Labnotes

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Weekend Reading — SELECT * FROM customers WHERE

@withoutgorms nailed it

Design Objective

What colour is it? Tells the time in RGB.

WTF Mobile Web Shaming sites with poor or non-existent mobile support.

Elastic SVG Elements Cool SVG elements that wobble, squish and bounce when you interact with them. Love that this is possible with HTML. Today. Just don't overdo it.

ExpertBeginner1:

Why does it always seem like the more detail I pour into the design spec, the more the developers fail to execute the vision?


Tools of the Trade

Tab Snooze Google Chrome extension, inspired by Mailbox, that lets you snooze tabs for later:

stilkov Absolutely:

IMO part of the problem with some MVC JS frameworks is that their authors are so smart they can make things work that shouldn’t be possible

hyper_linda Perfect illustration of the state of front-end development. Just say no!

iamdevloper

Being a JavaScript developer in 2014 is like speed dating.

45 seconds with each framework before you have to re-write.

philsturgeon Save a lot of pain by following this little tidbit:

"How do you automatically generate a REST API from a database schema?"

You fucking don't. That's how.


Lingua Scripta

ES6 Modules: The End of Civilization As We Know It? All about using ES6 modules in an ES5 world.

kangax

Call me old-school but this is just mind-bending:

var x = "y", { [x]: z1 } = { y: "z2" }; z1 === "z2"

(hint: ES6 nested props + destruct.)

traceur-source-maps If you're using Traceur for all the latest ES6/7 goodness, this module adds source maps support in Node, so line numbers will start to make sense. You can also use traceur-runner, it transpiles code on the fly with source maps.


Lines of Code

Waypoints / Debugging Clever trick. The Waypoints library comes with an additional script that you load in development, that script reports on common user errors in your code:

The debug script will monitor for instances of these common mistakes and provide a console error with a summary of the issue and a link to the detailed explanation on this page.

jessitron Easy to remember, easy to apply:

heuristic: put the least-varying function arguments at the beginning of the parameter list. This makes partial application useful. #fp

@tef Guilty as charged:

programmers love two things: making generalisations, and dismissing other people's generalisations because there are outliers and exceptions

silentbicycle Brilliant:

A language that has <<<<<<< , ======= , and >>>>>>> defined as prefix operators


Peopleware

MaryRobinette

It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.

William Morgan I worked there before, so yes:

You can measure the health of an org as the frequency by which someone says "that's a really good idea", but it never sees the light of day

hotdogsladies Let that sink in:

I can't think of a single instance where anecdotal evidence was inaccurate.


Locked Doors

The Sony Hack I've got three things to say:

  1. I don't care if this movie never sees the light of day. North Korea is sad, not funny, and as Thom Andersen so eloquantly said, they're the Jews of Asia.

  2. This couldn't have happened to a worse company. Remember when Sony hacked all of us by installing a rootkit on 22 million CDs?

  3. The US has a long standing tradition of pulling movies from theaters because of non-specific threats. Especially movies about/by black people under threat from white supremacists. So don't tell me this is an important battle for free speech. It's not.

Vulnerability announced: update your Git clients The issue affects case insensitive filesystems like HFS+ and NTFS. An opportunity to remind you that whatever code you write should be able to deal with both case sensitive and insensitive file systems.


None of the Above

How We ”Email” Hardware To Space ISS needed a ratcheting socket wrench, so NASA designed one in CAD and emailed it to the space station.

TorstenBeeck "Google gives insights to the four major religions."

What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs Right now Yahoo's share price is based on its Alibaba holdings, as if the rest of the business has no value. This gives Marissa cover for making radical changes, but also for making radical mistakes. The NYT isn't too excited about the future, but are they right, or is their traditional media bias showing?

Driving Safety, in Fits and Starts How technology and government regulation conspired to cause a dramatic decline in deaths from traffic accidents.

A Wave of PR Data A wave of bullshit data is coming our way:

Nobody can say exactly when the trend first started, but in 2014 we saw the first major outbreaks of bogus data distributed by private companies just so it would go viral online.

_youhadonejob "Bit harsh that"

Burner phone? There's an app for that, and it's earning millions of dollars Burner numbers are a big thing, and not just for drug dealers.

mulegirl

On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend 2014 to a friend?

#exitsurvey

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