, slack, conference DJ smashingmagazine.com #

Stocks Are Recovering While the Economy Collapses - That Makes More Sense Than You'd Think - So the Fed has added 8 trillion, other central banks are doing similar, note that the total money supply worldwide is in the region of 50 trillion, I don’t know what it means but these are big numbers - It’s likely I have this wrong but it seems to me that unless you increase your personal stash of money by the same percentage that got added to the total supply then you get poorer time.com #

I was just looking at some bitcoin charts, and this one stood out to me (make sure to click the "all time" button) - Which is worse dilution or infinite difficulty? Well I guess it depends what we (humanity) are trying to achieve blockchain.info #

The Seafloor Is Absolutely Littered in Microplastic - 10 million tons per year get into the sea, mostly from washing clothes that contain synthetic materials earther.gizmodo.com #

A Visual Guide To React Mental Models - It's a bit long, but there are some nice diagrams in this article and I like the general idea of describing mental models used to understand frameworks - One of the things that trips me up in React is that the JSX tree looks like HTML but it has all these extra layers that have nothing todo with the actual presentation of the page, like for instance how routers are implemented, it feels to me like JSX munges a load of things that are usually separate into a big soup, but then again there are some things about JSX that I like obedparla.com #

typescript-exercises - A collection of challenging TypeScript exercises github.com #

middy is a middleware framework for AWS Lambda written in Node.js - I like the syntax, looks pretty good loige.co #

Exploring Node.js Internals - Interesting deep dive into the node core and how the various pieces are connected together smashingmagazine.com #

Turning Vue components into reusable npm packages voorhoede.nl #

Generate Typescript types from Postgres github.com #

What I wish I knew about React - “React is a library rather than a framework” bitsofco.de #

DigitalOcean launches VPC feature blog.digitalocean.com #

How to Increase Linux LVM Size in Oracle VirtualBox jameshuangsj.wordpress.com #

If Andromeda Were Brighter, This is What You’d See - Andromeda is the closest galaxy to our galaxy the Milky Way, the to-scale drawings in this article are mind blowing, also I did not know we were on a collision course, though that will happen in a very very long time waitbutwhy.com #

SpaceX’s future deep-space rocket passes key test, paving the way for short flight theverge.com #

Interesting piece that looks at how well positioned Netflix is right now in comparison to a lot of the studios, they operate in a very different way which has resulted in them having already shot a lot of their productions well in advance theverge.com #

Shell productivity tips and tricks - Lots of handy shortcuts for making your shell sessions more like being in vi/emacs blog.balthazar-rouberol.com #

“The title ‘Front-End Developer’ is obsolete.” css-tricks.com #

How the Voyager Golden Records Work - Great podcast episode to listen to on a Saturday afternoon iheart.com #

Steps to secure AWS Serverless - Lambda - Setting up your lambdas and associated resources can be a little complex, this article does a good job of clarifying the process with some illustrative architecture diagrams medium.com #

Elon Musk announces plans for Starlink internet - “Private beta begins in ~3 months, public beta in ~6 months, starting with high latitudes” slashgear.com #

Compared - Magic Keyboard versus Smart Keyboard Folio iphone.appleinsider.com #

Netflix blows away new subscriber expectations - Some impressive numbers but I think the standout bit of this article is the praise Netflix CEO gives Disney for their recent successes cnbc.com #

JavaScript the Hard Parts - Asynchronous JavaScript - I found this video a few weeks ago while looking to refresh my knowledge on how the javascript event loop functions, I really recommend spending the time to watch it, Will Sentance CEO of CodeSmith and the classroom lecturer in the video, has a very entertaining and somewhat old school british style of teaching, with a perfect balance of humour, repetition over difficult parts, and light interaction with a live online audience, the whole thing has a sort of effortless, improv quality about it, while dissecting the difficult parts of javascript with precision and mastery - It takes a little while to get started, give it a chance and watch the whole thing when you are not in a hurry :) youtube.com #

Netlify Build Plugins - I want to know how to use the build cache to optimise builds, I had a quick look through some of the plugins but didn’t find anything, this new build plugins feature looks pretty cool though, I quite like their implementation because it’s simple and just regular javascript with a small bit a configuration docs.netlify.com #

“AI Eurovision” Special - Where androids dream of electric guitars - Interesting tech.eu episode this week if you are into tech/ai and/or music, from very eurovisiony, to experimental punk metal, these teams use a fascinating variety of programming and ai techniques to create their compositions tech.eu #

30 years of the great British gastropub - I worked at one of the early London gastropubs so I enjoyed this short recap of the posh food and a pint scene theguardian.com #

Debugging NodeJS AWS Lambda with VSCode and Serverless medium.com #

Debugging Typescript AWS Lambda with VSCode and Serverless medium.com #

serverless-offline - Emulate AWS λ and API Gateway locally when developing your Serverless project github.com #

Today I Learned (TILs) - Incredibly simple yet useful idea for a repo, that all the items are categorised in super nice, but there is also a daily view -- the commit history - This repo should be in the Louvre :) github.com #

jQuery 3.5.0 Released - Mostly security fixes, it's nice to see more mature projects continuing to develop, there is a lot of JQuery out there blog.jquery.com #

How to set up an express api backend project with Postgresql smashingmagazine.com #

NASA and SpaceX set the date for Crew Dragon’s historic launch - It will be the first time they have launched with astronauts onboard slashgear.com #

Apple launches smaller, cheaper iPhone theguardian.com #

Glitch launches subscriptions to power up its bite-sized apps theverge.com #

OBS Studio - Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming obsproject.com #

Facebook debuts experimental Apple Watch app ‘Kit’ for robust Messenger communication 9to5mac.com #

GitHub is now free for teams - “Every developer on earth should have access to GitHub - Price shouldn’t be a barrier” github.blog #

Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim keleshev.com #

Pandoc - Swiss-army knife for converting files from one markup format into another pandoc.org #

GitHub Protips - Tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets github.blog #

Git - To squash or not to squash? jamescooke.info #

Porting to TypeScript Solved Our API Woes - Makes a pretty strong case for Typescript, especially their technique of having the types exported from the database and enforced through all the layers from API to the client React app executeprogram.com #

Understanding (all) JavaScript module formats and tools - I haven’t had time to read all of this yet, hoping to read later, it’s a good summary - Makes me wonder what programmers from other languages think about javascript modules weblogs.asp.net #

Disney Plus surpasses 50 million subscribers theverge.com #

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover gets its record-setting cargo - An actual Mars helicopter - I really hope it plays the Airwolf theme tune when it flies around slashgear.com #

Twitter notifies users that it’s now sharing more data with advertisers theverge.com #

Featured actions from the GitHub Actions Hackathon github.blog #

A Static Future -
The magic of compile-time workflows - Makes probably the clearest and most concise case (that I have read) for why the new static site / JAMstack trend is an important shift in the web development space, and why incremental builds is the next big SSG development that’s going to make it possible to build much bigger sites statically joshwcomeau.com #

Backend infrastructure at Spotify labs.spotify.com #

Docker announces the creation of a new open community to be run with open governance to develop the Compose Specification - Docker compose makes it easy to define and deploy multi-container apps docker.com #

JSONPlaceholder - Fake Online REST API for Testing and Prototyping jsonplaceholder.typicode.com #

Microsoft updates Skype so you don’t need an account or have to download software, simple in-browser tool that opens when meeting link is clicked skype.com #

What happens when ... Kubernetes edition! - Pretty thorough deep dive into Kubernetes internals and component design all from the perspective of running one provisioning command, it’s certainly impressive but wow is it complicated, just to run a few websites, though if you are running a lot of services there is a point where the added complexity is worth the effort github.com #

Godot Game Engine with Juan Linietsky - Podcast discussion with the creator of the open source games engine, covers a lot of ground but also very approachable if you are in a unrelated area of the IT sector, a lot of similarities with movie software, and also UI frameworks softwareengineeringdaily.com #

Serverless Development with Jeremy Daly - Podcast discussion about the current landscape in serverless, it’s striking how much things have evolved in only a few years, some really interesting and advanced architectures are now possible, but of course there are trade-offs to consider softwareengineeringdaily.com #

A Practical Guide to Memory Leaks in Node.js - Good explanation with examples of how to create and analyse heapdumps in NodeJS arbazsiddiqui.me #

Another NodeJS debugging tutorial, this one is all about NoseJS built in diagnostics feature - Lots of cool features I wasn’t aware of nodesource.com #

Node.js in a Kubernetes world - All the essential things you need to know about as a NodeJS dev working with apps running on Kubernetes, well written and focuses on developer concerns developer.ibm.com #

The New SaaS Metric You Should Be Tracking openviewpartners.com #

The 8 KPIs That Actually Matter and How to Measure Them openviewpartners.com #

Amazon and Apple Strike Deal for Prime Video In-App Purchases and Subscriptions - Sounds kind of complicated at first, but read through to the analysis at the end to get a view on what each party gets out of the deal daringfireball.net #

2020 Sundance Film Festival Movies To Watch At Home Now coolhunting.com #

Multi-party video application built with NodeJS/React/Twillio/Serverless github.com #

Spotify signs licensing deal with Warner Music Group tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com #

Some interesting features are on the way in Microsoft Edge - Collections, Vertical Tabs, Smart Copy and 4k Netflix arstechnica.com #

Rivian Wants to Bring Electric Trucks to the Masses - Cool to see some more contenders move into the Cybertruck space, this one has a novel skateboard chassis design, battery platform wrapped in ballistic and waterproof materials, wheels that each have their own motor, allowing them to move independently to perform a tank turn wired.com #

Japanese astronaut joins the crew for SpaceX Dragon mission to space station geekwire.com #

That's My Jamstack Podcast - Aaron Frost on Scully, working too much and the merits of ice fishing - Pretty good discussion, helped me to think a bit more clearly about the Jamstack landscape, especially when it comes to what tools are being developed to build static sites using modern javascript frameworks thatsmyjamstack.com #

Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising? wired.com #

Movies Anywhere is bringing its digital film locker to LG’s TVs theverge.com #

A look at iPad multitasking, makes a good case for why this feature is critical in future devices, especially given the new devices are aimed more as being laptop replacements venturebeat.com #

How are Unix pipes implemented - The first half of this article is interesting from a historical perspective, it then gets a bit too technical for me, but if you are a C programmer probably a good read toroid.org #

Schedule your Netlify build with Github actions ericjinks.com #

Dumping MiniDisc Media - Quite technical but worth the read if you have a bunch of old mini disks in your music collection that you want to listen to on a more modern device pagetable.com #

Google Podcasts arrives on iOS as Android redesign goes official 9to5google.com #

10 Best IDE Software - Pretty good run down of the popular IDEs that are available websitesetup.org #

Chrome Phasing out Support for User Agent String - The user agent string has over the years been overloaded to the point where it doesn’t really correspond to anything meaningful anymore so it’s probably a move in the right direction, I’m interested to see what their updated feature looks like infoq.com #

Reddit’s new polls will let you vote on basically anything theverge.com #

SpaceX gets approval for 1 million Starlink user terminals for US internet service zdnet.com #

Aston Martin designs a new V6 for James Bond - and the Valhalla hypercar arstechnica.com #

How to do Base64 encoding in node.js? stackoverflow.com #

I've been using the octonode library to read and write files directly to a Github repo, it implements the v3 Github API, and has a pretty good interface github.com #

Different Favicon for Development - Now that’s a good idea, simple solution to an annoyance that happens a lot css-tricks.com #

Emojis as Favicons - More neat favicon tricks css-tricks.com #

Highlights from Git 2.26 - Optimised network fetch protocol is now the default, cool new tools to show the scope of configs, faster git grep, additional colorization for the format command, and more github.blog #

What You Can Do with Netlify Build Plugins - I like that all these companies are creating CI/CD tools, quite a lot of it is definitely useful, but honestly a lot of for instance Github actions and some of Netlify docs are really confusing, I hope all these build tools don’t turn into frankenmonsters that you have to set up in the cloud and on your local machine dev.to #

Javascript template literals with nested backticks - You don't really ever want to have template literals inside template literals, but in cases where it happens, and it just happened to me, there is a way stackoverflow.com #

Maintaining Performance - Makes some great points about the ever changing best practices and the pros and cons of using 3rd party services vs rolling your own solutions daverupert.com #

New Issue: Turning off strict mode for babel-loader in netlify-lambda build community.netlify.com #

Should you buy the new iPad Pro? Here’s how it compares to the 2018 iPad Pro 9to5mac.com #

Wikimedia has decided to move ahead adopting Vue.js as their frontend framework - These are the folks behind internet giant Wikipedia, so it's a pretty big deal as far as web development goes, firstly because as great as Wikipedia is, they use quite an antiquated tech stack, so moving their website towards something more modern is going to be interesting to watch, but also because they chose Vue over React with some pretty good reasoning in my opinion phabricator.wikimedia.org #

Interesting discussion with Brian Leroux about serverless architectures on the Shop Talk Show podcast - Devops have been a bit reticent to get into serverless, but frontend devs are very bullish on these types of setups, so it's interesting to hear some frontenders talk about the variety of things that are and could be built in this space shoptalkshow.com #

Here’s how the iPad’s new trackpad actually works - Some big changes in the world of touch / gesture based apple products, it might be an interesting new direction for the devices theverge.com #

Apple’s New iPad Pro Smart Keyboard Comes With A Built-In Trackpad - This review has the latest iPad Pro advertisement which in typical apple fashion makes it look very cool ubergizmo.com #

Next Phase Montage - Isaac Schlueter founder of Npm Inc writes about the journey so far, and his read on the acquisition - It's nice to see a lot of positivity there, npm contributed quite a lot to my decision to become a NodeJS/Javascript developer, so it's very interesting to me, I wish them all this best blog.npmjs.org #

GitHub for mobile is now available github.blog #

Curl write-out json - Cool new feature that enables you to output data about the transfer in various formats, probably the most popular being json daniel.haxx.se #

Visualizing data from your Node JS app with Prometheus + Grafana sergeypotekhin.com #

Interesting -
@Microsoft
now owns my entire dev stack, especially for writing JavaScript mobile.twitter.com #

CI/CD - Serverless Ebook using Gitbook CLI, Github Pages, Github Actions, and Calibre devops.novalagung.com #

The CSS Podcast & a list of some other interesting tech, designer and developer podcasts css-tricks.com #

How to run Express.js apps with Netlify Functions netlify.com #

Authentication using Netlify, lambda… and PassportJS medium.com #

Pretty big news in the world of Javascript - Github is acquiring Npm Inc - The folks that weren't happy about Microsoft buying Github are probably not going to like this acquisition either, but personally I think it's good that an entity so central to web development has some sturdy financial backing, although I have recently gotten lost a few times in Github documentation, and also recently gotten really really lost in Microsoft documentation, really hope these 3 companies find a way to keep npm great github.blog #

New Issue: __dirname appears to be incorrectly set in lambda function community.netlify.com #

Is an undefined actually undefined? - It turns out that in javascript the only robust and non-confusing way to check if a variable is defined or not is to use the void keyword medium.com #

New Issue: Headers are not being applied from either netlify.toml or _headers files community.netlify.com #

Microsoft announces Bill Gates is to step down from it’s board of directors to concentrate on his philanthropic activities news.microsoft.com #

Create Your First Github Package - Short tutorial that does a pretty great job of showing you how to create a Github package, IMO much clearer than the official docs dev.to #

Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD Pipeline) with Github Package and Github Actions - Continuation of the previous tutorial link, adds CI/CD integration dev.to #

The UK’s new digital tax starts in April protocol.com #

The UK will spend $1 billion on a moonshot agency to fund cutting-edge tech businessinsider.com #

Building a GitHub App With Node.js - Really useful tutorial that has all the pieces you need to create an express app that makes modifications to a Github repo thecodebarbarian.com #

Delightful Node.js packages and resources - I have probably linked to this in the past, but worth linking again because it's a great compendium of NodeJS resources github.com #

Three Things You Didn't Know You Could Do with npm Scripts - I use npm script a lot, so it was great to discover in this article some features I was not aware of regarding environment variables and argument parsing twilio.com #

Tesla’s Success in Europe Catches Industry Off Guard nytimes.com #

Chrome 81 - Near Field Communications, Augmented Reality, WebAudio and WebRTC additions and More blog.chromium.org #

What is Sourcebit? with Eduardo Bouças - I linked to Sourcebit a few days ago, so it's interesting to see a Smashing Magazine podcast interview with the creator of the project - He describes the various use cases really well, it's a sort of swiss army knife for ingesting and processing data from APIs, and has a plugin architecture so you can pull from any API source and push that data out to any target static site generator - It's a pretty cool javascript/NodeJs project podcast.smashingmagazine.com #

I got the libraries to load by using Bootstrap CDN instead of self-hosting the libraries, necessary because I'm seeing an issue updating the build command where I have the site hosted - So my statically rendered linkblog is looking a bit prettier now community.netlify.com #

I've managed to get the styles to apply the static render of my linkblog, one thing I had to change was the day hash links, now they point to that day on the monthly archives page - The downside is that the context around a day isn't as good but at least there is the context of the current month, and for the rest well the reader has to navigate using the breadcrumbs, there is no way around it because with no server running there is no way to turn the 'date' query param into a page in the main 'infinite scroll' linkblog links-static.markjgsmith.com #

Static rendering of my linkblog - It still looks a pretty weird because some libraries aren't loading yet and there is no styling, but it's a start, made with the mini static site generator I've been working on links-static.markjgsmith.com #

The History of the URL - My morning read for tomorrow blog.cloudflare.com #

Guide to SAML - Uses a fictional beer as a service (baas) example to explain the basics duo.com #

JavaScript Libraries Are Almost Never Updated Once Installed - The aversion to upgrades is almost universal, I say almost because one place where it’s not only not an issue, it’s almost become something to look forward to is in web browser software css-tricks.com #

I built a solution that converts your API into a SaaS - Every time I finish a very difficult bit of development, pretty much immediately afterwards someone releases a product that does exactly the thing that I spent weeks/months/years building, happens every single time, like clockwork - this solution called SaasBox actually looks pretty good reddit.com #

Please stop recommending Git Flow! - Teams come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes and develop in various contexts, this post explores some of the trade offs that the Git Flow development model makes georgestocker.com #

Chris Coyier drops some Typeography links css-tricks.com #

HTML - The Inaccessible Parts - A living document from Dave Rupert chronicling some of the inconsistencies in HTML daverupert.com #

Data-driven JAMstack with Sourcebit - I spent much of the early part of my career building file ingest workflows for media companies, these companies deal with lots of files, often big files, and they have to move them around and modify them - I've noticed that ingest workflows are viewed differently depending on the context, in machine learning companies for instance, the ingest workflows aren't so much about ingesting files, but about pulling in data from various APIs, and then processing the data - Anyway all to say, it's interesting to see the static website site generation space building tools for API based ingest workflows, this particular tool Sourcebit has taken a cli approach to creating configuration files that power the data ingest and processing - It's also interesting to me because I have recently been writing my own static site generator tool, and working with a lot more APIs stackbit.com #

Mozilla moves from using IRC to Matrix, with their first instance in full production matrix.org #

After attracting 800K web developers, Netlify wins $53M in funding siliconangle.com #

Little known features of iTerm2 - Covers smart selection and dynamic profiles, both really useful - other ones to check out are the pw manager and automatic colorisation of strings based on a regex banga.github.io #

Travelling with 24" monitors - Pretty awesome DIY solution to this travel conundrum, I feel like travel screens could be a new area for tech blog.luap.info #

A parody Twitter account hits a nerve with Silicon Valley VCs protocol.com #

New Issue: Running netlify functions in a debugger community.netlify.com #

Comparing AWS SAM with the Serverless framework sanderknape.com #

directory-tree - Creates a JavaScript object representing a directory tree - Pretty useful NodeJS module npmjs.com #

Accessing nested JavaScript objects with string key stackoverflow.com #

How a 2 person startup already uses 28 other tools - It's interesting to see the tools stack of a seed stage two person startup acrossapp.com #

A Text Renaissance - Venkatesh Roa goes on a very rambly walk through his text focussed junkyardy media empire, initially I really liked this piece, then I was like, gee this is getting way too long and I drifted off for a bit, but then there was another interesting part, and another etc, so much ground covered, but also nothing much, only wished I'd brewed a cup of tea before I started, if you are not in a rush and into technology and writing, it's definitely worth the read - Also some junkyards are pretty cool, it's nice to be reminded of that ribbonfarm.com #

Brave Browser and the Wayback Machine - Working together to help make the Web more useful and relia blog.archive.org #

Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates letsencrypt.org #

Build a Single Page Application (SPA) Site With Vanilla.js - Uses the latest javascript feature such as es modules, classes, template literals and destructuring dev.to #

My 2004 Blogroll - Via the medium of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, David Weinberger reminisces about his blogroll from 2004 - I used to read a lot of those blogs too, or listen to early podcasts that featured these folks, especially IT Conversations & Gilmore Gang, I guess I am getting old, though sometimes I honestly feel like I am almost dead - “Blogrolls were early social networks“ hyperorg.com #

Bootstrap 4 Tree View - Plugin that creates a nice looking tree view useful for navigation, pretty neat github.com #

How we use Kubernetes and spot instances to reduce EC2 billing up to 80% - If you use some form of message queues on the backend then you might be able to safely take advantage of AWS spot instances tuananh.net #

Wrapping REST API calls with Apollo Client dev.to #

EU Commission to staff - Switch to Signal messaging app politico.eu #

The Slippery Slope of Docker Dev Environments - Covers something I've come up against in the past, containerisation is pretty great for devops and deployments, but it's not always so great for local dev environments, because it adds quite a lot of complexity that can get in the way of debugging code blog.testdouble.com #

Should you self-host Google Fonts? - Interesting deep dive in font loading, feels like there might be a need for an open source version of the Google Fonts server since the speed improvements are considerable but Google is doing a lot of clever stuff behind the scenes, also highlights that there is a lot of complexity when it comes to fonts tunetheweb.com #

We need to address streaming's massive carbon footprint venturebeat.com #

Ryan Christoffel's Proposed Fix for iPad Multitasking - Kind of makes me wish I had an iPad again to get a better idea about how multi-tasking functions, one issue I think his proposal would face is that users are already quite used to long press activating “app jiggly mode”, which is one of the most absurd yet accurate ways ever of describing a mode daringfireball.net #

The command line options we deserve - Such a timely piece considering the previous iPad multi tasking link, this article discusses the curl command line utility that has nearly 300 options, and the importance of a user base being used to a particular way of doing things daniel.haxx.se #

Attempt To Put Every Musical Melody Into The Public Domain Demonstrates Craziness Of Modern Copyright techdirt.com #

Hotwheels creates Tesla Cybertruck with customisable broken window sticker gizmodo.com #

Looks like GitHub are testing out a new feature called Discussions, similar the issues but more focused on threaded conversations news.ycombinator.com #

iHeartRadio is now turning podcasts into books theverge.com #

Podcorn - A marketplace for podcast sponsorships and endorsements - Neat idea for a company, I wonder if they have a team of people who’s job it is to listen to loads and loads of podcasts or if they just use algorithms podcorn.com #

The Universe within 12.5 Light Years
The Nearest Stars - These old school maps are a bit 8bitish but their simplicity is their strength, lots of useful information atlasoftheuniverse.com #

Kristin Addis from Be My Travel Muse highlights some of the double standards women sometimes face when travelling alone nomadicmatt.com #

Open-Registry - A JavaScript Package Registry funded, developed and maintained by the community, for the community - Could be useful as a backup if the main npm registry goes down open-registry.dev #

A Practical Introduction to GeoJSON with Node.js thecodebarbarian.com #

The Circuit Breaker Pattern - These days we often integrate 3rd party APIs into our applications, but it can become tricky when the services run into issues, this pattern is a way to gracefully handle these situation blog.bearer.sh #

Building a Circuit Breaker in Node.js (Part 1) blog.bearer.sh #

Building a Circuit Breaker in Node.js (Part 2) blog.bearer.sh #

Notes on North Goa Beaches - Another great James Clark photowalk, it reminds me of my time in South Goa, though not always the easiest place to travel, it has so much charm and variety, I'd love to go on another trip there nomadicnotes.com #

octonode - NodeJS library for the Github api v3 github.com #

Multiple SSH Keys settings for different github account gist.github.com #

Over 150,000 Botanical Illustrations Enter the Public Domain - Very cool! Yey science, yey humans! Yey all the other cool and awesome earth animals too! hyperallergic.com #

New Repo: internet-of-things-app - System to collect and process realtime data of devices in an iot fleet, my contribution to the public domain today :) github.com #

Jeff Bezos commits $10 billion to fight climate change theverge.com #

SpaceX will launch private citizens into orbit theverge.com #

Dell Technologies to fit out Fortress Melbourne eSports arena zdnet.com #

How the BBC’s Netflix-killing plan was snuffed by myopic regulation wired.co.uk #

Galaxy Z Flip durability test calls Samsung’s Ultra Thin ‘Glass’ into question theverge.com #

Stream of machine generated art art42.net #

Treat us like something between a telco and a newspaper, says Facebook's Zuckerberg reuters.com #

Harrison Ford Says He Starts Doing Something With Indiana Jones 5 in a Couple Months io9.gizmodo.com #

Podcasters want an awards show, so they’re trying to start one theverge.com #

YouTube paid $3 billion to the music industry last year - Seems like quite a lot, but I’d like to know how much it is compared to the total amount the industry generates cnbc.com #

The WebSocket object provides the API for creating and managing a WebSocket connection to a server, as well as for sending and receiving data on the connection developer.mozilla.org #

University students are using AI bots to generate essays, some are saying that in a few years they will be indistinguishable from human written essays edsurge.com #

Facebook will allow influencers to produce sponsored content for political campaigns so long as the posts are clearly identified as ads theverge.com #

Building a Continuous Integration & Deployment Pipeline Using Docker (CI/CD) - Well written and concise tutorial, this appears to be the minimal CI/CD setup these days, it’s a bit striking how much more complicated it is than the old “ftp files to server” days taniarascia.com #

Ofcom to be put in charge of regulating internet in UK theguardian.com #

YouTube continues to mirror Twitch, tests new clap feature that lets fans donate to creators theverge.com #

REST vs GraphQL - The Main Differences dev.to #

NASA puts a price on a 2024 Moon landing- $35 billion - The cool bit in this is that they might built a Human Landing System to get down from lunar orbit easily, that sounds like it might be a landing pad arstechnica.com #

The new Samsung Galaxy Z Flip looks pretty cool, it has a glass screen so it folds closed in a nicer way than other foldable phones, looks like it would be good for shooting video or having video calls too because you can place it half open on a surface rather than have to hold it out in front of you selfie-style youtube.com #

Patreon is adding new features for creators in Europe - It’s adding payment options in euros and pounds theverge.com #

William Gerstenmaier joins SpaceX, and that’s a really big deal - He was in charge of many human space flight missions including the space shuttle, International Space Station, commercial crew, and exploration programs at NASA and has a reputation for excellent in safety arstechnica.com #

Fork and Pull Request Workflow - Some useful descriptions of commonly used github/git workflows github.com #

Registrars raise alarm over proposal for big .com fee hikes - Wouldn't it be cool if there was some way that every person could have 1 domain name for free, and you didn't have to worry about price hikes, or loosing the domain for whatever reason, it's events like this that make you realise that we are all building our stuff on unstable ground arstechnica.com #

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch Has A Gorgeous Poster empireonline.com #

Wes Anderson’s French Dispatch trailer looks wonderful nerdist.com #

An interview with Ben Keene, co-founder of Rebel Book Club - ""Not Your Average Book Club" indiehackers.com #

6 things I wish I knew about state management when I started writing React apps - I like the angle this article expands on because it highlights all the different types of frontend state you need to manage in a React app, and it’s a good basis for a mental model for thinking about more complex frontend applications medium.com #

Sole Trader Tax – A Guide for Start-Ups & the Newly Self Employed bytestart.co.uk #

Alphabet's Jigsaw incubator is now back under Google 9to5google.com #

Integration testing WebSocket server in Node.JS medium.com #

Will Spotify Ruin Podcasting? - Some pretty good commentary on the state of the podcasting scene mattstoller.substack.com #

A Moon Landing In 2024? NASA Says It'll Happen; Others Say - No Way wclk.com #

Ask HN - What are your war stories for converting teams to remote? news.ycombinator.com #

I used to think TypeScript is a waste of time - Now I changed my mind - There’s a bit of an unexpected twist in this article but it’s worth the read, I feel like more could be said about the benefits of using TypeScript interfaces, how do they effect the way you think about and structure your code on a large project? dev.to #

TypeScript Interfaces typescriptlang.org #

Man who helped the Queen send her first email dies - Of course I am somewhat saddened by this news, but also sort of impressed that the queen has been sending emails since before I was born bbc.com #

Europe’s solar orbiter begins its journey to the Sun - I would have thought that sending up a satellite to orbit the thing that keeps everyone on planet earth alive would get a bit more publicity, it’s the first I’ve heard of the mission arstechnica.com #

Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay cbc.ca #

Living Without a SIM Card habd.as #

The Trouble with TypeScript - Interesting how the author mentions CoffeeScript in this article, I’m seeing more people starting to see downsides with TypeScript, I think the way it effects your ability to easily and quickly see the flow of the code is a big deal, it’s adding something but it’s also taking away something too, is it worth the trade-off? dev.to #

Bill Gates orders £500m hydrogen-powered superyacht theguardian.com #

Getting Started in Freelance Web Development without Experience dev.to #

Chrome 80 brings support for module workers web.dev #

Use Cloudflare JavaScript Workers to Deploy Your Static Generated Site (SSG) levelup.gitconnected.com #

An extremely minimalistic alternative to Jest - The difference in the amount of lines of code is quite startling, +1 for liking old school function declarations volument.com #

Is Having an RSS Feed Just Giving Content Away for Free? - I like the sentiment of this article, a lot of the points raised are the reasons I run my blog and linkblog, both of which have RSS feeds now which I’m very happy about, I just wish I had had the chance to do it sooner but that’s not how things panned out css-tricks.com #

A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev github.com #

Understanding Modern Cloud Architecture on AWS - A Concepts Series - This blog series is pretty good if you are looking to get a bird's eye view of how all the pieces fit together start.jcolemorrison.com #

Google Maps is turning 15! Celebrate with a new look and features blog.google #

Kirk Douglas, Hollywood legend and star of Spartacus, dies aged 103 theguardian.com #

IMDb’s free streaming service is adding major TV shows slashgear.com #

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sells off another $1.6B in stock; he’s sold $3.4B over the past week geekwire.com #

Looks like Elon Musk might take SpaceX’s Starlink public with an IPO cnbc.com #

European parliament says it will not use facial recognition tech - I wonder what the consequences of having some large areas of the world using facial recognition extensively and other large areas not using it will be, it’s a pretty massive difference so it follows that there will be some new dynamics that will arise theguardian.com #

Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open - Really well written writeup of one person’s mini quest to figure out what data a Wacom tablet is tracking and sending back to head office, I reckon that softwares that are doing this should at the very least offer a web interface that shows clearly what data is being sent, of course it’s also good to know how to verify what’s actually being sent over the wire robertheaton.com #

Hosting Your Static Website For Free codebushi.com #

What are your favorite portfolio sites for devs? dev.to #

The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric - I really hope Google isn't foobared, because I just tried to use my outlook.com email account, and after an hour of changing settings, I still can't get it to work, it would be easier to just quit computers all together zdnet.com #

Spotify is buying Bill Simmons’s The Ringer, a podcast-centric media company vox.com #

Berlin Film Festival 2020 Preview - New Hands, Same Old City directorsnotes.com #

Chrome adopting new video ads rules that will also affect YouTube slashgear.com #

Welfare surveillance system violates human rights, Dutch court rules - Informative article that ends with the disturbing factoid that Daniel Dines, the world’s first “bot billionaire” wants a robot for every person theguardian.com #

Postgres for those who can’t even, part 1 rob.conery.io #

Postgres for those who can’t even, part 2 – working with node and json rob.conery.io #

An investigation shows that UK councils let firms track visits to webpages on benefits and disability theguardian.com #

Jeff Weiner Updates His LinkedIn Profile - After 11 years as CEO, he is passing the reins to deputy Ryan Roslansky, and will become executive chair wired.com #

Apple Adds Universal Purchases for iOS, tvOS and macOS Apps in Xcode 11.4 macrumors.com #

The science of friction - and its surprising impact on our lives - I didn’t know the word Tribology, or that there was an entire area of science devoted to it, interesting talk ted.com #

Ultimate guide to concurrent logging in Node.js - Show how to use NodeJS domains to pass context to independently executing tasks, so your debug logs can write out the current context that includes details about which task is creating the log message itnext.io #

Testing Node serverless applications - AWS Lambda functions - A well written article with nice examples, demonstrating that although not totally straight forward, if you structure your code carefully it's possible to write well tested lambda functions blog.logrocket.com #

Tool to Help Journalists Spot Doctored Images Is Unveiled by Jigsaw - It is being tested by several news and fact checking organisations nytimes.com #

How To Create A Headless WordPress Site On The JAMstack - Generate a Vue/Nuxt powered static site hosted on Netlify with all your data in a headless Wordpress smashingmagazine.com #

Bocker - Docker implemented in around 100 lines of bash github.com #

Shlide - A slide deck presentation tool written in pure bash github.com #

Apollo GraphQL without JavaScript - A interesting way to write your React/Graphql components so that when javascript is disabled in the browser, the page is still functional - It wraps the component in a form, which is only used when noscript is in effect, quite a nice progressively enhanced solution hugogiraudel.com #

Is there any language that can kill JavaScript? reddit.com #

Flashpoint is saving 36,000 Flash games from going into the night slashgear.com #

Amateur radio skills prove useful during bushfire emergencies abc.net.au #

Find a Crew - the World's largest international online Boat & Crew network and a truly global website findacrew.net #

NewBusinessMonitor sorts and filters the 1685 new businesses that are registered in the UK each day, and lets you send personalised sales letters to your target market with a single click newbusinessmonitor.co.uk #

A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity - Puts forward the idea that “slow multi-tasking” is a way to avoid getting stuck while at the same time infuse creativity into your projects ted.com #

Applications are eating the world - What's next? - "Applications have gone from being an addition to a company’s operations to being the centre of a company’s business" wired.co.uk #

The Dark Side of Microservices - I think the best point this article highlights is how complicated debugging becomes because often you have to setup a debugger in lots of different projects simultaneously, it's already a bit annoying with a website/api double monolith, so having even more debugger sessions open at once would be really tricky kelda.io #

How to force GitHub Pages build? - I'm trying to figure out a way write Github Pages blog posts from an iOS device, but it's not clear how to trigger the site build once you've written the post using the Github web UI, feels like this should be easier stackoverflow.com #

New Post: Test Post Written Using Github blog.markjgsmith.com #

Goals – An experimental new tool which generalizes “make” - I skimmed the talk notes and it looks interesting, make has quite a lot of sharp edges that this new tool tries to address rwmj.wordpress.com #

My Second Year as a Solo Developer - Pretty good writeup of an ex-googler’s solo dev journey for the past few years mtlynch.io #

California Attorney General delays .org sale domainnamewire.com #

Cypress in a Nutshell - I've been following the cyprus project for a while now on Github, I watched this demo video yesterday, the feature set is really impressive, easy to understand way of defining tests all in javascript, screenshots taken of each step when the tests are run, ability to open dev tools console at any step and see debugging info, looks like a really good tool for frontend testing youtube.com #

TypeScript’s quirks - How inconsistencies make the language more complex blog.asana.com #

The Scroll subscription service is an ingenious web technology hack - This new service sounds pretty cool, but I don't get how it's implemented because according to the article it sets a cookie that websites you visit can see and then not display ads, but as far as I know cookies are not cross domain for security reasons, example1.com cannot read cookies set by example2.com, I don't get it maybe they are magic cookies theverge.com #

Mailgun lowers free-tier API from 10k to 625 emails per month - This is pretty bad news for any early stage startups using Mailgun, without a decent free tier, it's impossible to get started because you can't even send out signup/welcome emails news.ycombinator.com #

Monoliths are the future - I personally quite like the "double monolith", one for the website and one for the api, but I think there are some really large deployments like AWS for instance, where using microservices makes a lot of sense, but it's tricky to pull off operationally because as the organisation changes shape, the code base needs to drastically change too, and probably a lot of teams just can't keep up, monoliths are more rigid but they don't crumble as easily changelog.com #

Pretty epic HN thread on the monoliths article from earlier, some useful notes from people with experience with microservices news.ycombinator.com #

eLoN mUsK rElEaSeS dOn’t DoUbT uR vIbE eDm MuSiC tRaCk theverge.com #

Building simple HTTP server with Deno - "Definitely great" youtube.com #

Lungs 'magically' heal damage from smoking - That’s good news though I will say that I still notice that my lung capacity isn’t what it used to be, maybe it’s just because of getting older, but I am still glad that I don’t smoke anymore, it’s been a few years now, I found the best way to quit was to stop drinking alcohol too, and stop going to bars, have a hobby to keep you occupied, took about 30 days until I stopped wanting to smoke, I relapsed once for a while but I was much more aware of the effects the smoking was causing, and also more aware of the benefits gained by not smoking (higher energy levels, no smoke smell, easier breathing), so giving up the second time was easier bbc.com #

Zuckerberg Plots Brussels Trip Amid EU Bid to Revamp Tech Rules bloomberg.com #

Atari is opening eight video game hotels across the U.S. - I'm noticing that there is a lot of interesting things happening in eSports recently, I just had the thought that it would be cool to be able to post links to your linkblog from within a game, so you could show people something cool just happened in your game inputmag.com #

Show HN - I made a guide with all steps for transition to freelancing in Finland - A lot of people in this thread were thinking exactly what I was thinking, that it would be awesome to have something like this for every country news.ycombinator.com #

World leaders talked the talk at Davos but we need some real change theguardian.com #

Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results apple.com #

YourStack is for sharing your favorite products with the world - A social network by the makers of ProductHunt, where people talk about products - They stick you in a queue, unless you spam 10 of your twitter followers with an invite, kind of a weird onboarding experience, there are 7000 people ahead of me in the queue yourstack.com #

Warren Buffett Throws in the Towel on His Newspaper Empire - It’s pretty crazy that he is selling 30 newspapers, how could one person be running 30 newspapers? It’s almost incomprehensible bloomberg.com #

Europe has a plan to break Google and Amazon's cloud dominance - Called Gaia-X it’s a collaboration between the European Commission, Germany, France, and apparently “some 100 companies and organisations” to build a Euro-AWS wired.co.uk #

Humans can't read URLs - How can we fix it? - I like Jake's proposed re-designed url bar, it's quite linkblogish youtube.com #

Greta Thunberg files application to trademark her name theguardian.com #

IoT security - Your smart devices must have these three features to be secure in the UK zdnet.com #

There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’ onezero.medium.com #

Don't start with React - I’m feeling the message highlighted by the author, it’s a good idea to learn the basics of how the browser works, but be careful because the stark reality is that it takes a lot of time and on the other end 98% of jobs on job boards require React/Vue/Angular, even the backend jobs, oh yeah and now Typescript, and you can guess that this pattern will continue, when you get there, there will be yet another set of minimum requirements - in a lot of cases your resume won’t even reach the employers inbox dev.to #

The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 - This piece by John Gruber is getting quite a lot of attention - Several years ago I had an iPad, I really liked it, it was exactly as he describes, very easy to use, but I never got another so I was unaware of these UI issues in the latest versions - The fact that the iPad is turning into vim where you have to know the exact combination of obscure gestures to get out is kind of scary daringfireball.net #

How new tech can help the UK’s creative industry flourish - Some interesting figures, there are close to 6 million small businesses in the UK, about 1/4 of the population works for a small business - It's going to be important for small businesses to be successful, they create a vibrant and diverse society wired.co.uk #

The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile - I really like most of this article, the intro is great, the description of how make operates too, there’s a confusing example about scheduling flights, but the web development examples at the end are great including things like database migrations, automatically starting up docker, seeding databases - Currently I mostly use npm scripts for all build tasks but I see the value in using make as a developer orchestration tool, btw it’s also possible to not use tabs which this article doesn’t mention, see some of my previous links on make for details blog.mindlessness.life #

Here is the article that has details about getting rid of the need to use tabs in makefiles linkblog.io #

Ask HN - Do you curate links/bookmarks? news.ycombinator.com #

SpaceX to put 60 more Starlink satellites in orbit today, although weather conditions might mean it is delayed until tomorrow slashgear.com #

Time check - Examining the Doomsday Clock’s move to 100 seconds to midnight arstechnica.com #

Google is backtracking on its controversial desktop search results redesign theverge.com #

Scotland Is on Track to Hit 100 Percent Renewable Energy This Year, Slàinte Mhath! earther.gizmodo.com #

Startup and entrepreneur visas around the world futureworkpresent.com #

Comparison of web browsers - I didn't know there were so many web browsers en.wikipedia.org #

Natalie Novick presenter on the tech.eu podcast is leaving to join Startup Boost as Chief Community Officer - I very much enjoyed Natalie's style of presenting on the podcast, and I quite liked the slight oddness of an american presenting european tech, she very often had great insight and knowledge, I wish her all the best on her new venture tech.eu #

Mirage JS is an API mocking library that le ts you build, test and share a complete working JavaScript application without having to rely on any backend services - This library has an impressive amount of features, it’s not that far off having an entire backend in your frontend, I think there are a lot of cases where it could be useful miragejs.com #

Check out my latest Fiverr gig - Translate french to english technical writing - If you need any French to English translation services, especially if it's any technical writing, then contact me! fiverr.com #

Dolly Parton's Meme Exposes Social Media's Masquerade wired.com #

UK won’t adopt new EU copyright law and the dreaded Article 13 trustedreviews.com #

Bert Belder talk on Deno the javascript runtime that might replace NodeJS - Since it has so many key features built in, It certainly looks like it cuts right through a lot of the complexity that has built up in NodeJS over the past 10 years m.youtube.com #

Inside node - What happens when we execute a script? - Great article that deep dives into the node execution - It’s relatively easy to understand even though there is some C++, it’s mostly the path the code takes that‘s highlighted, also briefly looks at the node source directory structure, and the location of the C++ - Javascript boundary blog.s1h.org #

Demonstration of llnode and how it could be used with lldb to debug C++ and JS code in node (both postmortem and in live apps) - I’ve been wanting to be able to do this for ages, would be amazing if it were possible to run something similar from right inside an IDE next to or part of the regular debugger asciinema.org #

There’s No Need To Hate Web Components - I’d like to see some decent examples of web components being used with React/Vue/Angular, and to understand why server side rendering is so difficult, will it ever be possible? Web components do seem like a good idea, but it is an entire extra layer which has the potential of introducing a bunch of complexities itnext.io #

Extensions in Firefox 72 - The first release on the new Mozilla 4 week release cycle, so not as many items as usual but still a few of interest including info about 3rd part network requests, CSP policy for content scripts in extensions, more click meta data, write support for storage.local from devtools, and an onChange listener for browser settings blog.mozilla.org #

dev.to acquires CodeNewbie which runs the CodeLand conference and a handful of dev related podcasts dev.to #

Scientists have no idea why Betelgeuse is dimming slashgear.com #

Ford Prefect - Betelgeusian en.m.wikipedia.org #

Zaphod Beeblebrox - Betelgeusian en.m.wikipedia.org #

Bruce Schneier highlights the fact that it’s not just facial recognition technologies that we should be scrutinising, there are a mirriad of other recognition technologies and it is quickly becoming a systemic issue that is affecting societies as a whole, whether it’s being implemented by governments or private companies via adtech schneier.com #

Big list of http static server one-liners gist.github.com #

Terry Jones - Monty Python stars pay tribute to comedy great bbc.com #

Scientists discover 'why stress turns hair white' bbc.com #

GitHub now uses AI to recommend open issues in project repositories - AI is eating the world venturebeat.com #

Plastic giant Coca-Cola says people want its plastic theverge.com #

iCloud backups are not fully encrypted because the FBI complained - Would be interesting to know where they got this information from because it goes against Apple’s public stance on privacy slashgear.com #

The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org prospect.org #

UN experts demand US inquiry into Jeff Bezos Saudi hacking claims theguardian.com #

Check out my latest Fiverr gig - Translate french to english technical writing - If you need any French to English translation services, especially if it's any technical writing, then contact me! fiverr.com #

Playwright is a Node library to automate the Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers - This looks like the next generation of Puppeteer, it’s by the same development team, the API looks very nice, not sure this makes complete sense but it sort of makes me think of a jquery but for browser testing github.com #

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos's phone 'hacked by Saudi crown prince' - Analysis of his phone showed it was likely hacked by a file sent to him from the crown prince’s WhatsApp account theguardian.com #

PHP in 2020 - I really liked this piece, I’m not a PHP programmer, but it’s nice to read something with a positive vibe that covers a lot of what modern PHP is like, there are a lot of similarities to NodeJS, they might even be implementing an integration with libuv, the library NodeJS uses for async stitcher.io #

How I write backends - Really great writeup by NodeJS developer Federico Pereiro of his development and deploy environment as well as how he structures his apps - It’s amazing to me how similar this is to my setup github.com #

Facebook Plans to Add 1,000 Jobs in London This Year adweek.com #

Tech.eu Podcast - Interesting roundtable discussion on the podcast this week about AI tech in the european HR sector, the rising importance of independent teams, and how HR workers are anticipating much more rapid change over the next decade than in decades past tech.eu #

deno (javascript runtime written by Ryan Dahl creator of NodeJS) has quite a lot of built in tools - dependency inspector,
code formatter,
bundler, runtime type info, test runner,
command-line debugger, and a
linter - I’m quite liking the idea of these built in tools but also I’m curious to know if it’s possible to use alternatives if you want to for whatever reason deno.land #

Why Google thinks we need to regulate AI - Piece written by Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai amp.ft.com #

Opera appears to be involved in shady money lending in Africa, I didn’t read the whole article but the main bullet points are quite alarming - I also didn’t know Opera is owned by a chinese company hindenburgresearch.com #

TypeScript's Secret Parallel Universe - TypeScript is weird in some places, also I’ve noticed that around 70-80% of freelance posting on job boards have typescript as a requirement - Do these projects really need typescript? I don’t know, but it looks like we’re all going to be writing in TypeScript in the near future, why not just write everything in C++? dev.to #

CloudSavings - A simple interface to save on AWS Bills cloudsavings.io #

The best word of mouth strategies I've come across indiehackers.com #

vocab10k.com - An interesting web tool for learning english used by professionals / in business vocab10k.com #

Generate a PDF in AWS Lambda with NodeJS and Puppeteer dev.to #

Every Time Zone - Time zone converter, compare time zone difference, makes it easy to see how different timezones overlap everytimezone.com #

I’ve added some space between results in the search page because it was looking a bit cramped there linkblog.io #

‎Techmeme Ride Home - (Bonus) Sports Tech With Will Martin on Apple Podcasts - I enjoyed this episode more than I thought I would, I'm not a massive sports guy, I like watching some football/soccer (mainly international matches), tennis, baseball games occasionally, basketball too and the Olympics are kind of fun, but that's about it, so I was kind of surprised to learn about how much technology there is in sports these days - As a tech guy, I find this pretty cool, but it's also kind of scary - I'm not sure how I feel about cyborgs on planet earth podcasts.apple.com #

Johnny Marr (Former Smiths guitarist) joins Hans Zimmer to score next James Bond film theguardian.com #

Timeless Web Dev Articles - Looks like some good reads in this bunch, hopefully I’ll get some time at some point to read some of these - Lists are trending for me, I’ve been making lots of lists the past few days css-tricks.com #

Making A Website - I like the concept of this tutorial series, seems like a good way to learn the basics kevq.uk #

In search of a better job scheduler - The author reviews many scheduling tools available on linuxy systems and makes quite a good case for a new front end to systemd that would makes it look a bit more like simple cron beepb00p.xyz #

New Post: List of freelance web development websites and marketplaces blog.markjgsmith.com #

New Post: List of remote friendly web development job board websites blog.markjgsmith.com #

Ask IH - Do you schedule publishing of posts to your blog? How do you do it? indiehackers.com #

What Is an Editorial Board? - Just like open source software development the big newspapers have systems of governance in place to help move things along in a hopefully positive way, so it's interesting to learn a bit about how these systems function nytimes.com #

Joe Biden Says Age Is Just a Number - I actually didn't read this NYT article, I am posting it because of the web design, what struck me was that the page header section is the entire page, and it's responsive so when you resize the page it always remains full screen, I think that it gives it a very newspaperish vibe, but on the web nytimes.com #

Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 - In this piece they outline a very extensive plan that will hopefully result in them being carbon ‘net zero’ by 2050, it’s good to see them lead in this area, it would be even better if other companies around the world followed in their footsteps blogs.microsoft.com #

Daily Overview photography of the Australia Bushfires -It looks terrifying getrevue.co #

What happens when words don't translate between languages - Something that is probably quite topical for programmers, naming things is difficult, it’s interesting to see the variations in how other cultures and languages approach this aspect of communication bbc.com #

Throw Me a Lifebuoy - Debugging Node.js in Production with Diagnostic Reports - Useful debugging tools and techniques for issues that fall outside of the space of easily debugable bugs m.youtube.com #

New Post: New Linkblog feature: rss, atom and json feeds blog.markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Setting up as a freelance web developer markjgsmith.com #

What are you self hosting? (2020) lobste.rs #

Microsoft launches Chromium Edge for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, and macOS - Right on schedule too venturebeat.com #

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey on edit button - “We’ll probably never do it" - Personally I use the edit feature on linkblog.io all the time, mostly because the auto correct on my mobile is constantly screwing up my words when I’m not looking, and also often when I am looking theverge.com #

Mozilla has money issues and announces layoffs, according to other articles I've read it's about 70 people - "We can and must work within the limits of our core finances" blog.mozilla.org #

Google sets final timeline for killing and replacing Chrome Apps 9to5google.com #

Popular dating apps like Grindr, OkCupid, Tinder, and the period-tracking apps Clue and MyDays are all sharing personal information directly with data brokers consumerreports.org #

Trump slams Apple for refusing to unlock iPhones of suspected criminals - This feels off because his reason is that the government helps Apple navigate the trade war, so they should help the government with policing, but it’s the government that is partly responsible for creating the trade war in the first place cnbc.com #

Verizon Media launches OneSearch, a privacy-focused search engine - It runs ads next to search results but only based on per query info - “no cookie tracking, no ad personalization, no profiling, no data-storing, and no data-sharing with advertisers” venturebeat.com #

Diary Email - Write private diary using good old email! - I like the simplicity of this product, though I’d be a bit worried about the security of the data, how it is transmitted and stored diaryemail.com #

Sequential announces new Pro 3 synthesiser residentadvisor.net #

Let’s Learn Eleventy! (with Zach Leatherman) - Learn With Jason - Watched this earlier, 11ty sure looks great youtube.com #

The Status of HTTP/3 infoq.com #

Difference between Ionic and Cordova - These are two popular frameworks used for mobile app development using HTML/CSS/Javascript, but they differ in where they are in the stack, Cordova provides access to the mobile device hardware and has many plugins, Ionic is more of a presentation layer, accessing the hardware via Cordova javatpoint.com #

What is Ionic Framework? ionicframework.com #

1917’s VFX artists had to totally reinvent how films are made wired.co.uk #

Highlights from Git 2.25 - The sparse checkout and partial clones features looks like they could be quite useful when cloning large monorepos github.blog #

#CES2020 - Primordial Soup of Innovation - I really liked this piece by Steven Sinofsky, his ‘primordial soup of innovation’ way of thinking about the show got me much more interested in the event than I usually am - It’s a long read but worth it to get an idea of the big trends in tech and electronics medium.learningbyshipping.com #

Node.js has a built-in debug log method - Similar to the much used debug module, you can set NODE_DEBUG to get debug info from node core modules stefanjudis.com #

More info about the NODE_DEBUG feature including a list of attributes - timer,http,net,fs,cluster,tls,stream,child_process,module alxolr.com #

It's Easy to Be a Jerk on Twitter And Twitter Wants to Fix That - The thing that I’m mildly fascinated about in this interview, but it’s something I’ve noticed in the past few interviews I’ve read from Twitter folks recently, is how the language to describe Twitter has evolved so much since the beginning - I really feel that they are starting to get into a more consistent flow for describing their product, a lot of times I’m nodding along even though the thing that they are describing is very abstract and new (10 years isn’t that long considering it’s a new medium), it’s starting to feel slightly ‘more real’ wired.com #

Some of my Twitter lingo favourites from the previous Wired interview: Mechanics, Vector, Context, Dimension, Conversations, Fireside chat, Relevancy, Balance of incentives, Account level, Content level, Interestingness, Timelineness,
The follow graph, Topic taxonomy, Corpus of content wired.com #

How is computer programming different today than 20 years ago? - Facts lightly sprinkled with humour medium.com #

Notes on algorithms - A look at big O notation for search am sorting algorithms with examples in pseudocode, C and javascript dev.to #

Interesting review from Peter Levels of a retweet giveaway promotion experiment he did on Twitter levels.io #

RIchard Stallman - “If we don't want US companies to censor for China, the US should forbid companies that censor for China to do business in the US” stallman.org #

Meghan Markle reportedly signs voiceover deal with Disney thefader.com #

How to build an OpenStack alternative - Step 1, the prototype - Interesting to see what shape a bare bones implementation of a hosting provider type system looks like ungleich.ch #

Jamie Oliver opens in Bangkok - how will Thais take to his fusion food? - I’ve always liked Jamie Oliver’s approach to life and the work he did with school food in the UK, also his restaurants helping the youth find a place in the work force, it’s pretty cool to see he’s opening restaurants in Asia, he always seems to take on difficult challenges, and very often with great results, I’m interested to see how he approaches this new venture theguardian.com #

The Netherlands’ government officially drops ‘Holland’ nickname to avoid confusion with tourists matadornetwork.com #

Goodbye, Clean Code - Some good advice in this story by Dan Abramov about being a programmer within a team overreacted.io #

The Nightmare Climate Scenario That Keeps Scientists Up at Night earther.gizmodo.com #

Show your personal websites lobste.rs #

Terrorism police list Extinction Rebellion as extremist ideology theguardian.com #

What Is JavaScript Made Of? - I found this piece by Dan Abramov was a nice read, very clear and also practical by saying how things are technically but also how people use the concepts and words in the real world overreacted.io #

Mark Zuckerberg publishes his goals for the 2020s m.facebook.com #

Size of node_modules folder when installing the top 100 packages - Turns out compared to some other languages, the size of node dependencies isn’t actually that bad size-of-npm.netlify.com #

Reddit bans impersonation on its platform theverge.com #

Things you can do with a browser in 2020 github.com #

AR Quick Look - To view these AR objects just open the page in Safari on an iOS device, I'm much more impressed than I thought I would be, pretty darn realistic developer.apple.com #

How to Start a Podcast - Some good tips, I don't think I personally want to do a podcast, but I'm definitely interested in learning how to edit and manipulate audio recordings, I think if I ever did do a podcast it would have to be pretty weird and experimental daverupert.com #

Snowpack - Build web applications with less tooling and 10x faster iteration - Gets rid of bundle tooling during development using ESM modules snowpack.dev #

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, announced on Instagram that they “intend to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen” - I think this is great news, exceptionally well timed, an exciting new chapter for both the UK and the US, I wish them all the best theverge.com #

Is Grimes Pregnant and Should We Blog It? - Looks like Claire Boucher (Grimes) and Elon Musk might be pregnant gizmodo.com #

The Split Personality Of Brutalist Web Development - Some interesting ideas in this article, an exploration of various website styles with some detours into the worlds of architecture and the arts, I’m wondering now why there aren’t more web developers that specialise in a specific style smashingmagazine.com #

It was looking at bit cramped, so I added a bit of space between linkblog links, hopefully a bit easier to read - Another bug surfaced though, if you use a highlightable message link to a link in a day that has more than a screen full of links then it gets highlighted but it's not focused because it is just off of the page, so you manually have to scroll a bit - For example this link to a post about blogging with Hugo does it on my laptop screen, I don't have a solution for that right now linkblog.io #

Twitter to introduce ability to stop people replying to tweets - Looks like some quite big changes are happening, will be interesting to see how it affects the flow in the twittersphere theguardian.com #

Benchmarking the top-level domain names - Some of the newer TLD nameservers are taking up to 200ms to respond in some cases bunnycdn.com #

Did Albert Einstein Say World War IV Will be Fought ‘With Sticks and Stones’? snopes.com #

Web-Server Frameworks Team - A place for Node.js framework authors and users to collaborate on the future direction and feature set of the frameworks and related Node.js core APIs github.com #

The Lost Landscapes of San Francisco - A Benefit for the Internet Archive - This fund raising event looks pretty fun, I wish I had more time to explore some of the historical footage on the internet archive blog.archive.org #

Probably a lot of people are not aware of the fact that Node.js is written in the C++ stackoverflow.com #

ICANN’s founding chairman joins the battle to keep .org out of private hands theverge.com #

Opera 66 initial release makes it easier to reopen closed tabs and to access extensions blogs.opera.com #

Swissted is a project by Mike Joyce where he redesigned old punk, hardcore, and indie rock show flyers into Swiss modern posters - This is an attempt to bring the Sonic Youth poster to life with animation codepen.io #

Firefox 72 - Mozilla have moved to a 4 week release cycle so expect releases more often but with less features in each release, also the javascript nullish coalescing operator looks useful, and a bunch of css stuff that I do t quite understand but sounds cool hacks.mozilla.org #

Notes on Can Tho - Urban life in the Mekong Delta - James Clark shares another great photowalk, this time of Vietnam’s 5th largest city - “Can Tho is a big city that still has a rural heart” nomadicnotes.com #

The Cornell Note-taking System - Seems like a pretty good notes taking strategy, simple and easy to remember lsc.cornell.edu #

Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet - Cheaper, healthier, better for the environment, better for non-human animals and enough food to feed everyone on earth theguardian.com #

The Principles of Clean Architecture by Uncle Bob Martin - Some very useful software architecture techniques, not specific to any particular language, presented with a very balanced mix of technical detail, humour and well paced story telling youtube.com #

Using Clean Architecture for Microservice APIs in Node.js with MongoDB and Express youtube.com #

SpaceX launches third batch of 60 Starlink broadband satellites, reviving concerns - I’m worried about the space garbage race, we can’t even do a clean planet yet, what are the chances the skies are going to turn into an orbiting garbage nightmare? How many companies worldwide like Amazon and SpaceX are going to decide to send 1000s of satellites into space? geekwire.com #

Linksys Wellness Pods track elderly with wi-fi signals - A few years ago I would have thought this was a hoax advert but looks real, creepy products are the new normal slashgear.com #

NextMind is building a real-time brain computer interface, unveils Dev Kit - Reminder that one of the best features of soon to be primitive keyboards, when you press one of the keys, you can be pretty certain it was you that pressed it, best feature ever venturebeat.com #

Impossible Now Makes Pork From Plants - I’d like to taste their products, presumably they are a lot cheaper than actual pork and beef? gizmodo.com #

Climate Change Stole the Show at the Golden Globes earther.gizmodo.com #

CES Gadget Show 2020 - Surveillance is in - and in a big way apnews.com #

Chinese Skiers Training In Norway Ask Local Library To Remove 'Controversial' Books - It’s worth remembering that either side could be lying (there is also the possibility that both are lying), but none the less the concept of the whole thing is weird because even if you put aside the free speech stuff, essentially it’s forced labour justified because of the possibility of forced labour techdirt.com #

How to start a blog using Hugo flaviocopes.com #

The stack I use to run this blog - I'm always impressed by the quality and quantity of the writing from Flavio Copes, so it's interesting to read about his setup flaviocopes.com #

An abbreviated history of JavaScript package managers - Quite technical but worth the time to read if you are working with Nodejs as there are lots of useful details medium.com #

AdminBro - a Modern Admin Panel for Node JS - This doesn’t render very well on mobile but I find the idea for the project interesting, being able to quickly spin up an admin UI on a Nodejs based app would be very cool, and I like that it isn’t tied into a specific product, because usually the admin panel is tied to the product like for example Wordpress inkoop.io #

Ray Kurzweil on what the future holds next (2018) - The entire interview was fascinating, but what struck me most having listened to it today was how common sense it all sounds, I think if I had listened to such an interview say 5 years ago I either wouldn’t have believed it was real or it would have melted my mind - Also if everything happens at logarithmic rates as he says then these “no way / melted mind” situations are going to start happening a lot more frequently, perhaps even daily, which I imagine might get quite annoying and tedious, maybe just post a link to your linkblog and move on with the rest of the day... [full disclosure in case you didn’t realise, I founded and run linkblog.io, but honestly, posting to my linkblog is one way I deal with overwhelm] ted.com #

Finnish PM calls for a 4-day-week and 6-hour-day scoop.co.nz #

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is making another appearance, apparently there are more documents that reveal global manipulation by a network of shell companies that affect how politics is funded in the US and UK theguardian.com #

New Year, New Rights - What to know about California’s new privacy law blog.mozilla.org #

John Gruber from Daring Fireball asks some important questions following the NYT piece about US citizens being tracked - I worry about the recent announcement that the quality of GPS data is about to get a bump of an order of magnitude from meters to centimetres precision, what applications would need such high precision? The matrix I guess... in an attempt to be vaguely positive about this I ask - maybe it will run nodejs? daringfireball.net #

Notes on Technical Writing - Summarises the main points from a variety of sources about technical writing, pretty useful if you have to write documentation, includes references to lots of useful books mkaz.blog #

Folklore.org is a web site devoted to collective historical storytelling (of computing), has a focus on Mac related topics, uses lots of relatively short anecdotes rather than a longer, monolithic narrative folklore.org #

JobFunnel - Automated tool for scraping job postings into a .csv file github.com #

Bruce Perens (OSI co-founder) quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license - The license blurs the lines between software and data theregister.co.uk #

Amazon is getting ready for everything you do online to be encrypted - They have implemented an open source replacement for the TLS component of OpenSSH called s2n and it is 6000 lines of code compared with 70000 lines of the old implementation wired.co.uk #

Restored complete curl changelog - A nice bit of tidying on a project a lot of us use on a daily basis daniel.haxx.se #

Distributing Software in a Post-Google Safe Browsing World - This appears to me to be quite an important issue, developers need to be able to distribute the software they are making medium.com #

Scripting tmux - Using a bash script to configure a tmux session rather than tmuxinator arp242.net #

jrnl - The Command Line Journal jrnl.sh #

What Are Those Grids of Glass in the Sidewalk - And Why Are They Purple? - Interesting bit of history kqed.org #

Wade Shepard writes about a conference he will be speaking at in the Ukraine, and his 5 prong business strategy as an independent writer vagabondjourney.com #

Lessons from Six Years as a Solo Consultant - Some interesting points about value based billing as well as the importance having a strategy to build a brand embeddeduse.com #

How the Digg team was acquihired - Great writeup of the process and difficulties that unfolded during the Digg aquihire some years ago lethain.com #

Why I’m still using jQuery in 2019 arp242.net #

Hacker news analytics - Tool to monitor the performance of a hacker news post over time hacker-news-analytics.christianfei.com #

Hacker News Rankings - Shows the position of articles over time hnrankings.info #

How travel narrative blogging has changed over the last decade, and where to find great travel reads - A great end of decade review from James Clark in the travel blogging space, it's interesting to see how things have changed over the past 10 years, running a blog and having your own domain is still a good path even with all the social media nomadicnotes.com #

Thank You (2019 Edition) - Chris Coyier does a year review of the csstricks website, interesting to see how everything breaks down, and also which areas they will be focusing on next year css-tricks.com #

Automating the Date On Your Footer - This article made me chuckle because I just had to update this earlier, yep will most likely get it automated at some stage, but there was also something satisfying about manually typing 2020 :) dev.to #

Power, precarity and white-hot anger - what I learned in a decade in journalism - The author worked at gawker.com, which had quite a reputation at the time, his article is a rather scathing commentary about what it’s really like to be a journalist theguardian.com #

The Comprehensive Guide to Speaking at Technology Conferences in 2020 cfpland.com #

ka.llio.pe - An IDE for songwriting - Really liking the concept, the feature set and the website copy ka.llio.pe #

The end of decade Talk Show podcast - Not only was there some great commentary about a lot of the achievements of the last 10 years, but some very interesting angles on products that I usually pay little attention to - Also a great example of why long form podcasting, where people can take it slow, can result in very high quality content daringfireball.net #

Jimmy Iovine the record executive who moved from record label Interscope to Apple, after selling Beats, a company he founded with Dr Dre, looks back at the decade in the music business nytimes.com #

Lack of guidance leaves public services in limbo on AI, says UK watchdog theguardian.com #

Electric Cars Threaten the Heart of Germany’s Economy nytimes.com #

A plateful of plastic -
Visualising the amount of microplastic we eat graphics.reuters.com #

4 Things You Should Know VSCode Can Do Without Extensions - The log points debug feature looks pretty cool blog.insiderattack.net #

A Recap of Frontend Development in 2019 css-tricks.com #

Why you should almost always order one large pizza instead of two mediums boingboing.net #

Prince William unveils 'Earthshot prize' to tackle climate crisis theguardian.com #