Reading List Archives
I keep track of all the blog posts I have read in 2021.
- Articles Read
- 588
Since 27 December 2020
- This Week
- 5
decreased by-38%
- This Month
- 44
decreased by-32%
14 April 2021
- Kill Tuesday
kmikeym
•
13 Apr 2021
Back in 2010 Josh Berezin wrote, “Workplace trends in the Western world include: higher hourly productivity, along with an increasing number of work hours. And to what end? Historically high levels…
- Deep dive in CORS: History, how it works, and best practices
Ilija Eftimov
•
12 Apr 2021
Learn the history and evolution of same-origin policy and CORS, understand CORS and the different types of cross-origin access in depth, and learn (some) best practices.
13 April 2021
- Is WebAssembly magic performance pixie dust?
Surma
•
13 Apr 2021
Add WebAssembly, get performance. Is that how it really works?
- Don’t aggregate your metrics
Recently Visnu Pitiyanuvath of Observable presented how dataviz techniques can be applied to developer dashboards to improve insights. I followed his advice and it had a transformational effect on my work. Read why and how leaving metrics unaggregate can help drive opti…
- Biscuit, the foundation for your authorization systems
After 2 years of development, I am proud to share with you the official release of Biscuit, the authentication and authorization token we develop to manage access to our systems. Where does it fit in the current authentication projects landscape (and why all of those cake themed names)?
11 April 2021
- It’s Not Better If It’s Also Worse
Joe Fabisevich
•
8 Apr 2021
For a long time I’ve told people that I love technology and all it enables, yet dislike the technology industry and working in tech. People often find my statement hard to rectify, probably because they see the two as inextricably linked. Technology is an ever-changing process, one that pushes human…
- On Psychological Safety
Daniel Truemper
•
7 Apr 2021
More and more work involves collaboration. Multiple people working in a team on the same thing that is becoming ever more complex. What does this mean for an organization? Information and knowledge, especially in the technology domain, is becoming a commodity. All the best technical tools to build y…
- Maestro Syndrome
Sam Bleckley
If you hear a voice within you saying, “You are not a painter,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced — but only by working. — Vincent van Gogh.
10 April 2021
- Creating an SVG path drawing animation.
Creating my logo animation using SVG and Greensock
- My Three Strikes Rule for Blogging
A simple way to decide when and what to write.
- My programming principles
Borislav Grigorov
•
9 Apr 2021
A principle is a "fundamental truth or proposition, that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior". Simply put, it's the "why" behind our thoughts and actions. If you want to understand why principles are important, how to expand horizontally and what does it mean for a design to emerge.
- The ‘Plasticity’ of Music
Streaming Machinery
•
9 Apr 2021
The plasticity of music is amazing. Think about the many ways people can listen, care or enjoy music. For example: You can listen to the same song 1,000 times.You can listen to 1,000 different song…
9 April 2021
- Dark mode in 5 minutes, with inverted lightness variables
Lea Verou
•
30 Mar 2021
By now, you probably know that you can use custom properties for individual color components, to avoid repeating the same color coordinates multiple times throughout your theme. You may even know that you can use the same variable for multiple components, e.g. HSL hue and lightness:
8 April 2021
- Animating Clipped Shapes
Another #postAboutYourPen post. This time I’m going to explain how I recreated Herry Koo’s SA 15 dribbble shot using SVG and animejs…
- Screw it, I’ll host it myself
Marko Živanović
•
7 Apr 2021
It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Likewise, it’s all fun and games until someone loses access to their private and/or business data because they trusted it to someone else.
- The Cursed Certificate
Noah Bailey
•
5 Apr 2021
The most chaotic self-signed TLS cert ever made...
- Build a business, not an audience
Jakob Greenfeld
•
28 Feb 2021
If you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the following pattern over and over again:
- Modern CI is Too Complex and Misdirected
Gregory Szorc
The state of CI platforms is much stronger than it was just a few years ago. Overall, this is a good thing: access to powerful CI platforms enables software developers and companies to ship more reliable software more frequently, which benefits its users/customers. Centralized CI platforms like GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines, and Bitbucket provide benefits of scale, as the Internet serves as a collective information repository for how to use them. Do a search for how to do X on CI platform Y and you'll typically find some code you can copy and paste. Nobody wants to toil with wrangling their CI configuration after all: they just want to ship.
- Choosing a good development partner
When developing new software, timelines, cost, and quality can be hard to control. Here’s how to choose the right development partner to keep things on track.
7 April 2021
- Et tu, Signal?
Stephen Diehl
Many technologists viscerally felt yesterday’s announcement as a punch to the gut when we heard that the Signal messaging app was bundling an embedded cryptocurrency. This news really cut to heart of what many technologists have felt before when we as loyal users have been exploited and betrayed by corporations, but this time it felt much deeper because it introduced a conflict of interest from our fellow technologists that we truly believed were advancing a cause many of us also believed in.
- Your E-Mail Validation Logic is Wrong
Nope, you don’t know how to validate an email address. Even if you think you’d get the domain part right, fuggeddabout the local part. Seriously.
6 April 2021
- Stealing arbitrary GitHub Actions secrets
Teddy Katz
•
17 Mar 2021
I’m a big fan of the “try weird stuff and see what happens” approach to security research. Modern software has a huge number of bugs, and engineering teams often have to prioritize which bugs to fix, based in part on the number of users affected by each bug. The result is that glaringly obvious bugs…
- Git as a NoSql database
Kenneth Truyers
•
13 Oct 2016
Git’s man-pages state that it’s a stupid content tracker. It’s probably the most used version control system in the world. Which is very strange, since it doesn’t describe itself as being a source control system. And in fact, you can use git to track any type
- Setting up a RaspberryPi without monitor and keyboard
Charlie Gerard
•
4 May 2021
For a long time, I thought a keyboard and monitor were needed to do the initial setup of a RaspberryPi. However, I recently learnt that you can do this using only another computer!
5 April 2021
- Radical Transparency
What transparency within companies could look like over the next decade.
- If You Play With FIRE, Don’t Get Burned
On finding financial independence and the possible downsides of early retirement.
- Why I don’t have any analytics on my blog
Last year I removed the last of any analytics plugins from my blog and I don’t miss it.I used to use Google analytics as most do, for my personal blogs, site...
4 April 2021
- Practical React Query
Let me share with you the experiences I have made lately with React Query. Fetching data in React has never been this delightful...
- Password protect your (Vercel) site with Cloudflare Workers
Use Cloudflare Workers to simply add Basic HTTP authentication to any of your websites even if they are hosted on a service like Vercel or Netlify.
3 April 2021
- useState for one-time initializations
Why you shouldn’t rely on useMemo for guaranteed referential stability but prefer useState instead
- The barriers to decentralisation
As someone who frequents HackerNews and various other forums, I often see a lot of discussion about privacy, data security and self-hosting. The discussion almost always leads to someone shunning all centralised services that most people use, and pitching Mastodon, Matrix, XMPP or something no one’s…
- How NOT to be a screen vampire
Daniel Sisson
•
31 Mar 2021
Put your phone down, get some sleep, don’t be a screen vampire.
- EARRRL – the Estimated Average Recent Request Rate Limiter
John Berryman
•
18 Mar 2021
You’ve got a problem: a small subset of abusive users are body slamming your API with extremely high request rates. You’ve added windowed rate limiting, and this reduces the load on your infrastructure, but behavior persists. These naughty users are not attempting to rate-limit their own requests. They fire off as many requests as they can, almost immediately hit HTTP 429 Too Many Requests, and even then don’t let up. As soon as a new rate limit window is available, the pattern starts all over again.
2 April 2021
- Exfiltrate files using the DNS
Go350
•
1 Apr 2021
yes you can
- How I Got Caching Working with Netlify and Cloudflare, or How I Almost Ditched Cloudflare for No Good Reason
Vlad Iliescu
•
1 Mar 2021
A story about love, loss, and caching
- This blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem
No, really. Despite the timing of this article, this is not an April Fool’s joke.
- The algorithm did it!
Earlier today, statistician Kareem Carr posted this interesting tweet, about what people out there mean when they say “algorithm”, which I found to be a good summary:
- The compiler will optimize that away
RoyalSloth
•
1 Apr 2021
A lot of programmers believe that compilers are magic black boxes in which you put your messy code in and get a nice optimized binary out. The hallway philosophers will often start a debate on which language features or compiler flags to use in order to capture the full power of the compiler’s magic. If you have ever seen the GCC codebase, you would really believe it must be doing some magical optimizations coming from another planet.
1 April 2021
- How to price your SaaS product
Patrick Campbell
•
27 Oct 2020
Q: I'm building a SaaS product and don't know where to start when pricing it. How should I approach my pricing strategy? When this question came in, I took to Twitter to find the smartest person in the world on SaaS pricing…
- What does a PGP signature on a git commit prove?
Konstantin Ryabitsev
•
27 Jul 2020
With git, a cryptographic signature on a commit provides strong integrity guarantees of the entire history of that branch going backwards...
- Writing Documentation
Mihai Tiriplica
•
27 Mar 2021
Writing documentation is the kryptonite for software engineers. It’s this thing we have to do after we finish all the interesting work and since we did all the interesting work we know everything about it so why do we need to document it? This idea it’s definitely exaggerated but I did have a versio…
- It’s hard to draw lessons from your own failures
David Heinemeier Hansson
Andrew Wilkinson’s tale of how he blew $10,000,000 building a to-do list app perfectly illustrates the danger of trying to analyze your own failures. It’s so easy to fall in love with one of those infinite alternate universes where you just did that one thing differently and everything worked out. L…
- The JavaScript Supply Chain Paradox: SRI, CSP and Trust in Third Party Libraries
A couple of years back as the US presidential campaign was ramping up, the Trump camp did something stupid. I know, we’re all shocked but bear with me because it’s an important part of the narrative of this post. One of their developers embedded this code in the campaign’s donation
- I Now Own the Coinhive Domain. Here’s How I’m Fighting Cryptojacking and Doing Good Things with Content Security Policies.
If you’ve landed on this page because you saw a strange message on a completely different website then followed a link to here, drop a note to the site owner and let them know what happened. If, on the other hand, you’re on this page because you’re interested in reading
31 March 2021
- Some opinionated thoughts on SQL databases
Nelson Elhage
•
30 Mar 2021
People who work with me tend to realize that I have Opinions about databases, and SQL databases in particular. Last week, I wrote about a Postgres debugging story and tweeted about AWS’ policy ban on internal use of SQL databases, and had occasion to discuss and debate some of those feelings on Twitter; this article is an attempt to write up more of them into a single place I can refer to.
- Font size is useless; let’s fix it
What happens when you set fontSize: 32 in your favorite editor
30 March 2021
- Using React with D3.js
Amelia Wattenberger
- Git email flow vs Github flow
Martijn Braam
•
30 Dec 2020
Comparing the Github and Gitlab pull request workflow to the Git built-in email workflow.
- HOWTO backdoor curl
Daniel Stenberg
•
30 Mar 2021
I’ve previously blogged about the possible backdoor threat to curl. This post might be a little repeat but also a refresh and renewed take on the subject several years later, in the shadow of the recent PHP backdoor commits of March 28, 2021. Nowadays, “supply chain attacks” is a hot topic.
- Peace of mind backup
Lars Solberg
If you are semi-paranoid, have a lot of data and want a backup-solution that last, this post might be for you. I've been trying to get a backup solution that I'm happy with for a while, but after using it for a while, there is always the questions of what if the house burns down, what if I forgot the backup key that hunts me..
29 March 2021
- Deriving key from chords in music
Butternotes
These articles, which describe fundamental algorithms for a music theory ontology, were originally found on the defunct {:code redux}. Since these articles first appeared 10 years ago, many music theory learning tools using algorithms have popped up, and I feel I need to write about what is and is not possible within these algorithms. There will be no code in this article, but what is written here will be important.
- Being a woman in tech should not be controversial
Marijke Luttekes
•
5 Mar 2021
Ah, Twitter. The cesspool where white men publicly, and with their own name, publish the weirdest and most harmful takes towards people who are not like them. The so-called “Tech Bro” opinion reflects many things going wrong in companies worldwide, but with a broader audience. This week was especially rough. Someone asked why there are so few women in tech, and it opened the floodgates to misogynistic tweets about how women’s brains aren’t wired to do maths and thinking and who-knows-what.
- A “sudden strong wind”: the worst excuse Ever Given?
Valentin Vincendon
The Suez Canal is an artery of world trade, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, and providing an avenue for vessels to pass between Asia and the Middle East and Europe. The main alternative, a passage round the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, takes considerably
28 March 2021
- Why I’m unreachable and maybe you should be too
Pieter Levels
•
27 Mar 2021
You may have noticed it’s practically impossible to send me a message anywhere. I did that on purpose so I can spend my time how I want to spend it. I don’t really use email and I have my direct message inboxes on every platform closed.
- Roll Your Own CSS-in-JS Library (1) - Introduction
yyjhao
•
7 Mar 2021
CSS-in-JS is an idea to tackle various issues with CSS by writing them in JavaScript (or whatever else that can compile to JavaScript, such as TypeScript). Some popular examples include libraries like styled component, emotion and JSS.
27 March 2021
- Automating Dependabot with our GitHub app
NearForm’s GitHub Dependabot app is a useful tool for unattended approval and merge of dependency updates.
- It doesn’t work
Frank Denis
8 AM. Like any other day, I take a quick glance at my GitHub notifications via Octobox. “Problem”, “Doesn’t work”, “Broken”, “Failure”, “Error”, “Bug”, “Doesn’t work”...
- Other Ways
Christopher Butler
•
26 Mar 2021
Sameness is the enemy of creativity. And yet so much of what we make is eventually swept up into the event horizon of uniformity. Why? There are likely as many reasons as there are makers. But I suspect those reasons may fall into three larger categories that arrange on a scale of conscious to unconscious: pragmatism, imitation, and ambient influence.
- Don’t let your design system seem complete
Tosin and Henry from the NHS service manual team shared their recent work at last Thursday’s design huddle. They covered their work on understanding and improving contributions to the service manual. They shared some of their research. Talking about reasons people don’t contribute.
- The six principles of lifestyle businesses
First, let me caveat this by saying that you will find lots of successful businesses that violate these principles. Indeed, I just met with a B2C company that makes $20+ mil/year with two employees - and they flatly contradict some of these principles. So I would treat them more as rough guidelines for when thinking through ideas for your company.
26 March 2021
- No more platforms please
David Heinemeier Hansson
We have enough social media platforms, and they are all broken. Content moderation is bust at even moderate scale, and algorithmic amplification is broken at any scale. We need a reboot. We need to double down on the ideas of Web 1.0, and the tools that make carving out your own place on the interne…
- You are sharing your downloads with your Antivirus Company
Ralf Schlatterbeck
•
23 Mar 2021
I recently have provided a customer with a link to a firewall image (using the Turris MOX router with a variant of OpenWRT) hosted on my own webserver. The image included keys material for an OpenVPN connection. The image file was in a hidden directory on my projects webserver. I monitored closely if there would be any downloads besides the one I expected from my customer.
- Success Mysticism
Christopher Butler
•
31 Dec 2020
Few things make me sadder than the now predictable moment at which a successful person creates a sellable mysticism out of their good luck and privilege. I find it astonishing how often success creates a 360° blind spot from which the beneficiaries of so many privileges, gifts, and fruits of other peoples’ labor can no longer see reality.
25 March 2021
- SQLite is not a toy database
Anton Zhiyanov
•
25 Mar 2021
Here is why SQLite is a perfect tool for you - whether you are a developer, data analyst, or geek.
- Hidden OAuth attack vectors
Michael Stepankin
•
25 Mar 2021
Intro The OAuth2 authorization protocol has been under fire for the past ten years. You’ve probably already heard about plenty of “return_uri” tricks, token leakages, CSRF-style attacks on clients, an
- Learn about problems, not solutions
Gareth Dwyer
Sometimes people ask me what they should learn - they’ve heard AI is kind of hot, but DevOps is too? What’s the best way to get into AI? Should they s
24 March 2021
- How to create a 1M record table with a single query
Anton Zhiyanov
•
21 Mar 2021
Let’s say you want to check how a query behaves on a large table - but there is no such table at hand. This is not a problem if your DBMS supports SQL recursion: lots of data can be generated with a single query. The WITH RECURSIVE clause comes to the rescue.
- Debounce and Throttle Callbacks with React Hooks
Kyle Shevlin
Learn how to debounce or throttle a callback function with React hooks while avoiding an exhaustive deps ESLint error
- Really Simple Syndication
Alvaro Duran
RSS is the not-so-innovative solution to the social media lunacy
- You merely adopted dark mode
The best product too few people have ever used
- Add auth support to a Next.js app with a custom backend
Arunoda
•
7 Aug 2020
Here’s how to add an auth system to a Next.js app that uses a separate API server.
23 March 2021
- What is Next.js Incremental Static (Re)Generation?
Arunoda
•
8 Jun 2020
It’s a combination of best features from server-side rendering(SSR) and static site generation(SSG).
- Substack’s UI and 1Password just cost me $2,023
A quick guide on how to accidentally spend $2k in two clicks live on a client Zoom call.
- Why Writing Software Is Hard
D’Arcy
•
22 Mar 2021
From time to time, I wonder why correctly functioning software is so difficult to write. Software development is something we’ve been doing a long time, that also has a benefit that many other crafts don’t: you can create a repeatable process that does exactly the same thing each time. Given this hu…
- The dispassionate developer
Mark Seemann
•
22 Mar 2021
Caring for your craft is fine, but should you work for free?
- You probably don’t need A/B testing
The best way to optimise your website is normally the simplest.
22 March 2021
- Creating Accessible Icon Buttons
Sara Soueidan
An icon button is an icon that triggers some sort of action on the page. More accurately, technically speaking, an icon button is a button that contains an icon and no (visible) accompanying text. These buttons can be found in the majority of app and user interfaces today. The infamous hamburger menu button is a great example of such buttons when not visually labelled “Menu”.
- Inclusively Hidden
Scott O'Hara
•
14 Apr 2017
There are various ways to hide content in web interfaces, but are you aware of the different effects they have on the accessibility of that content? While so...
- Accessible icon links
In modern web design, it is not uncommon to have a link (or a button) that visually has no text, and is just an icon. Think about social icons, or items in a compact navbar. Relying solely on iconography can be tricky, but it can work, especially when icons are clear and well known.
- A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components
Vitaly Friedman
•
22 Mar 2021
Reliable accessible front-end components: :focus styles, content sliders, dark mode, data charts, date pickers, form styles, navigation menu, modals, radio buttons, “skip” links, SVGs, tabs, tables, toggles and tooltips.
- The #1 tip to familiarize with new JavaScript Codebases
Getting thrown into a new codebase is difficult. But with tools for architecture analysis you can make your journey at your next job’s JavaScript or TypeScript codebase a breeze.
- Name Your Next Product With This Exercise - come up with a product name
Glenn Stovall
•
8 Mar 2021
How do you come up with a product or business name? Naming products is a hard but learnable skill. Here’s a repeatable process you can use to get unstuck.
- Internal Tooling is Underrated
Jake Rottersman
•
18 Mar 2021
Introduction Building tools that help employees be more productive is one of the most valuable things that is done in a company. Unfortunately, it’s frequently underinvested in and deprioritized in favor of customer-facing work. This leaves people creating ad hoc tools to solve their problems or br…
20 March 2021
- Continuous Typography
Notes toward a continuous framework for screen typography
- Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore
Law Gimenez
•
20 Mar 2021
Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore. Why do I say this? Well, if you’ve been rocking the iPhone SE 2020 you would know. What I’m saying is there a lot of UI glitches from ap…
19 March 2021
- Using Serverless Redis with Next.js
Lee Robinson
•
19 Mar 2021
Did you know it’s possible to use Redis for your entire database? Caching, counters, sorted lists, and even queues. Learn how to deploy a Redis & Next.js app in a few short minutes.
- A world without trust is not better
David Heinemeier Hansson
One of the reasons I’ve never cared for crypto currencies is that the associated utopia of trustless society had zero appeal to me. I don’t think the world is better off by erasing the need to trust in our transactional counterparts, so turning these transactions into pure computing always struck me…
- Stuff your logs!
Paul Khuong
Nine months ago, we embarked on a format migration for the persistent (on-disk) representation of variable-length strings like symbolicated call stacks in the Backtrace server. We chose a variant of consistent overhead byte stuffing (COBS), a self-synchronising code, for the metadata (variable-length as well).
- Relentlessly give the user what they want
Bryan Kennedy
•
18 Mar 2021
I love my Peloton. Mostly it exists as a fancy piece of abstract art in my office, but I occasionally use it for workouts. When I overcome my lazy butt inertia, my experience is that the Peloton almost always wants to do an update.
18 March 2021
- System fonts don’t have to be ugly
Make your site faster and more environmentally-friendly by taking a system-fonts-first approach
17 March 2021
- Self-hosting Git
Akshay
•
17 Oct 2020
Earlier this week, I began migrating my repositories from Github to cgit. If you care at all about big corporates turning open-source into a T-shirt farming service, this is the way to go.
- GitHub has a Permission Problem.
TL;DR: Thousands of developers are giving 3rd parties write access to their github repos. This is even more irresponsible than giving out your email password or your computer's password since your github repos are often used by more than just you. The tokens given to 3rd parties are just like passwords. A hacker that breaches a company that has that info will suddenly have write access to every github repo the breached company had tokens for.
- A clock based on Cistercian numerals
The story of when I tried Twitch for the first time to live-code a Web Component that displays numbers with Cistercian numerals, so I could build a clock.
16 March 2021
- Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
Bitcoin is the worst waste of resources and energy in human history. It is solely used for financial speculation, with no genuine utility…
- What you read is none of their business
David Heinemeier Hansson
There’s this scene in the 90s movie Se7en where the detectives played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are able to hone in on the serial killer via a secret FBI program that monitors people’s library habits. The killer, played by Kevin Spacey, has been reading Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise…
- When Should I Interrupt Someone?
How many times have you sat there trying to work through a technical problem, and thought: Is it OK if I interrupt someone else to get them to help me?Pretty much every engineer ever Since I work w…
- The Value of a Personal Site
Back when I was setting this site up for the first time, there was a common theme across many of the resources I was reading. Almost all of them said to treat a personal site as a ‘business card for the Web’. While that idea is a fine starting point if you're only looking for a site to show some basic contact information, I think doing so does a disservice to yourself.
15 March 2021
- shared, util, core: Schroedinger’s module names
I do a lot of architecture work lately, and one thing that seems to appear more often than I thought it would be are module names that have generic-sounding names like shared, util, or core. There is something confusing about them, as they don’t tell you what’s inside!
- 🖼 Secure Asset Management and Upload with S3
Bruno Scheufler
•
12 Feb 2021
An incredibly powerful way of offering a customizable user experience is to allow users to upload media content like images, for profile pictures, or other assets that will be embedded in your product. When you’re building a knowledge base
- 6 Micro-SaaS Startups in 12 Months
The (Modified) Levels Challenge The start of 2021 marks the beginning of my true Indie Hacker journey. My intention is to build 6 micro-SAAS startups within 12 months. From there, I’ll double down on whichever projects are profitable. I’m taking this idea from Pieter Levels and his famous article, “…
- Is this true?
Jordan Scales
•
13 Mar 2021
A conversation on unit tests, computation, and existential crises stemming from the question: does this function return true?
- HTML and CSS still isn’t about painting with code
Christian Heilmann
- JavaScript performance beyond bundle size
Nolan Lawson
•
23 Feb 2021
There’s an old story about a drunk trying to find his keys in the streetlight. Why? Well, because that’s where it’s the brightest. It’s a funny story, but also relatable, be…
- A Simple Personal Data Backup Setup
David Gorski
Getting Started With An Easy, Good-Enough Backup Solution
14 March 2021
- Bookmark Knocking: Hidden Bookmarks Without A Browser Extension
Jacob Strieb
•
12 Mar 2021
A novel technique to securely hide bookmarks without a browser extension.
- My playbook for shipping side projects
Tips and strategies I’ve learned for shipping side projects.
13 March 2021
- Understanding Extended-Nonce Constructions
How and why XSalsa20/XChaCha were designed, and why they’re secure.
- Don’t Read Links on the Internet
Adam Simon
•
12 Mar 2021
Don’t read this blog. Think about it? Why should you read this blog? There are a functionally-infinite number of other things you could read and you’ve clicked this specific link on the internet.
- Do one thing well
Brad Dickason
•
11 Mar 2021
Teams add so many features that the product fails at the job we hired it for. People don’t want more features. They want the product to get the job done and get out of their way.
- Interpolating the internet
Fraser Greenlee
•
11 Mar 2021
What happens when every plausible idea is an inference away.
- Tech investors don’t care about climate change
Can Olcer
•
11 Mar 2021
Lately, I’ve been noticing more and more startups that try to tackle climate change. And they seem to be backed by big venture capitalists, too.
12 March 2021
- The totalitarians of the attention economy
David Heinemeier Hansson
It’s become increasingly common for executives of dominant internet services to see their competition as all of human activity. Not just activity spent on competing or adjacent services, no, all activity of any kind. Any time spent outside their service equating to minutes on the clock to conquer. T…
- Stop Waiting for the Ripe Idea
Salman Ansari
•
10 Mar 2021
Deciding when to share an idea is a lot like picking fruit. A farmer can never know for certain how a fruit will taste. They look for any signals they can find of its ripeness — its color, smell, shape, and texture. Their success depends on their ability to do the seemingly impossible: predict how a…
- How to Use React Context Effectively
Kyle Shevlin
Learn how to use React Context effectively in your web applications by using custom hooks and memoization.
- On shutting down, weighing and boredom.
Today, I’m shutting down two of my SaaS: Timelygigs and Adagio.
11 March 2021
- After Minimalism
David Perell
•
17 Dec 2020
It’s time for us to move beyond minimalism. If we want a dynamic world, we should splash our buildings with enthusiastic colors, bold patterns, and visions of a better tomorrow.
10 March 2021
- Rate limiting for distributed systems with Redis and Lua
Florent Chauveau
•
20 Sep 2018
How we use Redis and Lua to rate limit requests per second
- Staying out of TTL hell
Cal Paterson
•
9 Mar 2021
Cache strategies that don’t trade-off correctness for speed
- Why asynchronous Rust doesn’t work
eta
•
8 Mar 2021
In 2017, I said that “asynchronous Rust programming is a disaster and a mess”. In 2021a lot more of the Rust ecosystem has become asynchronous – such that it...
- TypeScript: Narrow types in catch clauses
When you are coming from languages like Java, C++, or C#, you are used to doing your error handling by throwing exceptions. And subsequently, catching them in a cascade of catch clauses. There are arguably better ways to do error handling, but this one has been around for ages and given history and influences, has also found its way into JavaScript.
- What Color is Your Function?
Bob Nystrom
Each function—anonymous callback or regular named one—is either red or blue.
- The Future of Group Messaging
Jarren Horrocks
An analysis of modern messaging, and the next evolutionary steps. A Case Study.
- Saas sucks: we can do better
Adam Bourg
•
9 Mar 2021
Software as a “Service”, ahem Subscription, sucks. It’s really good for software companies and for the engineers that build the systems but as an end user it totally sucks. I’m going to talk about why, and what we can do better as an industry.
9 March 2021
- SEO mistakes I’ve made and how I fixed them
A look back at what I learned fixing my terrible SEO mistakes on my Gatsby websites
- Building Webhooks Into Your Application: Guidelines and Best Practices
WorkOS
This post will walk through the basics of how to send out webhooks from your app, manage authentication, handle security, and provide a smooth developer experience to your customers.
- Scrollspy demystified
A deep dive into how the inner workings of a Scrollspy, Intersection Observers, and how to integrate it with Markdown-based static sites without the need of third party libraries.
- Not Every Bug is Worth Fixing
Felipe Moyano
•
27 Feb 2021
Does it feel like your team is constantly putting out fires? That your product isn’t moving forward because of constantly having to chase down bugs? Maybe it’s time to reconsider your strategy, and start saying no to some of them.
- Notion is not a knowledge base
What is Notion For those of you who don’t know Notion, it is a note taking app. Well it used to be a note taking app. They describe themselves as the ‘All-in-one workspace’. I usually describe themselves as ‘Google drive with pretty emojis’. Which is I don’t think far from …
- Competition in SaaS doesn’t have to be cut throat
Read an exploration into competition in SaaS. An area that is undeniably fierce, but can it be done in a humane and thoughtful manner? Check it out!
8 March 2021
- Immutable approaches
Tom MacWright
For the fourth or so time in my career, I’m thinking about and implementing an ‘undo’ function. Undo is a powerful feature because it lets people do destructive or major operations without worrying because they can just hit command-z. Implementing undo is a subtle challenge for both UX & algorithms.
- Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 Edition
Nick Craver
•
17 Feb 2016
This is #1 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Welcome.Previous post (#0): Stack Overflow: A Technical DeconstructionNext post...
- Doxxing for Good
Zach Bellay
•
6 Mar 2021
tl;dr: I found an unsecure webcam online, and called the guy to turn it off, and he did.
7 March 2021
- Gyro-web: Accessing the device orientation in JavaScript
Accessing the device orientation using React hook, and rotating a CSS 3D cube afterwards.
- Cleaning Up Your Postgres Database
Actionable steps on how to improve your Postgres database performance.
6 March 2021
- Life Quests, not Goals
Hima Tammineedi
•
3 Mar 2020
Some people say they have goals that they want to accomplish in life. I, however, have goals and quests. I’ll explain what quests are, but I would recommend reevaluating your goals and considering turning some of them into quests. If you adopt this framing of quests and goals, then you might be able…
- Ideas to monetize your side projects.
Bruno Quaresma
After launch TweetPik one month ago I’ve been trying to find ways to monetize it and I’m going to share with you some of my learnings during this time so far.
- I don’t want to do front-end anymore
Nomm
•
8 Feb 2021
Front-end is not something that makes me happy anymore, in large part due to its complexity.
- Beyond Minimalism
Álvaro Durán
Stop being a cucumber. Start being a pickle.
- Trust but Verify
Brendan Eich
•
11 Jan 2014
It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. This is particularly troubling when such surveillance is done by governments under statutes that provide limited court oversight and almost no room for public scrutiny.
5 March 2021
- Bring Your Own Client
Geoffrey Litt
•
1 Mar 2021
It’s delightful to have the freedom to Bring Your Own Client (BYOC): to choose your favorite application to interact with some data. For example, I can program with Sublime Text, while my teammate uses vim, and we don’t need to fight to the death to pick one editor between us. There are dozens of text editors to choose from, and no lock-in from proprietary file formats.
- Everything we know about Core Web Vitals and SEO
There has been a lot of uncertainty and confusion since Google announced the Page Experience Update in 2020. With just over three months before the update goes live in May, here’s what we know about it.
- React useRef By Example: What It Is, Why We Need It
useRef is a built-in React Hook. What is it used for? How does it work? I’ll reveal this hidden gem for you with a few real-world examples.
4 March 2021
- Why I don’t need to clean up my desktop and downloads folder in macOS
Stefan Judis
•
4 Mar 2021
How to leverage the tmp directory to not store random files on your macOS computer.
- HTTPWTF
HTTP is fundamental to modern development, from frontend to backend to mobile. But like any widespread mature standard, it's got some funky skeletons in the closet.
- Bitsquatting windows.com
Remy Hax
•
3 Mar 2021
Earlier this month, I came back around to seriously considering an attempt at bitsquatting. While the prior link goes into great depth on the topic, I will attempt to give a very high level overview here: If this sort of thing interests you: I tend to do stuff like this weekly.
- (Dis)Honest Functions
Bendik Solheim
After a recent debugging session, discovering I had once again been the victim of a dishonest function signature, I was... Well, let’s just say I was unimpressed. Two thoughts popped up in my head – the first one was «ahh.. this thing again..», and the second was «wait, why is this still even a thing?». It left me in a state of frustration.
3 March 2021
- Less handoffs: reviewer merges
Cees de Groot
•
15 Jan 2021
A little writeup on why I think that having the PR reviewer merge/deploy is a good thing.
- Why ethical A.I. is nonsense
Marco Lardelli
•
2 Mar 2021
We should not try to create gods so that we can remain fools. We should strive instead to improve ourselves.
- The problem with perpetual licensing
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know should know by now the perpetual licensing pattern: you buy a license to certain software, you receive updates for a year or two, depending on the license, then you stop receiving updates for the app and you can use that version forever. The main prob…
- How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%
t0st
•
1 Mar 2021
GTA Online. Infamous for its slow loading times. Having picked up the game again to finish some of the newer heists I was shocked (/s) to discover that it still loads just as slow as the day it was re
- Things I Made That Sucked
We don’t all hit homeruns on the first go around. Today, I celebrate the misses.
2 March 2021
- Foam: Six Months Later
Jani’s Notes
Hello. It’s me, Artist Formerly Known As Lead Maintainer of Foam. You may remember me from such hits as “feverishly astroturfing a community around an early-stage open source project and then disappearing into the thin air without any kind of acknowledgement that anything had ever happened.”
- Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You
The widely used Python package cryptography changed their build system to use Rust for low-level code which caused an emotional GitHub thread. Enthusiasts of 32-bit hardware from the 1990s aside, there was a vocal faction that stipulated adherence to Semantic Versioning from the maintainers – claimi…
- Speed is the killer feature
Brad Dickason
•
25 Feb 2021
Do you remember your first time using a modern smartphone? A vibrant screen that responded instantly when you tapped replaced cramped keyboards. You could sign your name, drag and drop apps around the screen, and even spin the giant Price is Right wheel to set your alarm. In 2007, this felt like a the future. There's a reason it was called 'the Jesus phone.'
- TypeScript Function Syntaxes
The syntax for various functions and function types in TypeScript with simple examples.
- All your input are belong to me – 3rd party web security
adtechmadness
•
25 Feb 2021
Hello readers! Today we are going to discuss another (not just adtech) madness: 3rd parties and their security. To make a long story short, modern web apps contain a lot of code (“tags”…
- The small web is beautiful
Ben Hoyt
Summary: I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Also, a bonus rant about microservices.
- Music To Program To
Alan Grow
•
27 Feb 2021
Programming is deep work. Tuning out distractions is key, and music is one of the most effective tools at your disposal.
1 March 2021
- Why does an A note on a piano sound different from an A note on a violin?
Omar Shehata
If you pull up a tuner app on your phone and play an A note on a piano, the tuner will say ~440 hz. Do the same thing on a violin's A note and you'll also get 440 hz.
- The Sliding Window Pattern
Chocolates and a way to make your array algorithms a bit faster.
- Passion Not Required: It’s OK to Only Program for a Paycheck
You don’t need passion to be a programmer. Go get them paychecks!
- Remote-work surveillance software is vile
You could have hoped that as the pandemic wore on, the initial rush of companies to adopt employee-surveillance software would peter out. They’d realize that the biggest problem with working remotely is usually not that employees work too little, but that they work too much. No such luck. Employee-s…
- A note on boredom, anonymity, and declinism
It’s interesting to see how the amount of ennui in our society increases simultaneously as technology advances. We are doing something wrong. Technology and its rapid advancement can be not o…
- How to parse boolean or numeric values in fastify query string
Varun Batra
•
5 Oct 2020
- Add an Access-Control-Allow-Origin Header using Cloudflare Workers
If you have set a cookie free domain or CDN and your fonts are broken and not showing then it might be due to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). There should be a way to control what resources from…
28 February 2021
- Pro Tip: Don’t overcomplicate content storage / the database from the start
Part A – The problem I’m currently working on a fairly complicated project that basically is a single-page app having just a quiz. Based on the answers you give, you receive a special report and solution at the end. Something regarding loans and financial stuff. The problem is that those questions m…
- Keeping platforms open
Rohan Kumar
•
26 Feb 2021
How open platforms become closed, and how standards-driven development can prevent it from happening.
- What You Can Actually Do About Burnout
Olesya Luraschi
•
18 Feb 2021
Burnout is becoming an epidemic. This feeling of chronic stress that does not subside is rising not just in healthcare professions, but across all types of professions. What often goes unmentioned is that in psychology everything is a spectrum. The difference between someone who is chronically stres…
27 February 2021
- Before You memo()
Rendering optimizations that come naturally.
26 February 2021
- Why your phone’s portrait mode fakes the blur
Surma
•
26 Feb 2021
Portrait mode artificially blurs out the background of an image to make it look... “better”. Turns out the reason this is done artificially is physics more than anything else.
- How often should I rotate my ssh keys?
An intriguing tale of rotating ssh keys.
- Grow the IndieWeb with Webmentions
When I re-made my site with Eleventy, the pages didn’t change much, but I had loads of fun adding new features. The most fun was webmentions and I’m here to co…
- Plain Text Protocols
Blain Smith
•
1 Sep 2020
If you haven't noticed already I really love plain text so I thought I would find some plain text protocols that are used in different software systems. The Redis Protocol specification states it best by describing its own protocol, but this applies to all of the plain text protocols I will cover.
- ISO 8601: the better date format
Kirby Kevinson
•
26 Feb 2021
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that there are different date formats in the world such as the American one (mm/dd/yyyy) and the European one (dd.mm.yyyy). If you’re smart enough, you’ve probably also noticed that the American one makes no sense and is just awful.
- My Terminal-First Blogging Workflow
You don't need fancy WYSIWYG editors and complicated plugins to write your blog, you just need a text file and some basic Unix tools.
- Don’t define functions inline in your public headers
ThatGeoGuy
•
24 Feb 2021
Thoughts with regards to having inline definitions in dynamic library headers.
- Imagining a Better Social Media
Peter Yin
Between the negative impacts on mental health, the spread of disinformation, and concerns with data privacy, the problems with social media seem more in the spotlight than ever before. The Social Dilemma, a recent Netflix documentary highlighting these problems (with help from the people who created them), has reached 100 million people in 190 countries. It’s no exaggeration to say the problems with social media are a mainstream topic.
- Leaving Comments on My Own Pull Requests
For the record, the process of leaving comments on my own pull requests isn’t something I came up with on my own. I adopted it from a previous colleague of mine, Jean Cochrane.
- Cryptography Interface Design is a Security Concern
Cryptographers and cryptography engineers love to talk about the latest attacks and how to mitigate them. LadderLeak breaks ECDSA with less than 1 bit of nonce leakage? Raccoon attack brings the Hi…
- The Future of Web Software Is HTML-over-WebSockets
Matt E. Patterson
•
24 Feb 2021
The future of web app development is taking shape, and it’s changing the way we think about server-side app architecture. In this article, Matt E. Patterson shows why a new WebSockets-driven …
- Technology without Industry
George Hotz
•
18 Jan 2021
A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway
25 February 2021
- A minimal email client
Manuel Moreale
•
19 Feb 2021
In a world filled with chats and forums and apps, emails are still one of the most useful tools to communicate with people. I’m not an email power …
24 February 2021
- Stop Using Icon Fonts
Icon fonts became popular over a decade ago. But their convenience comes at a high cost to your visitors.
- this email is being tracked
Alex Hern
•
17 Feb 2021
Every industry has practices that burst into flames on contact with the public. Things which are accepted, and not even doubted, within the field, but which, if enough normal people pay enough attention to them, are indefensible. Journalism, of course, is full of this. From the practice of “door kno…
- I paid for Spotify playlist placements so you don’t have to
As part of my ongoing mission to throw money into thin air I decided to promote some of Corserine‘s songs on Spotify. Objectives: increase monthly streams on my Spotify artist page so I can get picked up by Spotify algorithms better. Which in turn means I get on even bigger playlists which in turn means….er… profit?
- Modules, monoliths, and microservices
Avery Pennarun
•
23 Feb 2021
What is a microservice? When are microservices a good idea? Lately, I get people asking me when microservices are a good idea. In systems design explains the world, I talked about big-picture issues like second system effect, innovator’s dilemmas, and more. Can systems design answer the microservice…
- BBC News: ‘Spy Pixels in Emails Have Become Endemic’
Speaking of Hey, BBC News ran a piece on email spy pixels last week: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56071437
- Large-scale Analysis of DNS-based Tracking Evasion - broad data leaks included?
Lukasz Olejnik
•
23 Feb 2021
User tracking technologies are ubiquitous on the web. In recent times web browsers try to fight abuses. This led to an arms race where new tracking and anti-tracking measures are being developed. The use of one of such evasion techniques, the CNAME cloaking technique is recently quickly gaining popu…
- The Pretty JSON Revolution
Peter Ohler
Wouldn't it be nice if more JSON tools supported a truly pretty JSON format? Demand options for truly pretty JSON now! Viva la revolucion!
- The three freedoms of the web
Paul Bakaus
•
18 Feb 2021
What makes a piece of content, or sub-platform truly open, and part of the open web’s content corpus? This turns out to be a deceivingly hard problem, because everyone I ask replies with a different angle of openness they care about.
- The Ghost Recruiter
Nomm
•
23 Feb 2021
A story about a particular type of person who gives hope and then takes it away.
23 February 2021
- A retrospective look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Riccardo Mori
•
23 Feb 2021
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
- Why I’m Losing Trust in Open Source
Gibson
•
22 Feb 2021
Back when I was starting to code several years ago. I picked up The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond and I was blown away at the idea of free software. Just in case you are not familiar, free software as in freedom and not free beer.
- Records & Tuples for React
...and how they are much more than immutable data structures.
- What the heck, z-index??
The z-index property can be a tricky little bugger. Sometimes, no matter how much you crank up the number, the element never rises to the top! In this article, we explore stacking contexts, and see how they can thwart our efforts to use z-index.
22 February 2021
- Rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, and Notion beats markdown.
Drew Bredvick
For the longest time, I’ve wanted to write my blog posts inside Evernote & have them automatically available on my personal site. I looked into ways to do this in Evernote back in the day and it was tricky. With an intense if this then that (IFTTT) flow, you could kinda get there. I gave up on that idea.
- Replacing MDX with Notion
Paul Shen
Customize react-notion to get the benefits of MDX while using Notion as a CMS
- To thread or not to thread ( on Hacker News )
Datapeek
TLDR: Reply to comments, not to stories on Hacker news.
- Tap your phone at Gold Coast bus stops to access my website
Josh Withers
•
21 Feb 2021
My February 2021 Apple Fitness challenge is to walk 227km in the month. So I was out late last night closing in on the target when I stopped and looked at the bus timetable sign at a local bus stop. That NFC tag piqued my curiosity. I wondered if it worked on iPhone?
- Thought Space vs Reality
Suket Karnawat
•
21 Feb 2021
There are two worlds - the one in our head and the one that is real. It’s easy to conflate the two; perception is reality, the saying goes. But they are separate. Perception is just a representation of reality and as we know, the map is not the territory.
- The problem of CryptoArt
Joanie Lemercier
•
19 Feb 2021
I spent the past 15 years flying to festivals, galleries, events, art fairs to exhibit and distribute my work while building my art practice. Most of these projects are unsustainable, so when I dec…
21 February 2021
- Listify a JavaScript Array
Make a human readable list from an array in JavaScript.
20 February 2021
- Facade Pattern
Learn how the “facade pattern” can be used in JavaScript to make it easier to swap libraries, increase code flexibility, and hide complexity in your applications.
- Silence
Let’s be honest, silence is not usually considered an exciting subject. Despite Depeche Mode’s ironic effort to convince us, the idea that we should enjoy silence seems like a stretch. So why am I writing about it?
19 February 2021
- Downsides of working remotely
Martin Tournoij
I love remote work, and I’ve been working remotely for the last five years, but I think there are some serious downsides too. In spite what all the “remote work is the future!” articles of the last year claim, it’s not all perfect, or suitable for everyone.
18 February 2021
- Debugging layout repaint issues triggered by CSS Transition
Dzhavat Ushev
•
18 Feb 2021
A couple of weeks ago I was randomly checking the performance of a CSS Transition here on my blog. I was expecting to see a butter smooth animation but ended up surprised 😲. The transition was triggering repaint on pretty much the whole page every time it ran.
- The Fantasy of Opting Out
Those who know about us have power over us. Obfuscation may be our best digital weapon.
- The web didn’t change; you did
If you didn’t gather off the bat from the title, the problem with developing front end projects isn’t that it’s harder or more complicated, it’s that *you* made it harder and more complicated. You have the power of choice, so choose what you want to do - because the choices are overwhelming and ther…
- You probably don’t need a micro-frontend
Micro-frontends is a relatively new architectural style for building web-based applications, which as the name suggests, is an extension of the popular microservices pattern. In this blog post I argue that this is a pattern you might not need!
17 February 2021
- How I manage my browser tabs to maximize focus
Browser tab chaos gives me anxiety. This simple trick keeps me on task and productive without the need for fancy plugins or features.
16 February 2021
- It’s going to cost four figures
Raccoon
Let’s talk about pricing commissioned work on existing open source projects. Or: things I learned from my past mistakes.
- Your phone vs. Supercomputers
Trương NH Huân
•
7 Feb 2021
Today, I looked up how many floating point operations per second (FLOPS) that an iPhone can do. It turns out the A14 chip in the iPhone can do about 11 TFlOPS according to Apple. Let’s give Apple the benefits of the doubt and not get too deep into how they got that number, and put it to perspective …
15 February 2021
- Clubhouse’s Inevitability
Ben Thompson
•
15 Feb 2021
Clubhouse will do for audio what Twitter, Instagram Stories, and TikTok did for text, images, and video.
- Reasons why SELECT * is bad for SQL performance
Tanel Poder Consulting
•
24 Nov 2020
When I write production code, I explicitly specify the columns of interest in the select-list (projection), not only for performance reasons, but also for application reliability reasons. For example, will your application’s data processing code suddenly break when a new column has been added or the column order has changed in a table?
- On Witchcraft
Lies, damned lies, and social media.
14 February 2021
- Allow your mobile visitors to easier share your articles with the Web Share API
With the Web Share API you can use the native sharing mechanism of the device.
- The problems with the GPL
Unix Sheikh
•
2 Feb 2021
The GNU Public License (GPL) was created to be the "antithesis" of the standard proprietary license. Any modifications that were made to GPL licensed software required to be given back to the GPL community and any application that used or linked to GPL source code was required to be under the GPL.
- Feeds Considered Harmful
Suket Karnawat
•
2 Feb 2021
Technology is merely a tool. It can work for us or against us. If we use it with agency, we can leverage the world’s information to better our lives. If we use it indiscriminately, we find ourselves at the mercy of the Algorithm, passively consuming content.
- Taming the E-Mail Avalanche
E-mails are known to be boon and bane in almost any job. As I move forward in the academic hierarchy, I am spending an increasing amount of time in my mail client. Here, I want to quickly discuss how to stay on top of this avalanche—while also showing some statistics of my personal e-mail experience.
- GitHub repository language overview - How?
The files and directories within a repository determine the languages that make up the repository. With GitHub, you can view a repository’s languages to get a quick overview of the repository. But how does this happen?
13 February 2021
- Note-taking apps for the data conscious
My requirements for a notes app and a rundown of candidates.
- Design for fidgeting
I believe software should be delightful to use. That it should not simply help us accomplish tasks—communication, collaboration, design, creation, thinking—but that it should feel pleasant, joyful, even fun to use while accomplishing these tasks.
- Environment Aware Sessions in SSH
Steven Wade
•
1 Feb 2021
In my first week on the job as a software developer, I deleted an entire table’s worth of data from a client’s database. Luckily, we had a backup from the night before and that table was low traffic. What happened was that I thought I was on the staging server and I was doing some testing and needed to clear out the existing data. I was not on staging. I was on production.
12 February 2021
- <iframe> feedback: a fun technique with iframes on the web
ciphrd
What would happen if a <iframe> tag on a page pointed to the same page ?
- SVG: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Nicolas Lenz (Eisfunke)
•
12 Feb 2021
SVG, short for <em>“scalable vector graphics”</em> is a format for, well, scalable vector graphics. In this article I summarize my opinion of the format, what its problems are and suggest what could be done to improve things.
10 February 2021
- Entrepreneurs & Stress
Lau B. Jensen
Stress is a not so silent killer of Entrepreneurs all over the world. In this post I recall a few personal experiences and point to a way out of stress.
- Using ES Modules (ESM) in Node.js: A Practical Guide (Part 1)
Gil Tayar
•
5 Feb 2021
ESM is ready for use in Node.js. This guide shows you how, and how to avoid all the small gotchas. The guide covers the basics, but also discusses how to write packages that can be dual-mode (ESM and CJS), how to configure ESLint, Mocha, and Testdouble, and how to use TypeScript with ESM.
- Timezone Bullshit
Wesley Aptekar-Cassels
•
10 Feb 2021
People often use short timezone abbreviations like EST and PST to refer to timezones. If you're doing this in a computer program, you are almost certainly making a huge mistake. Let's take take a look, using the disastrously bad unix libc timezone tools, which you're almost certainly using under the hood if you're writing software on Linux or OSX.
- Clubhouse
Ahmed Al-Ismaily
•
9 Feb 2021
An exciting new entrant arrives on the scene changing the way we interact with audio. What is Clubhouse and why is it the future?
- Exposing sequential IDs is bad! Here is how to avoid it.
Petre Popescu
•
28 Jan 2021
It is easy to expose the primary key of your entries. This, however, can pose some security concerns. Here is how to avoid exposing primary key.
- Why should I give you my ID card
Thibault Meunier
•
8 Feb 2021
Youtube asks me for my ID card. Follow me as I dig further on how they could have done this differently
- Be Humble
Armin Ronacher
•
5 Feb 2021
Something on the topic of money and privilege that come with working in software.
9 February 2021
- An Interactive Guide to CSS Transitions
This comprehensive guide shows how to use CSS transitions! A back-to-basics look at the fundamental building blocks we need to create microinteractions and other animations.
- Crackpot Cryptography and Security Theater
Tales from the Crypt[ography].
- What’s an SPF Record?
SPF records are DNS records that help prevent SPAM and forged emails.
- Use ideas as tools not truths
Edmar Ferreira
•
3 Feb 2021
> “The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea because then he’ll fight and die for it.” -Francis Crick. This quote made me think about the dangers of believing in ideas as truths. Most things that matter in life are messy.
- Why You’re In An Echo Chamber
Hunter Clarke
I’ve recently noticed that despite my best efforts, I’m fed the same content from the same people at the same cadence. It’s an echo chamber that is hard to escape. I thought about how to break out of this loop and came up with the following mental model and solution.
- Just Launch The Damn Thing!
MobileFolk
Tl;dr: life is short, startups are even shorter. Don’t overthink, launch faster, keep moving and iterating!
- Repurposing my Twitter Feed
David Bieber
Twitter’s addicting. It’s not a good use of my time, but I scroll there anyway. If I’m going to be scrolling there anyway, might as well make it worthwhile. So, I’ve decided to repurpose my Twitter timeline and inject things I actually care about into it.
8 February 2021
- Cold Paths
Tim Kellogg
•
29 Jan 2021
A cold path is a path through the code or situation that rarely happens. By contrast, hot paths happen frequently. You don’t find bugs in hot paths. By nature, bugs are found in places that you didn’t think to look. Bugs are always in cold paths — every bug is found in a path colder than all the paths you tested.
- gifts, work, vices, hurt
Kyle Morris
How do you know when an activity is good or bad for you? Sometimes your brain lies and says it is good but then you regret it after. Maybe it's something hard now but pays off long-term. How do you know if you should suck it up and endure the hardship now to receive the payoff later? What if you're just abusing yourself and you don't realize there is no long-term payoff?
- On Boycotting FOSS
Josias
When we use proprietary software, we are under the power of the owner of the software. The owner's revenue depends on us, either directly through purchases and solutions, or indirectly by advertising. There is a relationship of power, with the owner having power over us.
- The power of three
Leonardo Federico
•
7 Feb 2021
We are wired to tune into the power of three. Great communication is built on it. Consider many of the most durable marketing slogans: Just do it. Don't be evil. I'm lovin' it.
- App Startup vs Content Startup
Beng Tan
Here is something that occurred to me recently. It’s not a law or anything, but just a thought-provoking observation. I find it interesting, and maybe it’s useful as a tool in thinking about startups. Most startups are either an app startup or a content startup.
- Turn Hacker News into an RSS feed
Matt Radford
You're an engineer who looks at Hacker News 2-5 times a day. HN is a good way to fill the gaps in time. You scan the front page- repeatedly- for links of interest... reading titles, eyeing scores... often jumping directly to the (overtly contrarian) comments to see if a link is even worth the energy.
- Change your MAC address with a shell script
Josh Thompson
•
18 Dec 2019
Sometimes I’m at a coffee shop and get locked out of the wifi, after an hour or two has passed. Rather than spending 2 minutes/week entering terminal commands, I thought it made sense to spend a few hours figuring out how to make it take one minute a week, instead, via AUTOMATION.
7 February 2021
- That’s not my name! Practical problems in real name policies.
Once in a while, big companies suggest that the answer to abuse is to ban anonymity and institute a Real Names policy. This time, it is Google’s turn.
- Fast Software, the Best Software
Essay on the benefits of speedy software, and how it affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability.
- Beware the Cult of Numeracy
Adam Waxman
•
4 Feb 2021
While data can be a fantastic tool to understand behavior and measure impact, we should be mindful of its limitations.
- How I stay motivated to publish despite being a lazy bastard
I briefly break down my process for staying on top of my writing ideas despite begin a lazy bastard. Procrastinate without guilt.
- ARCHITECTURE.md
Aleksey Kladov
•
6 Feb 2021
If you maintain an open-source project in the range of 10k-200k lines of code, I strongly encourage you to add an ARCHITECTURE document next to README and CONTRIBUTING.
6 February 2021
- Fulfilling the promise of CI/CD
When people say “CI/CD,” they are only talking about continuous integration. Nobody is talking about (or practicing) continuous deployment. AT ALL. It’s like we have all forgotten it exists. It’s time to change that.
- Modifying Telegram’s “People Nearby” feature to pinpoint people’s homes
owlspace
•
5 Feb 2021
A new way for script kiddies to find out where you live as opposed to “hacking your IP address”.
5 February 2021
- All Stories Are Wrong, but Some Are Useful
Stories are powerful, and they rule our world. This post explores how we’re always telling ourselves a story, and how choosing the right story has long term, surprising implications.
- RGPD avec Doctolib
J’ai lu des choses pas très roses vis à vis de Doctolib, sur ce à quoi les praticiens sollicités via Doctolib peuvent avoir accès. Des médecins qui auraient des comportements ou remarques déplacés en connaissant le nom ou le rôle des autres praticiens consultés.
- The spectrum of synchronousness
Communicating correctly is key for remote working. We look at sync and async communication on the spectrum of synchronousness.
- A short post on Nibby, URL shorteners and the dangers of machine translation
The Crow
•
3 Feb 2021
Twenty years ago, URL shorteners were a godsend. A complicated, hierarchical, 300 character address could be compressed down to a dozen characters - or fewer. So this is my new effort. nib.by. Nibby. Likened to the nib of a pen. Nibby.
- Locating Humans with DNS
Alan Gibson
•
4 Feb 2021
I recently lost access to a free email account I’ve had since before I can remember (though only temporarily, thank the lord). When it happened, I instantly became effectively uncontactable by a large portion of humanity. My own temporary disappearance from reality started me to thinking about how we can reuse existing infrastructure to store contact information in a durable and highly available way.
- My Most Productive Project Stack
Matt James Boyle
I have started literally hundreds of side projects and never finished any that had any sort of substance.
- Oh sorry, I was on mute!
Neil Panchal
•
4 Feb 2021
I ranted on HN the other day about Google Meet’s user interface gore. Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn.
4 February 2021
- Why indiedevs shouldn't fear being cancelled
adn
•
4 Feb 2021
I've seen a fair number of small indie developers say they're afraid of expressing their opinions online due to fear of being cancelled. Overall I think this is a pretty unwarranted fear and in this post I'll explain why.
- My product is my garden
Herman Martinus
•
1 Dec 2020
I’ve been part of the internet startup scene for a while. There are so many different camps: the bootstrappers, the VC-backed tech-bros, the crypto “investors”,
- Killing Containers at Scale
Connor Brewster
To make it so that anyone with a web browser can code on Replit, our backend infrastructures runs on preemptible VMs. That means the computer running your code can shutdown at any time! We've made it really fast for repls to reconnect when that happens. Despite our best efforts, though, people had been seeing repls stuck connecting for a long time.
- How merge trains keep your master green
No more queuing and waiting for pipeline results, merge trains will speed up your deployments while making sure master stays green.
- Why I Still Use RSS
I firmly believe the Internet, and what it stood for, peaked with RSS.
3 February 2021
- Build A Confirmation Modal in React with State Machines
React confirmation modals can be tricky, with useEffect and keeping track of shown/hidden, loading/not, and errors. State machines make it a breeze!
- Unhealthy obsession with analytics
Yusuf
•
25 Jan 2021
The irresistible urge to look at stats
2 February 2021
- Just because I have a vertical screen, doesn’t mean I’m on a phone!
I’m a weirdo – I fully admit that. As part of my home working set up, I use a vertical monitor. I read and write a lot of long documents – and this form factor suits me perfectly.…
- Past, Present, and Future of React State Management
Lee Robinson
•
2 Feb 2021
Learn about the history of state management in React and what the preferred solutions are today.
- The Cult of Best Practice
Dominik Krejcik
•
31 Jan 2021
Best practices are, despite the name, not universally good.
- Why Generation X will save the web
Heather Burns
•
31 Jan 2021
Politicians want to regulate the internet as if a handful of companies are the open web. Why? Because for their young policy staffers, that’s the only web they’ve ever known.
1 February 2021
- Tiny habits. No, like TINY tiny.
Most people try to start habits that are too big. Even the ones people think are small are too big.
- Advice to My Younger Software Developer Self
As I look back over what’s almost a decade in software development, there are some things I wish I’d started doing sooner. This is the advice I’d give my younger self, who has just landed their first professional software development job.
- Do words mean anything?
Max Hodak
•
1 Jan 2021
The principle of absolute freedom of speech has embedded in it a basic premise that words do not inherently mean anything.
- BitLocker touch-device lockscreen bypass
Microsoft has for the past years done a great job at hardening the Windows lockscreen, but after Jonas published CVE-2020-1398, I put effort into weaponizing an old bug I had found in Windows Touch devices.
- A Survival Guide for Beating Information Addiction
Leo Babauta
•
23 Aug 2020
Are you suffering from information addiction? It’s a growing problem as people spend more and more of their time online — and while online tools are amazing, being addicted to checking them can steal most of your day. You know you’re an information addict if you: Check email, Facebook…
31 January 2021
- The Hidden Drawbacks of P2P (And a Defense of Signal)
John Goerzen
•
31 Jan 2021
Not long ago, I posted a roundup of secure messengers with off-the-grid capabilities. Some conversation followed, which led me to consider some of the problems with P2P protocols.
- I bought 200+ Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix them! Part 4
James Dawson
•
30 Jan 2021
The first batch of the repaired Raspberry Pi’s have been sold! If you missed out on this, don’t worry! There are more to come as I repair them. I sold a total of 27 Raspberry Pi’s, 3 people cancelled their orders as they somehow thought these were Raspberry Pi 4’s?!
- An introduction to macOS Head Pointer
Eric Bailey
•
26 Jan 2021
Did you know you could use a mouse without using your hands?
- Storing images and files in IndexedDB
Robert Nyman
•
23 Feb 2012
The other day we wrote about how to Save images and files in localStorage, and it was about being pragmatic with what we have available today.
30 January 2021
- My playbook for shipping side projects
Tips and strategies I’ve learned for shipping side projects.
- Uniwidth typefaces for interface design
Uniwidth typefaces have great potential for the use in interactive interfaces. A short, handy compilation of some available typefaces.
- Bulletproof flag components
A resilient take on a flag component using CSS Grid. A flag is similar to the ubiquitous media object, but with a more nuanced alignment.
- Was Social Media a Mistake?
Christine Dodrill
•
26 Jan 2021
Traditionally, getting your message in front of thousands or millions of people required you to be a public figure working for a media company.
- I Launched my side project on Product Hunt, here is what I learned.
Every time I used to visit Product Hunt, I would end up discovering a few awesome tools and products that make me say, wow! This is so cool. I want to build something like that. But the thing is I had no idea what to do.
- Why we walked away from a $1.5 million seed round and shut down our company
Mikkel Dengsøe
This is the story of how I met a brilliant co-founder, started a company, got a product in the hands of early customers, got offered $1.5 million in seed funding but decided to shut it all down.
- Apple Silicon M1 supports “billion of colors” aka HDR 10-bit output
Kay Singh
•
24 Jan 2021
When most people hear Apple in a sentence, their next thought is likely the color. Does Apple Silicon M1 output “billion colors”?
29 January 2021
- The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security
Marcus Ranum
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book.
- WhatsApp and the domestication of users
Rohan Kumar
•
28 Jan 2021
WhatsApp’s rise and recent PR efforts highlight a class of business models that I call “user domestication”.
- Delivering with empathy
I remember learning about the difference between sympathy and empathy in middle school. > Sympathy: feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune. Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Pretty damn simple to understand the difference when you read each of…
- White House Youtube Dislike Manipulation
Zoe Phin
•
27 Jan 2021
I’ve seen screenshots of YouTube modifying dislikes of White House videos. I decided I would do a thorough analysis myself. I wrote a script to check video stats every 80 seconds for 24 hours…
- The great SameSite confusion
Julien Cretel
•
29 Jan 2021
In this post, I expose a common misconception about the SameSite cookie attribute and I explore its possible impact on Web security. TL;DR The SameSite cookie attribute is not well understood. Conflating site and origin is a common but harmful mistake.
- Why I’m losing faith in UX
Mark Hurst
Digital design increasingly exploits users.
28 January 2021
- useEncapsulation
Improve the quality of your codebase with encapsulation and custom React hooks.
- 4 JavaScript ES2021 (ES 12) Features That You Should Learn in 2021
The logical assignment operator, Promise.any, and more.
- The EU must protect the right to privacy and not attack end-to-end encryption
Proton Team
•
27 Jan 2021
Along with Threema, Tresorit, and Tutanota, we are releasing a joint statement calling on the EU to reject any ban or attack on end-to-end encryption.
27 January 2021
- Twitter ‘Industry’ Bullshit
Here’s a trend I’m seeing on Twitter recently. These kind of “influencer” guys posting tweetstorms that get thousands of likes and RTs… Part of me feels jealous. I spend a lot of time on Twitter and try to share valuable things, but I don’t have results like that.
- Federated development and federated forges
Loïc Dachary
•
23 Jan 2021
I’m very new to federation. Over the years I heard rumors that it was good without understanding why and how. I ran a mastodon instance for a few years but did not use it much: I’m a developer and not much of a microblogger (reading or writing).
- How to instantly show your value
Wes Kao
•
8 Jan 2021
I’ve compiled my favorite ways to convey your product’s value prop. These apply to products and brands, but feel free to apply this to people too. These work for job interviews, selling yourself as a consultant, etc.
- Advanced Technical SEO: How social image sharing works and how to optimize your og:image tags
Optimizing how content looks when it’s shared on social media has many benefits. But it’s not as simple as just picking a great social image!
- The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
I’ve told this story at conferences – but due to the general situation I thought I’d retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London.
- Data Fetching on the Web Still Sucks
Boris Cherny
It’s 2021, and data fetching on the web still sucks. This is crazy!
- Twitter’s Birdwatch is Fundamentally Flawed
The fatal flaw of Birdwatch’s current design and how it can be fixed.
- The Pros and Cons of DRY Code
Clean code is like clean garbage - it’s only truly clean if it doesn’t exist. In other words, the only clean code is no code.
26 January 2021
- Firefox 85 Cracks Down on Supercookies
Mozilla Security Blog
•
26 Jan 2021
Trackers and adtech companies have long abused browser features to follow people around the web. Since 2018, we have been dedicated to reducing the number of ways our users can be tracked.
- Making is Show Business now
Alex Danco
•
10 Oct 2020
Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year.
- Giving advice is a last resort
Give the Advice Monster the finger. Tell less and ask more.
- Twitter and Interoperability: Some Thoughts From the Peanut Gallery
Cory Doctorow
•
25 Jan 2021
Late in 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey floated “Project Blue Sky,” a plan for an interoperable, federated, standardized Twitter that would let users (or toolsmiths who work on behalf of users) gain more control over their participation in the Twitter system.
- On the complexity of JSON serialization
Einar W. Høst
•
8 May 2020
I vented a bit on Twitter the other day about my frustrations with JSON serialization in software development. I thought I’d try to write it out in a bit more detail.
- The High Price of Mistrust
When we can’t trust each other, nothing works. As we participate in our communities less and less, we find it harder to feel other people are trustworthy. But if we can bring back a sense of trust in the people around us, the rewards are incredible.
- CSS Frameworks, hype and dogmatism
Some notes on the dogmatism and gatekeeping themes of Tech Twitter and how they can generate often incorrect and naive statements—specifically about frameworks and methodologies.
- Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces
Mitja Felicijan
A few months ago I experimented with DigitalOcean spaces as my backup solution that could replace Dropbox eventually. That solution worked quite nicely, and I was amazed how smashing together a couple of existing solutions would work this fine.
- Names to avoid in Software Engineering
Danver Braganza
An incomplete list of poor names for libraries, modules, projects and teams
25 January 2021
- Everyday decision making
One of the hard things in building software, I realized, are decisions: Which tech debt to tackle? How to architect this feature? What to focus on?
- Progressive Web Apps in 2021
Maximiliano Firtman
•
6 Jan 2021
The current status of the PWA platform, abilities, compatibility, app store distribution, PWA market share and more insights about the state of the platform.
- You should always do server-side validation! Always!
Petre Popescu
•
24 Jan 2021
Here are three common scenarios of bad webapp security and best practices on how to protect yours from bad behaviour.
- The joy of deleting code
Bevan Steele
•
24 Jan 2021
I consider myself a software craftsman who takes good care of my craft. What I find difficult to understand is why I take so much joy when I am deleting code.
- State of the React Ecosystem in 2021
What’s the best way to build React apps in 2021? What has changed since 2016? What libraries is everyone using these days?
- Reusing content (with variables) in MDX
Aaron Collier
•
20 Jan 2021
How I learned to reuse content in a docs-as-code workflow in MDX.
- Throttle vs Debounce on real examples
Throttle and debounce let you save some resources and increase the performance of your app. Learn about differences and use cases.
- Margin considered harmful
We should ban margin from our React components. Hear me out.
- The styled-components happy path
styled-components is a wonderfully powerful styling library for React, and over the years I’ve learned a lot about how to use it effectively. This article shares my personal “best practices”.
- Reality is up for Grabs
Erik Torenberg
•
24 Jan 2021
Bootstrapping new realities in the digital age
- Flattery-driven open-source
With the society trending towards short-term wins and satisfaction, open-source is no different. Doing open-source is shifting from being something close to the art of craftsmanship, to make developers feel like a magician where their GitHub profile is the hat, and the rabbit their new project for the “community” to talk about. They are competing with themselves to have always a new trick (i.e. project) to show off.
24 January 2021
- The right way to turn off your old APIs
All things come to an end, even HTTP APIs. However great your API may be today, one day you'll want to release a completely new version, an improved but incompatible endpoint, a new parameter that solves the same problem better, or to shut down your API entirely. Your current API will not be live forever.
- Big Tech Censorship
Ed
•
24 Jan 2021
What Big Tech is doing in deplatforming prominent right-wing figures, based on prodding from certain NGOs and politicians, is in fact censorship, even if Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff calls it “censorship by proxy”.
- My setup for using Twitter without hating it
How to get only the good parts of this infamous social network
- Moral basis for regulating social platforms
solus.life
Many people seem to be stuck between two opposing thoughts: 1. It feels wrong that social platforms have the power to arbitrary filter content. 2. They are private companies, so they have the right to do as they please. How do we reconcile those ideas?
- Product idea: verifiable digital document sharing
Jamie Lord
•
23 Jan 2021
Some employers, utility companies, banks or government departments still require you to be in possession of physical documents - it’s now 2021 and this is stupid.
- Technological stagnation: Why I came around
I was skeptical at first, but have come to believe the stagnation hypothesis. Here’s why.
22 January 2021
- My Backup Strategy
Nerds love discussing their backup strategies, so I thought I give it a try.
- Signal App UX irritation: “x just joined Signal”
Nitin Nain
•
21 Jan 2021
I’m trying to convince friends and family to switch to Signal. Opened the Signal App after several months today and I was welcomed with 100+ unread “X just joined Signal” messages. And it irritated me…
- Righteous, Expedient, Wrong
OSI swings at Elastic, misses, and leaves a mess
- Why Electron is a Necessary Evil
Federico Terzi
•
21 Jan 2021
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 5 years, chances are you have used an Electron-based application at least once in your life. For those (probably few) who don’t know what Electron is, it’s a cross-platform desktop app framework built on top of Chromium and NodeJS
- An Ode to Chess
Dan Reardon
•
18 Jan 2021
Or - My Chess Addiction
- Open source licensing for supervillains
This post covers my research into open source software licensing and my analysis of real-world open source projects that profit off of open source code via proprietary licenses.
- The little guide to CI/CD for frontend developers
How to ship your app faster, more reliably and make your team unstoppable with good testing practices and automation.
- Guide to creating animations that spark joy with Framer Motion
An interactive guide introducing everything I’ve learned about Framer Motion through fun examples and little case studies of animations I built.
21 January 2021
- An abundance of caring (for yourself, and in turn those close to you)
Graham Sherry
•
11 Jan 2021
This post started as a few simple sentences for my brother; tips on how to lose fat and manage blood sugar better. I decided to write them down as a reminder to myself, or anyone, especially those in middle age, as I’m starting the year with a health drive.
- Would You Rather Be Uninformed Or Misinformed?
jarbus
Is it better to have no facts about a topic and thus no opinion, or have access to a few “out of context” facts and thus a misinformed opinion?
- I only know you from above the shoulders
One of my lovely colleagues made an small speech during a recent meeting. She was delighted to announce that she was heading off on maternity leave next month and looked forward to seeing us all next year once the pandemic was over.
- The Irrevocable SSL certificates of CloudFlare
Matthew Morgan
I moved this website ‘worldofmatthew.com’ away from CloudFlare back in August 2020.That should have been the end of the relation with CloudFlare for my website.
- The harmful assumptions we make about tasks
Cyrus Roshan
•
12 Dec 2020
How they hurt us, and how to correct them
- Write Crypto Code! Don’t publish it!
Crypto Fails
•
1 Feb 2014
Today I’m talking about this code. It’s PHP code that’s supposed to do encryption. It’s ugly, broken, and insecure, but we can learn from it. Thanks to @voodooKobra for pointing me to the code.
- Please Stop Encrypting with RSA Directly
RSA is for encrypting symmetric keys, not entire messages. Pass it on.
20 January 2021
- TypeScript: Low maintenance types
I write a lot about TypeScript and I enjoy the benefits it gives me in my daily work a lot. But I have a confession to make, I don’t really like writing types or type annotations. I’m really happy that TypeScript can infer so much out of my usage when writing regular JavaScript so I’m not bothered writing anything extra.
- When costs are nonlinear, keep it small.
Jessica Joy Kerr
•
19 Jan 2021
Batching work is more efficient … until cost rises nonlinearly with batch size. Then smaller batches are the most efficient. So don’t delay maintenance!
- Environment variables, config, secrets, and globals
Henrique Vicente
•
16 Jan 2021
Server-side applications are heavily relying on environment variables for holding configuration data, and even credentials like token and password. Is this a good idea?
- How to gather consensus before a big decision
Jacob Kaplan-Moss
The next time you have an important proposal to make, don’t wait until the big meeting to ask for support. Here’s how to gather feedback and build consensus beforehand, so you can make that big meeting into a non-event.
- 3 Reasons You Should Start A Personal Blog in 2021
Jacob Gustin
Us humans tend to place things into narratives, and having a cool blog gives the people around you information about their narrative of you. Having a strong personal brand also makes you more employable and might open doors that you didn’t know existed.
- A solution for social media?
Jan-Lukas Else
•
18 Jan 2021
Sometimes I find it quite interesting to read through articles that I wrote three or four years ago, back then still on the platform Medium. Some time ago I deleted them on Medium and published them on my blog in a “Medium Archive”.
19 January 2021
- From note-taking to note-making
Note-taking is fast, uses the original author’s language, and feels easier. Note-making is slower, more involved, and uses your own language.
- Is Writing as Important as Coding?
Eugene Yan
•
4 Oct 2020
As our careers grow, how does the balance between writing & coding change? Hear from 4 tech leaders.
- Death to covert contracts
“If I do X, then you’ll do Y, even though neither of us have acknowledged it.” This is crap.
- HTML and CSS techniques to reduce your JavaScript
Anthony Ricaud
•
27 Dec 2020
More and more websites are relying on JavaScript for the interactions they provide. It enables pleasant experiences but also comes with undesirable effects: longer page load times, page is unusable until the JavaScript loads and if it does so without any errors...
- I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
TJCX
•
18 Oct 2020
When good ideas make bad business
18 January 2021
- We can do better than Signal
icyphox
•
17 Jan 2021
Centralized silos are never the solution
- Are We Really Engineers?
Hillel Wayne
•
18 Jan 2021
I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of suburbanites and their 75,000 BTU woks. But now he was the test subject for my new project, to see if it was going to be fruitful or a waste of time.
- That XOR Trick
Florian Hartmann
•
15 Mar 2020
There are a whole bunch of popular interview questions that can be solved in one of two ways: Either using common data structures and algorithms in a sensible manner, or by using some properties of XOR in a seemingly hard to understand way.
- The Embedded YouTube Player Told Me What You Were Watching (and more)
2019, October 11, 00:16: I finish the cold frozen pizza that I made hours before but forgot to eat, finally write the report, press submit on the Google security bug submission form, and see the classic, Thanks! We received your report. message. That feeling is hard to beat.
- Github Stale Bots: A False Economy
Ben Winding
•
18 Jan 2021
Stale Bot’s are a type of automated bot on Github, which locks issues which are “stale” (as in have no recent activity). This seems like a helpful tool at first, but in reality it’s terrible for all parties.
- Build a Simple FLIP Animation in React
Travis Arnold
The FLIP technique allows for declarative and performant animations. In this article, we will look at a simple way to implement this method using React.
- Tidy TypeScript: Name your generics
TypeScript’s generics are arguably one of the most powerful features of the language. They open a door to TypeScript’s own meta-programming language, which allows for a very flexible and dynamic generation of types.
- Consistency beats quality
Do anything consistently for a long time (meaning multiple years), and you’ll be good at it.
- That’s not how 2FA works
Another day, another high-profile website cloned to phish credentials. In the replies, you’ll see lots of techbros saying “this is why you should switch on 2FA people!!!” Except, and I hate to bring accuracy to a technical discussion, that’s not how 2FA works!
17 January 2021
- Becoming a better interviewer
What I’ve learned from studying interviewing principles and analyzing the meta elements of my favorite interviewers.
- My Second Brain - Zettelkasten
For as long as I have been learning web development ( ) I have been taking notes. Partly notes to help clarify my understanding of something…
- A fresh new avenue for Google to kill your SaaS startup
Google Safe Browsing is a Google program that can blacklist any website or SaaS application in Google Chrome and other browsers and platforms.
- How I develop web apps in 2021
Tim Daubenschütz
•
16 Jan 2021
It's now roughly seven or eight years that I'm building dynamic front ends for the web. And since my process of creation has dramatically changed over the years, today, I'd like to share how I'm developing web apps in 2021.
- a11y* is your ally
awesome-badger
I am going to talk about Accessibility for the Web by offering a software engineer perspective (my area of knowledge) of it. However, it is important to highlight that each member of the team could approach this topic from their own discipline.
16 January 2021
- Motivation Will Eventually Go Away: Build Accountability Systems Instead
Motivation eventually goes away. Here is how you can make sure you’ll consistently create the work you’re meant to create.
- Cognitive dissonance is a gift, not a curse
Ben Barbersmith
•
24 Dec 2020
When we feel stressed or guilty because we know we should be acting differently, most of us ignore it and try to turn our minds elsewhere. Instead, we should focus on the dissonance and use it to change our behaviour for the better.
- A Svelte component to format numbers
Instead of 63476432, the component displays 64M.
- How to Kill a Unicorn
Chris Frantz
•
14 Jan 2021
I took a deep dive on freemium pricing and decided to document it in this post. Why freemium? I think it’s how the little guys can win against market leaders. Basically, it’s how you kill a unicorn. Notion, Figma, Canva, Mailchimp, and Segment. What do all of these platforms have in common, besides being category leaders?
- Prove you can write regularly before you think about the tools
Do you actually want to write or do you just to be a person who writes?
- The Big Little Guide to Running Code in the Cloud(s)
There are now many ways to run code, from traditional servers to the new serverless to cutting-edge edge options. This guide evaluates many of the code execution offerings available across AWS, Google, Azure, Heroku, Fly and Cloudflare.
- Rust is a hard way to make a web API
Tom MacWright
It is not just the borrow checker
- Date Manipulation in JavaScript - A Complete Guide
Learn how to work with date and time on plain JavaScript and how date libraries can save you time.
- Dealing with Timezones in javascript
Josh Owens
I often write about Meteor.js specific topics, but today I am going to dive into a more general javascript topic - Timezones. I can already hear most of you, "Just use Moment.js because it makes handling time easy..." I agree, it does! But I am talking more specifically about dealing with timezones and offsets.
15 January 2021
- Our Dumb Security Questionnaire
Hangar Engineering
There are many Dumb Security Questionnaires. This is ours. We think it’s better.
- The Right to Pay for my Products
Paul Heymann
Should we forbid personalised advertisement to gain back our attention, our data, our digital selves? Should we completely break the underlying economic machinery that fuels companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google? I think the answer to that has to be No.
- Cryptography Dispatches: NaCl Is Not a High-Level API
Filippo Valsorda
When talking about high-level application cryptography APIs I usually hear mentioned libsodium, Tink, pyca/cryptography, and NaCl.
- The psychology of influence and hacking growth
Wayne Haber
•
7 Jan 2021
I finished two books recently on the related topics of hacking growth and the psychology of influence. My notes and excerpts are below.
- Don’t worry son, all your friends are weirdos too
Robert Heaton
The morning after the US election it looked like the presidency was still up in the air and the Democrats were going to lose the senate.
- Uganda’s January 13, 2021 Internet Shut Down
Two days ago, through its communications regulator, Uganda’s government ordered the “Suspension Of The Operation Of Internet Gateways” hours before the country’s general election. This action was confirmed by several users and journalists who got access to the letter sent to Internet providers.
- How I hijacked the top-level domain of a sovereign state
Fredrik N. Almroth
•
15 Jan 2021
Here’s how I temporariliy took over 50% of all DNS traffic for the TLD of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Encoding data in dubstep drops
Ben Cox
How much effort would it be to actually embed machine readable data inside a dubstep track, while ensuring that the sound could be enjoyed by humans as well…
- Hacking :visited
Hacking the :visited selector to show unread posts. We’ll look at the limitations and my little work-around.
14 January 2021
- We Have A Reality Problem
Christopher Butler
In the early 1990s, when the internet was still in its structural infancy, and its influence on broader culture was widely underestimated if not entirely unknown, Howard Rheingold already knew enough to predict where this newest technology would — and wouldn’t — take us.
- What is Social Cooling?
John Messerly
•
13 Jan 2021
“Like oil leads to global warming … Data leads to social cooling”
- Web Dev Without Tools
Dan Prince
•
4 Jan 2021
Most frontend web development projects rely on a complex stack of tools that turn code into code, or code into errors.
- null
Alan Pope
•
13 Jan 2021
I quite like to break things. While I’m not a QA or security professional, I have developed a knack for doing “stupid” things with software which causes it to malfunction. Some developer friends of mine have lamented that they didn’t show me software before they released it.
- Storing Cryptographic Keys in Persistent Browser Storage
Francisco Corella
•
2 Jun 2017
This blog post is a companion to a presentation made at the 2017 International Cryptographic Module Conference and refers to the presentation slides, revised after the conference.
13 January 2021
- An unlikely database migration
Brad Fitzpatrick
•
13 Jan 2021
When I first joined Tailscale, I was horrified to learn that “the database” was a single JSON file that was rewritten on any change. We migrated to something better.
- Legacy Code Should Be Respected, Not Hated
Steven Wade
•
1 Jan 2021
Developers hate legacy code. It’s dirty, it’s crowded, it’s ugly, it’s messy, it’s… old. But we shouldn’t have a negative outlook on legacy or old code. It’s there for a reason, we just need to appreciate that reason.
- 100 daily blog posts
And here’s to thousands more!
- If it will matter after today, stop talking about it in a chat room
Live chat is for things that can get lost.
- Exact match domain vs brand domain
Johnathan Nader
I was talking with a friend of mine about the benefit vs drawback of a exact match domain vs a brand domain.
- The Paradox of Abundance
David Perell
•
13 Jan 2021
Information abundance, like all markets of abundance, is bad for the average person but great for a small number of people. Abundance is a paradox. Environments of abundance are bad for the median consumer but extremely good for a small number of conscious ones.
- Get Ready For ESM
At the end of April 2021, Node.js 10 will be end-of-life, which means that package maintainers can target Node.js 12. This Node.js version has full support for JavaScript Modules, also known as ESM.
- Reminder: Please be nice
Adam Piggott
•
12 Jan 2021
I have seen a significant uptick of people posting or joining the forums and using belligerent language, making unilateral demands and insulting the process that is open source software. “The fact you haven’t done x is stupid”. “How can you write a piece of software that doesn’t do y?”.
12 January 2021
- How to Beat Parkinson’s Law
Anthony Diké
•
11 Jan 2021
This is a method I use to help me stop procrastinating on work.
- Laptops need to change
Sergey Grigorchuk
•
7 Dec 2020
They do
- Startup ideas for 2021
Sagiv Ofek
•
11 Jan 2021
Here are some ideas I have for 2021
- The clipboard history feature is the best thing since sliced bread
Martin De Wulf
•
11 Jan 2021
For those who do not know, having a clipboard history is the best thing since sliced bread. It is that little feature that allows you, after you made a few copy actions (ctrl+c on Windows or command-c on Mac), to choose any of the copied texts to paste it.
- Getting started with Signal
First of all you may be asking “who makes Signal?” Signal Messenger LLC. is the company that makes the Signal app. They are funded by the Signal Foundation which is a non-profit organization that relies on your donations to make the app free and not have ulterior motives with your data.
- Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About inputmode
The inputmode global attribute provides a hint to browsers for devices with onscreen keyboards to help them decide which keyboard to display when a user has selected any input or textarea element.
- Guest Blog Post: Leaking silhouettes of cross-origin images – Attack & Defense
Aleksejs Popovs
•
11 Jan 2021
This blog post is one of several guest blog posts, where we invite participants of our bug bounty program to write about bugs they’ve reported to us.
- I received first-ever donation on my open-source side project and it felt great!
I decided to build an extension for VSCode. That would add handy buttons for many common commands like save file, format file, show opened files etc.
- Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQL
Many developers think that having a critical bug in their code is the worse thing that can happen. Well, there is something much worst than that: Having a critical bug in your code and not knowing about it! Using some high school level statistics and a fair knowledge of SQL, I implemented a simple anomaly detection system that works.
- Useful setup that I always use when starting a new project
A bunch of actions you should set when starting a new project that will set you in the right direction.
- Restarting the blog
Returning to proper blogging after two years of it laying dormant. What could possibly go wrong?
- Why using localStorage directly is a bad idea
In my perfect bubble localStorage always works and I can rely on it unless you are using Opera Mini. The reality is a little bit different.
- My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network
Carter Sande
I’d be interested in a decentralized social network with network-layer anonymity, grassroots content delivery, and customizable moderation.
11 January 2021
- Let’s Bring Spacer GIFs Back!
The 90s web gave us many delightful things: web rings, guestbooks, “under construction” animations, and spacer GIFs. In this article, we’ll see how I use a Spacer component to solve common layout problems, and why it’s often a great tool for the job in the modern web.
- Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time
Back in December 2019, a few months after I started hacking on Google VRP, I was looking at YouTube. I wanted to find a way to get access to a Private video which I did not own.
- Malware on my Android phone!
Cedric Beust
•
10 Jan 2021
I have a confession to make that I’m not very proud of: recently, I unwittingly installed malware on my Android phone. As one of the early members of the Android team and someone who’s been using Android for about thirteen years, this was a pretty humbling and irritating event.
- GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker (and my toilets are blocked)
jayfax
GNOME filepicker and my toilets are broken because of culture of mediocrity.
- The confusing world of USB
Fabien Sanglard
For decades, my perception of USB was that of a technology both simple and reliable. You plug it and it works.
- I did not notice my worsening mental health, and got hit hard by OCD (a tale of caution)
Sergii Kharagorgiiev
Have you seen “Aviator”, a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio about Howard Hughes? Then you might recall what an OCD is.
- Death to the document
David Yates
•
10 Jan 2021
Until quite recently, the South African Revenue Service’s online tax filing website required Adobe Flash. This aged web plugin allowed SARS to embed editable tax forms in the e-Filing web application. The result looked like this: Taxes and Flash: a match made in Hell.
- 🗳 Ranked voting systems
Elzear
•
10 Jan 2021
How we should change voting systems to remove strategic voting.
- Exploring my writing: The subjects of sentences
Consider the two sentences below, which one do you think is better? "The dog chased the cat." or "The cat was chased by the dog." ?
- Block Cipher Structures: Ranked
An opinionated curation of different classes of block ciphers, ranked by an opinionated furry.
10 January 2021
- Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale
In the first 45-minutes the market was open the faulty software deployment sent millions of child orders into the market resulting in 4 million transactions against 154 stocks for more than 397 mil…
- You might not need to store plaintext email addresses
Daniel Skogly
•
1 Nov 2020
Earlier this year, when I went from having only Facebook-login on Wishy.gift to allow registrations with email address and password, one of my concerns was how to implement this is a way that protects the data and privacy of my users. I don’t have any ads or analytics on the site, the users can select whatever display name they want, and I never stored the email addresses I got from Facebook when a user registered or logged in - only a hashed version of the ID. Email addresses and passwords, on the other hand, are a whole other beast, and the consequences of a database breach much worse.
- Software is drowning the world
James Abley
•
9 Jan 2021
One of the many upsides I’ve had from working at lots of organisations is that you get to see what’s common. Are things like this everywhere? Frequently, the answer is yes! An example of this is tech debt. I see organisations which are running to stand still, and I’m not sure they realised they’re doing that.
- Modern codecs like AV1 can bring better quality video to the open web
Judy McConnell
•
11 Jul 2018
Here’s a surprising fact: It costs money to watch video online, even on free sites like YouTube. That’s because roughly 80% of web videos rely on a patented technology called the H.264 video codec that lets engineers shrink large media files and transmit them quickly over the internet.
- The Platform Is The Enemy
Many, many people do not use the internet, the internet uses them. And this percentage is constantly growing.
- Why you can’t find an engineering coach | Swizec Teller
Swizec Teller
Wanna learn boxing? Join a gym, find a coach. Tennis player with a kink in your game? Find a coach. Software engineer with a missing skill? Google, random blogs, fun newsletters, dubious podcasts, noise on twitter 🤨
- How to grow your email list to three subscribers
Johnathan Nader
Over the past twenty five years as a prolific internet user I have been able to accomplish many feats. Some of which have garnered the attention of governments, others of family members. None of these though are as profound as the truly difficult feat of growing my subscriber list.
- Signal, thank you for not collecting my data. But I won’t use you.
Rukshan
•
8 Jan 2021
Facebook has given an ultimatum for WhatsApp users to either share their data with Facebook or leave the service. And that date is February 8th. One of the most appealing things about WhatsApp is it’s end to end encryption.
- Why you should test critical parts of your app
Last Monday, I sent the usual newsletter to the users of CloudNews. But instead of receiving one unique email, they received dozens of them, some received more than a hundred in a few seconds.
- How WhatsApp convinces you to give it your contacts
Matt Bearman
•
8 Jan 2021
WhatsApp uses dark patterns to coerce you into giving it access to your contacts.
- Block your feeds
I’m addicted to the internet. Mainly via my phone. A year ago I implemented a radical plan to try and stop my addiction.
9 January 2021
- Authenticated Key Exchanges
Soatok
•
22 Apr 2020
Authenticated Key Exchanges are an interesting and important building block in any protocol that aims to allow people to communicate privately over an untrusted medium (i.e. the Internet).
- Steam’s login method is kinda interesting
Owlspace
•
7 Jan 2021
Investigating extra security measures at one of the world’s biggest digital storefronts.
- What I learned doing 125 public talks
Minko Gechev
Over the past 7 years, I gave over 125+ talks for 20 countries in front of over 50,000+ people. By any means, this doesn’t make me an expert in public speaking, but I had the opportunity to learn a few things that I’d love to share.
- What if users brought the infrastructure?
James Salter
•
8 Oct 2020
Maintaining a free cloud app is an unsustainable hassle. Pre-cloud, you could write a piece of software, compile it once for all the systems you wanted to distribute it for, upload the binary somewhere (or send hard copies to people), then go to the beach.
- Processing RSS feeds with Repl.it
Jacob O'Bryant
The other day I made a small web service with Repl.it that does a simple transformation on an RSS feed.
- Next Gen Static Blogging
Maximilian Mackh
Take a look at the source code of this page - I rely mostly on CSS for the rendering of this article.
- Masks Off for TheDonald.win
After all, nothing screams “Proud American” like hosting your website with a French company in a Canadian datacenter.
- Understanding Connections & Pools
What connections are, how they affect our systems, and how and why pooling works—with notes on how popular applications servers and databases handle connections.
- Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design
Dave Akin
1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
- Custom Properties as State
Here’s a fun idea from James Stanley: a CSS file (that presumably updates daily) containing CSS custom properties for “seasonal” colors (e.g. spring is greens, fall is oranges). You’d then use the values to theme your site, knowing that those colors change slightly from day to day.
8 January 2021
- The Earth has been spinning faster lately
Bob Yirka
•
7 Jan 2021
Scientists around the world have noted that the Earth has been spinning on its axis faster lately—the fastest ever recorded. Several scientists have spoken to the press about the unusual phenomenon, with some pointing out that this past year saw some of the shortest days ever recorded.
- Why we don’t sell ads
WhatsApp
FB: A reminder that even the best intentions are worthless when selling a security product to a surveillance company.
- Dear freelancer, protect yourself.
Celestine Omin
•
30 May 2020
A few days ago, I wrote a post about how freelancers and clients should manage their relationship and be realistic about expectations. Today, I will talk about things freelancers can do to protect themselves.
- How I automated my Coffee Grinder
Florian Meier
•
6 Jan 2021
Making Coffee and what influences it. There are not many better things than a good espresso to start your day.
- How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance
Evan Ackerman
A week ago, Boston Dynamics posted a video of Atlas, Spot, and Handle dancing to “Do You Love Me.” It was, according to the video description, a way “to celebrate the start of what we hope will be a happier year.” - Featured in IEEE Spectrum.
- Metaballs and Marching Squares
Something about making visually interesting simulations to play with just gets me really excited about programming, particularly when there’s some cool algorithm or bit of math backing it.
- Plaintext HTTP in a Modern World
Joshua Stein
On the modern web, everything must be encrypted. Unencrypted websites are treated as relics of the past with browsers declaring them toxic waste not to be touched (or even looked at) and search engines de-prioritizing their content. While this push for security is good for protecting modern communication, there is a whole web full of information and services that don’t need to be secured and those trying to access them from older vintage computers or even through modern embedded devices are increasingly being left behind.
- WhatsApp? I try to back up my history.
maxwellito
Your whole life in a black box
7 January 2021
- Encrypted Client Hello: the future of ESNI in Firefox
Mozilla Security Blog
•
7 Jan 2021
Background Two years ago, we announced experimental support for the privacy-protecting Encrypted Server Name Indication (ESNI) extension in Firefox Nightly. The Server Name Indication (SNI) TLS extension enables server and ...
- My experience posting on "Who Wants to be Hired" thread on Hacker News
Alex D’Angelo
•
3 Jun 2020
I posted info about myself on the June 2020 “Who Wants to be Hired” thread on Hacker News. The thread has lots of posts of people covering a wide variety of technical roles and locations. What would happen if I did it? Who looks at this? This is my anecdotal experience.
- React Server Components
React Server Components aim to enable modern UX with a server-driven mental model. In this post I will share some notes I took while catching up on the latest...
- An Annotated Guide to React Server Components
React Server Components are a nuanced, sweeping addition to React’s existing capabilities. This is my guide.
- Why Goals Don’t Work as We Expect
We relentlessly set goals — weekly, monthly, yearly. We think when there’s a goal, we’re continually moving towards it. The goal resembles a destination, and it seems to us that we’ll be able to get there only if our desire is strong enough. But it’s not the case.
- A developer’s perspective: the problem with screen reader testing
Screen readers are an essential part of using the web for people who are vision impaired, illiterate or have a learning disability. Today’s screen readers traverse web pages and applications and read out user interface elements, content and allow users to navigate and interact with the web.
- The Local Maxima Trap
Dan Reardon
•
4 Jan 2021
Why the golden handcuffs stay locked
- Tell people something new
Tim White
•
1 Jan 2021
A conversational technique I learned recently (not that I think about all the things I say with such intention) is to tell people something they don’t already know.
- No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees
Sahil Lavingia
How we work at Gumroad
6 January 2021
- What I Use Now Instead Of Google
Kira McLean
I made a goal for myself in January 2020 to stop using Google products by the end of the year. That might sound like way too generous a timeline, but...
- A simple 2 x 2 for choices
Our life is filled with projects. We invest time, effort or money, and perhaps we get a result. It’s useful to have a portfolio of projects, because not all of them are going to work.
- Memory access on the Apple M1 processor
Daniel Lemire
•
6 Jan 2021
When a program is mostly just accessing memory randomly, a standard cost model is to count the number of distinct random accesses. The general idea is that memory access is much slower than most other computational tasks.
- What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry
BTI360 teammate Joel Goldberg recently retired after working in the software industry for over four decades. When he left he shared with our team some of the lessons he learned over his career.
- DALL·E: Creating Images from Text
OpenAI
•
5 Jan 2021
We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
- Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2
Bertrand Fan
•
4 Jan 2021
In the beginning of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Connor uses a laptop to crack the PIN of a stolen debit card.
- Moral Competence
Evan Conrad
What we were missing, and what many social-good founders are missing, is moral competence. If you want to do good, you actually have to help people.
- Equal pay for equal work
Remote work is on the rise, the economy is on a decline and businesses are re-structuring themselve...
- How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus
Avir Mitra
•
31 Jan 2020
When evolutionary biologists studied the protein involved in fusing placenta cells, it didn’t look like it came from human DNA. It looked like a virus.
- How startups can avoid flawed decision making
As a startup founder, it's mission critical to know what decisions you should make quickly, and which you should make slowly.
- Obligatory “What I wish I knew about git” post
Peter Whittaker
•
30 Dec 2020
tl;dr: If you think of `git branch` as a verb meaning "diverge from this path, split my tree" and think of the branch name as a label that tracks the most recent commit on this new path, a lot of stuff about git becomes clearer.
- Note to Self - How to Work
ZephyrBlu
•
31 Dec 2020
Re-align with your Goals: Spend some time thinking about what you’re trying to achieve and why to spark that passion again.
- Shallow Git Repositories
Jordan Rose
•
3 Apr 2020
A useful feature that isn’t documented as well as it should be.
5 January 2021
- Convex and Concave Dispositions
Vitalik Butterin
One of the major philosophical differences that I have noticed in how people approach making large-scale decisions in the world is how they approach the age-old tradeoff of compromise versus purity.
- 10 Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade
Powerful life skills from powerful people that most people don’t know about.
- Don’t complete their thought
Nick Ngorok
•
3 Jan 2021
I’ve recently been thinking about why listening can be very difficult. One aspect that always comes to mind, a practice that is exceptionally
- Load testing is hard, and the tools are... not great. But why?
Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky
If you're building an application that needs to scale—and we all tell ourselves that we are—then at some point you have to figure out if it does or not. This is where load testing comes in: if you want to see whether or not your application can handle scale, "just" generate scale and see if it can handle it!
- You might want to block Pinterest to save your data
Rukshan
•
5 Jan 2021
I guess this is the first blog post of the new year, even though I’m not someone who is keen on celebrating a new year, I sincerely hope every one would have a very bright 2021. Most of you are enjoying unlimited internet at your homes, but sadly I’m coming from a part of the world that charges a
- Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering
Surma
•
4 Jan 2021
I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.
- What I Learnt Reading 80 Articles On Product Validation
I created a site called validationguide.com (using Ghost) to host all this research. Upon researching the topic, I realized something, Almost all product validation methods for successful bootstrapped companies are the same...
- Telegram publishes users’ locations online.
Ahmed's Notes
•
4 Jan 2021
A few years ago, while using the Line app, I noticed a feature called “People nearby.” The feature lets you connect with other Line users wi...
- How I got to the HN front page three times in a row
Francesco Di Lorenzo
In the past month, I managed to get to the Hacker News front page three times in a row.
- Why we gave ourselves 6 months to make our company work
An ultimatum was what we needed to change our paths.
- My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero
John DeFeo
•
5 Jan 2027
Google’s December 2020 Core Update drove this website’s traffic to new highs, then it fell to zero.
- How To Make Seamless Patterns
yuanchuan
•
4 Jan 2021
Sometimes, when we make seamless patterns out of several objects, we need to deal with the situations where the objects are on the borders. Usually we create copies of the objects and place them at proper positions to make the tiling work with no seams.
4 January 2021
- Conspiracy theorists mistake guitar pedal diagram for “5G Chip”, alleging it’s in COVID-19 vaccine | MusicTech
The widely circulated image of the chip is a reworked schematic for the Boss Metal Zone pedal. FB: You can't kill the Metal 🤘
- Developing and Maintaining Gratitude
As I reflect back on 2020, a year that was tough on human civilisation as a whole, I am nevertheless grateful for the many positive experiences of this year.
- Stats are the new analytics
tl;dr: I set up self-hosted Plausible Analytics on this site. You can see it here [https://stats.mattfarrugia.com/share/Be4n5ONmXZa3C495vFOJ2]. This site runs on an instance of Ghost [https://ghost.org…
- Software Leviathans
nsledgianowski
•
3 Jan 2021
- The mathematics of human thought
Keith Devlin
The story of George Boole, father of the Boolean logic.
- Fair-Code Automation with n8n.io
David Field
•
4 Jan 2021
One of the features I really like is the integration with Rocket Chat and Zapier. While it works really well, its also very expensive (at time of writing) from the free tier to the next one up.
- Get a repo-scoped GitHub Access Token quickly
Today I need an access token for github so that I could commit show transcripts for Syntax via some automated scripts. Has three options…
- Parity Purchasing Power
For the last ~5 years I’ve been offering PPP discounts on my web development courses for developers in countries where their purchasing…
- Shiv - Let’s Build a Version Control System!
Shatterealm
Say you have some source code you'd like to track the changes of, but for some reason, you're banned from using any binary not already on the system, and the only binary available to you is busybox.
- Look Up Unknown Phone Numbers using Facebook Reset Password or WhatsApp
This tutorial is meant to help find clues as to who is calling you when you’re receiving calls from an unknown phone number. FB: side effects of mass data gathering from Facebook
- Code Age vs Time to Recall
Tim White
•
1 Jan 2021
A colleague of mine has repeatedly called for some of the controllers in our project to be refactored. He says they’re messy, but what I think he means is that they’re hard to understand.
- Looks vs Results
Greg Kogan
•
30 Dec 2020
Making things look nice can take a long time, either due to lack of resources or abundance of opinions. This could delay launches, frustrate people, and waste precious energy. Those are high costs for startups or companies hoping to move fast.
3 January 2021
- Endnotes on 2020: Crypto and Beyond
Vitalik Buterin
- How your startup can survive technical debt
How can a startup use technical debt to survive and thrive? Technical debt is hard to avoid completely but startups can use it to their advantage.
- How we compress Pub/Sub messages and more, saving a load of money
Lawrence Jones
•
29 Dec 2020
Compression is a trick that can be used to solve a load of problems. Outside of well known use cases, there are a variety of opportunities to improve efficiency or save money by leveraging compression. This post covers one such opportunity, where a tiny change allowed us to save >$30k per year in in…
- What’s good about offset pagination; designing parallel cursor-based web APIs
Offset pagination gets a bad rap because it's backend inefficient, but it's actually a nice feature from a consumer's perspective. How to bring those advantages to cursor-based APIs.
- My year in data
samplesize.one
•
1 Jan 2021
What do I actually do with my time? How productive am I? I logged everything I did in 2020 and got some pretty cool data out of this.
- Castlevania III Password Algorithm
Meatfighter
•
1 Jan 2021
This article explains the mechanism Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse uses to save and restore game state through the medium of passwords.
- How to Stop Endless Discussions
When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don’t know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.
- I don’t let design and UX get in the way of shipping early and often
Sam Texas
•
2 Jan 2021
I don’t let design/UX influence the early stages of product development. Instead I rely on opinionated frameworks like Django and Bootstrap to take that burden.
- URL shorteners set ad tracking cookies
Luke Miles
This Christmas, a family member sent me a URL to a family Zoom call. However, they didn’t send me a direct link to Zoom.
- Encrypted Backup Shootout
acha.ninja
- The design flaws of password managers
Go350
•
3 Jan 2021
I once worked in highly regulated environments and needed a way to recall dozens of complex passwords that changed frequently. I tried to use a password manager, but could not due to the burdens and insecurity of some common design flaws.
- CVE Stuffing
Jerry Gamblin
•
17 Dec 2020
As Michael Roytman told me, “The only thing worse than no data is bad data”, and that is what is happening here; the CVE database is being stuffed with bad data.
- Setting up personal OKR
My approach to creating OKR for the personal life. In this article, I’ve tried covering different aspects of the personal life and created specific and measurable goals for them.
- Curved Text Along a Path
Geoff Graham
•
1 Jan 2020
We can flow text along a curved line with three tools built right into SVG.
2 January 2021
- Shooting High-Res Thermal Photos of Iceland to Show Nature at Work
A computer vision engineer by day and photographer by night, I never take the path most traveled, especially when it comes to imaging technology. Thermal
- The Last Question
Isaac Asimov
- Platforms, bundling and kill zones
Benedict Evans
•
21 Dec 2020
What does it mean when Google, Microsoft or Apple turn your whole company into a feature? When do we let a tech giant build and when do we call the anti-trust lawyers? And what does that mean for Spotify, Yelp or printing in landscape?
- Perihelion and the Seasons
Today the Earth is at the point on its orbit at which it is at its closest to the Sun, i.e. at its perihelion.
- Search with typo tolerance
Surprise your users with a typo-tolerant search. Let them know that you care about them and you’ll try to do your best to show some results.
- Reducing Eye Strain
Jersey Fonseca
- Full-Text Search Battle: PostgreSQL vs Elasticsearch
2020-09-08 update : Use one GIN index instead of two, websearch_to_tsquery , add LIMIT , and store TSVECTOR as separate column. More…
- Stop writing shell scripts
UNIX shell isn’t a real programming language, so stop using like one!
1 January 2021
- Year(Decade) of the Homelab.
Mahdi Yusuf
•
1 Jan 2021
You can find audio to this post here. I’m usually not huge on sticking flag poles in the ground regarding the direction technology will take in the coming years/decades. You can already see me hedging by saying decades in the title. I believe home labs (servers for home use) will become a thing this…
- No Prize for Doing It the Hard Way (2020 Retrospective)
The struggles, failures, and financial realities of bootstrapping an indie software business in 2020.
- Rebuilding my website with NextJS, Chakra UI and Airtable
Thoughts about my new website setup
- 2020 in review
Looking back on 2020 and setting goals for the next year.
- A survey of security.txt
Go350
•
1 Jan 2021
I was curious to know how many popular websites have already uploaded a security.txt file and how many followed the most recent draft. So, I wrote a small Go program to check the Alexa Top 1 million websites.
- One Year of Excalidraw
The Excalidraw Team
It’s been kind of a different year, but it was the first year and pretty amazing for Excalidraw.
- Bitcoin is a disaster.
Ray Dillinger
It is my opinion that Bitcoin is a failure. Worse than that, it's a disaster. It doesn't scale, except by becoming the very thing it was supposed to replace.
- Talk Less, Listen More - The Reformed Broker
Joshua M Brown
•
30 Dec 2020
I spent a whole bunch of time this fall and winter taking calls from young financial advisors. I try to schedule this stuff on Friday mornings when things are a little quieter for me. They DM me or email me and I just say yes. I have 15 minutes for any kid reading my stuff...
- The Big Little Guide to Message Queues
A guide to the fundamental concepts that underlie message queues, and how they apply to popular queueing systems available today.
- The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators
Thea Flowers
•
31 Dec 2020
A comprehensive deep dive into the design of Roland’s legendary DCO
- 2020 Year in Review
Jack Ellis
•
23 Dec 2020
Here’s my first ever year in review. It’s a deep dive into how 2020 was for me and it wasn’t easy to write.
- Leading someone with more years of experience than my age
Daniel Rojas
•
27 Dec 2020
It all started at my first job. I’ve been around 6 months in the company and was happy getting used to the ropes of my current job. In those 6 months, I quickly pushed to prod (without even k…
- Building a successful company is fucking hard
Navigating my first 10 years of full-time entrepreneurship from dozens in failures to millions in revenue.
- The Urgent vs. the Important
Preslav Rachev
•
29 Dec 2020
I have recently bought an e-book by a Gumroad author [https://gumroad.com/dellannaluca] named Luca Dellana [https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca]. I have to admit I did it mainly to see how successful authors on Gumroad package their offerings. I was initially skeptical about the book, dismissing it as …
- Banking on Status
Julian Lehr
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12 Dec 2020
How Neobanks Should Monetize Status Signaling.
31 December 2020
- The cost and value of knowledge
Nicolas Fränkel
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2 Dec 2012
I was a student in France when I discovered the Internet and the World Wide Web. At that time, I didn’t realize the value of the thing, even though I taught myself HTML from what was available at the time (even if I don’t remember the sites - they probably have disappeared into Limbo). When I began …
- There Will Always Be Uncertainty
Anthony Diké
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30 Dec 2020
A big reason why people are afraid to start is because they’re unsure of what will happen. There will always be uncertainty. The trick is to dive in and reduce the uncertainty yourself.
- How we built the GitHub globe
Tobias Ahlin
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21 Dec 2020
GitHub is where the world builds software. More than 56 million developers around the world build and work together on GitHub. With our new homepage, we wanted to show how open source development transcends the...
- Well, Actually. 10 Physics Answers.
Sabine Hossenfelder
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30 Dec 2020
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
- 5 Ways You’re Not Making Your Website Accessible
Twan Mulder
It doesn’t have to be that way!
- Browser Tracking
Madaidan
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25 Sep 2020
- Linux Hardening Guide
Madaidan
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25 Dec 2020
Linux is not a secure operating system. However, there are steps you can take to improve it. This guide aims to explain how to harden Linux as much as possible for security and privacy.
- Don’t use Protobuf for Telemetry
Richard Startin
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29 Dec 2020
Protobuf needs no introduction, but this post argues that you shouldn’t use it for telemetry. The basic premise of this post is that a good telemetry library needs to be lightweight to avoid perturbing the application; inefficient diagnostic tools are self-defeating. Unlike other formats, nested Pro…
- How I Made $40,000 Off A Book…Before I Even Published It.
Emma Bostian
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10 May 2020
In 30 days I managed to pay of $30,000 in medical debt I have had hanging over me for five years. Here’s how I did it.
30 December 2020
- Things I Learnt in 2020
Vadim Drobinin
For the past six months I have been sending out a weekly newsletter with things I learnt and read during the week. Some of those trivia are not trivial at all, so I decided to share the condensed crème de la crème of the Internet in this New Year special edition.
- How They Shot the Impossible Mirror Scene in ‘Contact’
Meg Shields
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2 Aug 2020
Mirror, mirror on the wall what’s the most mind-boggling blue screen effect of them all? We explore one of the coolest shots in Contact.
- 3 tribes of programming
Joseph Gentle
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18 Jun 2017
There’s an old joke that computer science is a lie, because its not really about computers, and its not really a science. Funny joke. Everyone laughs, then someone says “Yeah but it sort of is about computers though, isn’t it?”.
- Getting Started With Webmention and NextJS
Monica Powell
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3 Oct 2020
An overview of setting up Webmention on a NextJS site to collect comments from across the decentralized social web (i.e., Twitter, GitHub, Pinterest, Reddit) in a centralized place.
- Jumping Into Webmentions With NextJS (or Not) | CSS-Tricks
Atila Fassina
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3 Jun 2020
Webmention is a W3C recommendation last published on January 12, 2017. And what exactly is a Webmention? It’s described as… a simple way to notify any URL
- Use Old School State
Kyle Shevlin
Let’s kick it old school and create a custom React hook that takes a callback second argument for `setState`.
- Encapsulation
Kyle Shevlin
Typically, functions are written for their reuseability, but I want to convince you that the reason to reach for a function is to encapsulate a concern.
- Paranoid password printing with a Raspberry Pi
7402
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29 Dec 2020
- Web design that focusses on text content is the best
Mark Smith
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24 Dec 2020
The modern web is full to the brim with consent forms, paywalls and popups, and in this new world, web design that focusses on text, simplicity and the reading experience is becoming my favourite hidden pleasure.
- Building websites and workflows
Mark Smith
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29 Dec 2020
There are a lot of futuristic technologies about these days, I realised today that what I like is building websites and workflows
- Failure Is Not An Option
Joe Williams
- Facebook’s Unknowable Megascale
John Griber
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29 Dec 2020
A mere “website” — say, Wikipedia — that reaches an audience of billions is like the surface of an ocean: enormously expansive, but visible. Facebook is like the *volume* of an ocean: not merely massive, but unknowable.
29 December 2020
- Having fun with Insertable Streams and E2EE (and SFrame!)
Lorenzo Miniero
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28 May 2020
About a month ago, we shared a post on several things that were happening in Janus. One of the most exciting sections was definitely the one related to end-to-end encryption, and how Insertable
- So You Want to Build an End-to-End Encrypted Web App
Deirdre Connolly
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3 Jun 2020
The software security model of the web does not lend itself to long term identities, but are they necessary?
- Going Bark: A Furry’s Guide to End-to-End Encryption
Soatok
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5 Dec 2020
Governments are back on their anti-encryption bullshit again. Between the U.S. Senate’s “EARN IT” Act, the E.U.’s slew of anti-encryption proposals, and Australia’s ne…
- Hacker News Alternative UIs
luke.lol
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28 Dec 2020
News.YCombinator.com Readers Ranked by Alexa popularity. hn.algolia.com HackerNews with a search function and 16.8+ million posts indexed. Alexa: 8.7k popurls.com Several news sites combined into a single newspaper-like feed Alexa: 87k upstract.com News aggregator with paid features, includes HN Ale…
- Betting With Time
Tom Hirst
I realised control over my time the day I graduated from University in Sheffield, UK, 2009. Or so I thought. “I can’t work for a boss” was my only criterion…
- Does iOS 14 protect your privacy? - Gingerlime
Yoav Aner
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23 Nov 2020
A few months ago I wrote a post: Does Apple care about your privacy? In the post, I looked at Apple’s IDFA – ID For Advertising, and how it’s abused by companies like Facebook and many more to track you. I believed then, and still believe now, that what Apple is doing is not ethical…
- SVG Favicons and Dark Mode
Dave Letorey
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19 Nov 2020
Tutorial on how to use Dark Mode with SVG Favicons
- Conditional React Hooks
Ben Ilegbodu
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27 Dec 2020
How to conditionally call a React Hook while still calling Hooks at the top level
- node.example.com is an IP address
Reilly Tucker Siemens
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28 Dec 2020
URLs are hard. This year I'd like to examine the most peculiar bug I encountered at work.
- What Is the Jamstack in 2021?
Brian Rinaldi
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28 Dec 2020
What Jamstack means is evolving. While labels don’t help you get your work done, they are also important.
- Build your own async primitive
Lars from Tweede Golf
Concurrency isn't easy and implementing its primitives is even harder. I found myself in need of some no-std, no-alloc Rust async concurrency primitives and decided to write some.
- Accessible SVG Icons | CSS-Tricks
Chris Coyier
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28 Dec 2020
The answer to “What is the most accessible HTML for an SVG icon?” isn’t one-size-fits all, because what an icon needs to do on a website varies.
- Experimenting On My Hearing Loss
paddlesteamer
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28 Dec 2020
var loadAudios = function() { WaveSurfer.create({ container: ‘#generated’, mediaControls: true, backend: ‘MediaElement’, waveColor: ‘#fff’, height: 64
28 December 2020
- Accurate Estimations
Cam Hashemi
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28 Dec 2020
We’re constantly asked to give estimates: How long will it take?How much will it cost?What time should we leave?How much do you want? Estimations are information about the unknown. We constan…
- Why the iPhone Timer App displays a Fake Time
Lukas Hermann
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22 Dec 2020
While building a timer app I came across a peculiarity with displaying time and found out that the iPhone timer addresses it by showing you a fake time.
- 7 Principles of Rich Web Applications
Guillermo Rauch
- 2020, the year of the interactive blog post
John Otander
- Build your own React
Rodrigo Pombo
We are going to rewrite React from scratch. Step by step. Following the architecture from the real React code but without all the…
- Thinking in React Hooks
Amelia Wattenberger
React introduced hooks one year ago, and they've been a game-changer for a lot of developers. There are tons of how-to introduction resources out there, but I want to talk about the fundamental mindset change when switching from React class components to function components + hooks.
- Building SVG Icons with React
Brent Jackson
How to Create Mathematically-Generated Graphics Using JavaScript and React
27 December 2020
- It’s Hard to Forego Efficiency
Guillermo Rauch
We live in a world of tradeoffs. Spending some time optimizing a certain function takes your focus and time away from optimizing another.
- How Complex Systems Fail
Richard I. Cook, MD
Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety
- API pagination design
Alexander Solovyov
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15 Oct 2020
Returning all results for a given query could be a challenge for an API, especially if there are thousands of results. It puts a load on a server, on a [...]
- Dark Patterns - Types of Dark Pattern
Harry Brignull
Dark Patterns have been categorised into 12 main types, including ‘bait and switch’, ‘roach motel’ and ‘privacy zuckering’. All of them are manipulative techniques that aim to trick the user into doing something they didn’t intend.
- After the Techcrunch bump: Life in the “Trough of Sorrow”
11 Sep 2012
The life of a startup A few years back at a YCombinator dinner, Paul Graham and the other partners drew a great diagram depicting the life of a new product. The main discussion is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173261. It captures a viscerally truthful thing about the life of a new compan…
- 100 Tips for a Better Life - LessWrong
Ideopunk
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26 Dec 2020
(Cross-posted from my blog) The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in. Possessions 1 .If you want to find out about people’s opinions on a product, google <product> reddit. You’ll get real people a…
- Reasons You Aren’t Updating Your Personal Site
Brian Lovin
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21 Dec 2020
Tips and strategies to painlessly manage a personal website.
- What’s the point of free if you have nothing to sell
Jakob Greenfeld
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20 Dec 2020
Two days ago Corey Haines shared the following framework.
- The Modern Trap of Feeling Obligated to Turn Hobbies Into Hustles
Molly Conway
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18 Feb 2019
Not everyone is required to take the things they love and monetize them, transforming them from private passions to unwanted hustles.
- My stack will outlive yours
Steren Giannini
My stack requires no maintenance, has perfect Lighthouse scores, will never have any security vulnerability, is based on open standards, is portable, has an instant dev loop, has no build step and… will outlive any other stack.
- Trading time for money - Nicolas Bouliane
Nicolas Bouliane
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24 Dec 2020
Paying someone else to do your work isn’t such a great deal, and you should probably learn to do it yourself.