Labnotes

Aidin Vaziri "We now basically live on a planet from Star Wars."

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Design Objective

Google is Really Good at Design They've done a remarkable job shifting away from feature-obsessed engineering, and towards user experience, aesthetics, and maybe someday even brand appeal?

As an aggressively engineer-led company, the Mountain View behemoth’s early efforts, particularly with its mobile software and devices, focused not on beauty, elegance, or simplicity, but rather concentrated on flexibility, iteration, and scale.

Distilling How We Think About Design Systems Argues that a design system is more like a product than a methodology:

The product is what users consume. The documentation (commonly called the styleguide), the UI kit, the code, etc. The product is the tangible parts.

What is a “serif” in Hebrew? "Every adaptation of a Latin system for non-Latin use is an interpretive measure, and has to be taken with a grain of salt."

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Tools of the Trade

React-Sight Visualization tool for React, with support for Fiber, Router (v4), and Redux.

Keyboard latency 50ms latency is the time it takes for a TCP packet to cross the Atlantic and back!

But it turns out keyboard latency is significant! I was surprised to find that the median keyboard I tested has more latency than the entire end-to-end pipeline of the Apple 2. … keyboards are often more powerful than entire computers from the 70s and 80s! And yet, the median keyboard today adds as much latency as the entire end-to-end pipeline as a fast machine from the 70s.

The New MacBook Keyboard Is Ruining My Life Speaking of keyboards: "The path from “a piece of dust” to “$700 repair” is terrifyingly short."

mcc Metaphors are fun for a hot minute, and then they're just not:

Opinion: It would be better if this Homebrew error message explained to me what was happening instead of making confusing beer metaphors

Steve T-S Adobe passive-aggresively embracing web technologies:

Adobe keeps taking parts of Photoshop and porting them to HTML so they take multiple seconds to load instead of nanoseconds 🤷‍♂️

JorgeBucaran/classwrap "0.3 KB JavaScript utility for conditionally concatenating class names."

IPv6 Buddy "The essential tool for IPv6 engineers." No they didn't …

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Web-end

Mark Dalgleish This:

With single page apps, we broke the back button. Now, thanks to the power of service workers, we've broken the refresh button.

Building Browser Extensions At Scale Grammarly on their experience building browser extensions for all the major browsers.

Let There Be Peace on CSS Bringing peace to a world divided by it's love/hate for the cascades:

From that moment on, the web community was split in two by an intense debate between those who see CSS as an untouchable layer in the “separation of concerns” paradigm (content + presentation + behaviour, HTML + CSS + JS) and those who have simply ignored this golden rule and found different ways to style the UI, typically applying CSS styles via JavaScript.

Introducing PayPal’s open-source cross-domain javascript suite This is fantastic:

At PayPal we write a lot of javascript that ends up running on other websites and other domains. …
Last year, we decided to focus on putting together a really solid suite of tools to help avoid these pitfalls, and allow us to create great experiences without constantly having to worry about whether a message would get through, or whether an iframe would successfully render.

8 Key React Component Decisions Types, classes vs functions, state, styling, etc decisions all React projects have to make at some point.

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Lingua Scripta

Maggie Pint 👍

We really should rename package.json to allTheThings.json. The name is misleading.

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Lines of Code

Optimal pull request size TL;DR smaller === better:

Every team has an optimal pull request size, it’s likely much smaller than you think, and making your pull requests your optimal size will improve the performance of your team.

Gavin Joyce Or to put it another way:

Evolution iteratively produced an eye, you can split your massive pull request in two

Nick Lockwood 🙏

“May all your bugs be reproducible” - @nerdonica

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Architectural

Nicolò Pignatelli Your periodic reminder: "The original DRY principle. And it's about knowledge, not code."

Geoff Cant It's hip and fashionable:

Swagger is just WSDL you allow yourself to feel good about. Fight me.

JBD 💯

A good API is not just easy to use but also hard to misuse.

☠️ 💀 👻Cody 👻 💀 ☠️ "How a mutex works"

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Devoops

e. hashman 😭

A primer:
Site Reliability Engineers = sysadmins with Go
DevOps Engineers = sysadmins with Ruby
Systems Administrators = sysadmins with Perl

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Locked Doors

What to know about KRACK Attack Also KRACK attack is especially bad news for Android and Linux users TL;DR

• If you're on a public Wifi, your threat model is still someone guessing or social engineering the router password, and will remain so
• "Neither Windows nor iOS are believed to be vulnerable to the most severe attacks", and both Apple and Microsoft are issuing patches
• "Linux and Android appear to be more susceptible" … however, Android patches coming some day, to some devices, maybe yours, maybe not
• The issue originates in the WPA2 spec, which is "proven correct", except for that one edge case
• It's been present for 13 years (!), the public only learning about it this week
• Probably because the WPA2 spec is behind a paywall: an obstacle for public review, not for attackers with means

very earnest tweets "A lot to unpack here folks"

Jan Schaumann 🔥

Since ancient times, members of the #infosec tribe have adhered to a set of rigid Rules of Branded Vulnerabilities across the cybersphere.

An Undead Favorite "this spam email encoded an entire image thumbnail as an HTML table, using a table cell with a background color for each horizontal chunk of pixels"

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Techtopia

One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end Mike Monteiro delivers some choice words:

Twitter was built at the tail end of that era. Their goal was giving everyone a voice. They were so obsessed with giving everyone a voice that they never stopped to wonder what would happen when everyone got one. And they never asked themselves what everyone meant. That’s Twitter’s original sin. Like Oppenheimer, Twitter was so obsessed with splitting the atom they never stopped to think what we’d do with it.

Caro 🤔

Me: I used to get joy from twitter but now it makes me upset.
Therapist: what if you just didn’t use it anymore?
Me: not sure I understand

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None of the Above

Fluff Society "These mini cows. ♥️♥️♥️"

Edge Subtle and genius:

@KFC follows 11 people.
Those 11 people? 5 Spice Girls and 6 guys named Herb.
11 Herbs & Spices. I need time to process this.

Halloween Name Chris "Timberland not fucking about when it comes to capturing the millennial market."

Showerthoughts 🍽

It is amazing how many dirty dishes can hide from plain sight until after the dishwasher has been started.

ಠ_ಠ "best part about this weird La Croix CEO press release outburst is that it was published to a 1998-era geocities blog"

The impossible dream of USB-C TL;DR "Maybe next time, we’ll get it right. But probably not."

Jay Nordlinger "Sign after you get through security in the Milwaukee airport. My favorite sign in all of America."

Dark chocolate is now a health food. Here’s how that happened. TL;DR

They tend to focus on the health attributes of cocoa: its impact on cardiovascular health or cognitive function. But they don’t address the role the cocoa delivery mechanism — sugary chocolate — may play in obesity. Most Mars and Hershey chocolates also contain very small amounts of the cocoa that supposedly promotes heart health — along with lots of fat, sugar, and calories.

Farbod Saraf "Earth is 384,400 kilometers from the Moon —Nikon P900 optical zoom gives a closer look"

UPS DOGS via @torclean

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Design Objective

Instacart’s Lead Product Designer on Creating A Design System If at first you fail …

Flat Design: Why you should question Nielsen Norman’s research on the trendy design style. You may remember from a few Weekend Readings back, that Nielsen Norman published this article, the gist of it: "use strong signifiers". Sean Dexter digs into the specifics of that article and finds it wanting:

The thing is, there was no noted difference between these two designs. The eye-tracking results showed roughly equivalent results. The scenario that most fairly represented flat design didn’t result in a significant difference between either option.

Nathanael Coyne 🐶

Adding features to your product is like adopting puppies. It's not build and forget; it's another mouth to feed and more shit to pick up.

I decided to challenge myself by redesigning Blockfolio The before & after look like they're a decade apart.

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Tools of the Trade

Rico's cheatsheets This is such a fantastic resource. 340 cheatsheets for a variety of tools, languages, libraries, and frameworks. Bookmarked!

daiyi! (chris) A reminder that the "user" in "user experience" refers to anyone and everyone:

As tool builders, we're gatekeepers. Every time we print an incomprehensible error msg, someone decides they're not good enough at coding.

Sam Sykes ✍️

I don't know what the most important rule of writing is, but the second is "you won't remember that idea you just had, write it down."

A more connected universe GitHub can now analyze and show you the project's dependency graph. And … "Soon, your dependency graph will be able to track when dependencies are associated with public security vulnerabilities"

Streams: a new general purpose data structure in Redis. Redis takes on Kafka:

Mixing radix trees + listpacks, it is possible to easily build a log that is at the same time very space efficient, and indexed, that means, allowing for random access by IDs and time.
… both as replacement for Pub/Sub applications that need more reliability than fire-and-forget, and for completely new use cases.

Exploding Git Repositories "Unless you have quite a lot of memory (both RAM and storage) git was killed, ran out of memory, or you had to reboot. Why is this? It is a perfectly formed repo made of only 12 objects."

John Resig "Your regular reminder to run brew cleanup - you probably have a huge heap of old builds waiting to be cleaned up if you use homebrew!"

yan 💵

gitcoin: the author of the commit sha1 with the longest prefix of 0's in your repository is now the project maintainer

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Web-end

CSS Grid Gotchas And Stumbling Blocks Rachel Andrew on Grid vs Flexbox, content sizing, masonry layout, nesting, polyfills, and more. And she just published a new book: The New CSS Layout

Essential Image Optimization TL;DR "We should all be automating our image compression," a new eBook by Addy Osmani:

The smaller in file-size you can make your images, the better a network experience you can offer your users - especially on mobile. In this write-up, we'll look at ways to reduce image size through modern compression techniques with minimal impact to quality.

The future of accessibility for custom elements An introduction to the Accessibility Object Model, and how web components would use it.

Tabbed Interfaces On tabs and accessiblity.

How to Draw Your Face in CSS "The process of translating from Illustrator to CSS was pretty time consuming, but it is highly satisfying to create an entire image out of CSS, especially if you add swanky animations to show off its div-yness."

FOIT vs. FOUT A demo of the functional differences between FOIT and FOUT.

Jan Schaumann "So all y’all know that UserAgent strings are total bullshit, right?" 🤣

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Lingua Scripta

Mikeal Rogers "This is getting absurd."

A Guide to Faster Web App I/O and Data Operations with Streams This article covers the WHATWG Streams specification, coming to a browser near you … some day.

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Lines of Code

The case against annotations Sometimes Java can't decide whether it's a language with strong types, or a language for escaping the trappings of strong types:

A string-based language inside a mini-language inside Java! … In effect, we get an interpreted, non-typesafe mini-language embedded in Java.

... What classpath scanning does, is it trades certainty, control and the ability to have a mental model of the entire application for rapid development and fast bootstrap.

Stuart Clark 😹

Schrödinger’s Code: Code has been written, but not tested, and is in state of neither working nor failing until it is observed.

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Architectural

The whole web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank Lin Clark explains in plain English how modern browsers can render HTML pages at neckbreak speed. Hint: they offload much of the rendering to the GPU:

With WebRender, we want apps to run at a silky smooth 60 frames per second (FPS) or better no matter how big the display is or how much of the page is changing from frame to frame. …
So how does WebRender do that? It fundamentally changes the way the rendering engine works to make it more like a 3D game engine.

Alan Coopersmith "Wow. An archaeological dig in the old Sun hq found a copy of the ancient scrolls of X11."

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Peopleware

Mental Accounting and Self-Control Richard Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for his works at the intersection of psychology and economics:

One of the things that Thaler has become known for is the concept of the “nudge” … The most famous example of a nudge is forcing people to “opt out” of default options.

… The idea behind mental accounting is that people don’t treat all of their money (or time or effort or other resources) as if they have one big pool of it.

racy Lee | ladyleet 👍

Hai open source people. I love you. Why? Because you are a set of self selected motivated people and that's inspiring.

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Locked Doors

iOS Privacy: steal.password - Easily get the user's Apple ID password, just by asking Proof of concept, but if you ever see a "Sign In to iTunes Store" popup, do this:

Hit the home button, and see if the app quits:

• If it closes the app, and with it the dialog, then this was a phishing attack
• If the dialog and the app are still visible, then it's a system dialog. The reason for that is that the system dialogs run on a different process, and not as part of any iOS app.

How Israel Caught Russian Hackers Scouring the World for U.S. Secrets TL;DR Israel intelligence hacks into Kaspersky’s network, watches as Russian intelligence hacks into Kaspersky’s network and uses Kaspersky's own products to siphon data from the US intelligence community. Spies spying on spies spying on spies.

Should Antivirus software be part of your threat model? Related:

By installing AV software, you place a tremendous amount of trust in the vendor to do the right thing. In addition to malicious action by the AV vendor, we saw with the recent CCleaner backdoor that your vendor’s security matters substantially too.

Hackers covertly hide code on Politifact to hijack your PC, secretly mine cryptocurrencies Hackers no longer after your data, just your CPUs.

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Techtopia

What Facebook Did to American Democracy Was it hard to see it coming, or merely inconvenient to admit it?

The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken and hidden from view. It wasn’t just liberal bias that kept the media from putting everything together. Much of the hundreds of millions of dollars that was spent during the election cycle came in the form of “dark ads.”

Adrienne Porter Felt 🖼

I wandered into a cute new boutique in Palo Alto. After 5 min of looking at their art, discovered it's actually a startup office #awkward

Showerthoughts "Technically it was Moses that had the first tablet that could connect to the cloud"

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None of the Above

Fluff Society "Squirrel tries to hide nut in dog"

Najaf Ali The kid knows:

Daddy, why does Kylo Ren kill his daddy?
It's complicated..
Is it because the Han Solo actor is tired and wants to take a break?
Probably

Marcin Wichary "Part of the fun of being an (amateur) historian is discovering connections like these."

Ditch Facebook Messenger. Use Messenger lite instead Familiar story:

• High-tech company bloats its core product with useless features
• Also, releases a light version for non-Western regions, where bandwidth is more expensive
• Sometime later, light version arrives at/gets discovered by Western country
• Immediately heralded as the new must have, for it's hip, minimalistic UI

Ryan "Perfectly flat floor, designed to stop people from running in the hallway"

James Herring "Lawyers. This how you write a cease and desist letter to fans. Good work Netflix."

Why can’t we cure the common cold? TL;DR Interesting read. So it's not a conspiracy of the Cough Syrup Industrial Complex, but the challenge of developing one vaccine that can deal with 160+ common cold viruses.

David Mack "omg this is everything"

Kyle Griffin "There is someone dressed like the Monopoly Man at the Senate Equifax hearing."

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Design Objective

Papyrus "He just got away with it. This...man...this...professional graphic designer..."

DHH The performance differences are quite stark, and often you can tell a web app was designed by/for iPhone:

JetStream too artificial for you? Checkout Speedometer 2 scores. Android is so far behind it's not even funny 😮

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Tools of the Trade

Zach Holman 💡

I feel like all coding bootcamps should have at least one lesson on “spend 2hrs on a problem, go to sleep, and fix it in 2 minutes tomorrow”

Hammock Driven Development Related, Rich Hickey's fantastic talk covers software design, focus, and thinking AFK: "On the hammock, no one knows you're not sleeping."

Building a sentiment aware Polymer input control Using Polymer and CoreNLP to build a UI control that tells the user what kind of sentiment they are conveying.

Protect your npm account with two-factor authentication and read-only tokens Only took a couple of minutes to setup.

Keybase launches encrypted git "Every now and then you want to make a repository that's private. Not for an open source project, but for other stuff: research, writing a novel, family history, or a community's private files. Or your team's API keys, devops secrets, and business docs. What do you do?"

foone "Remember the good ol' days when a drive would come with the list of bad sectors written on it from the factory?"

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Web-end

Addy Osmani: The Browser Hackers Guide To Instantly Loading Everything Addy Osmani's talk from JSConf EU 2017 got you covered:

Will we use preload, prefetch and preconnect? What about HTTP/2 Server Push? or Service Worker? and how the heck do we ship JavaScript bundles that don’t break the bank on mobile?

JavaScript Service Worker Design Patterns for Better User Experience Building for snappier UI responses, fire & forget editing, and new content pushed to the user.

Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android: What developers need to know With Edge usage now at 4%, maybe enough people will decide to run Edge on their non-Windows phone. Edge will use two rendering engines: Webkit on iOS, and Blink on Android. So I guess us web developers have no reason to care. Moving on.

Daryl Ginn 😭

A step by step guide on how to use z-index:

1. Try a value like 25.
2. Notice it doesn't work.
3. Increase to 3000 because life is short.

The Practical Dev ☑️

Making an checkbox not look like crap only takes about 6,000 lines of CSS, some JavaScript, and a piece of your soul you'll never get back.

Allen Wirfs-Brock Uphill, both ways:

Got Netscape 2 (JavaScript 1.0) and IE3 (JScript 1.0) running in a Win95 VM. Now for some serious JavaScript archeology. Want to find out if JScript really was as confused about prototype inheritance as implied by its spec. cc/@BrendanEich

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Lingua Scripta

Asynchronous stack traces: why await beats .then() Not yet in V8, or all browsers, and doesn't apply when using Babel (which transpiles async/await to regular promises), but the point still stands:

Like most ECMAScript features that are seemingly “just syntax sugar”, async/await is more than that.

Rich Trott Fantastic news: "Keynote by @fhinkel tells everyone that V8 policy now is that no V8 commit can land if it breaks Node.js. 🎉"

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Lines of Code

ashley williams Perspective one (a thread):

today i finally recognized that unit tests are a critical part of my programming flow

Chris Dickinson Perspective two (a thread):

I continue to struggle with how I value integration tests, in particular how much more I value them than unit tests in certain scenarios.

Source Code in TV and Films The year is 2256, people still code in C:

Star Trek Discovery S01E03 has Michael Burnham looking through code on a secret project that she believes is related to “biochemistry, possibly a genome expression.”

The code is actually decompiled Stuxnet.

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Devoops

Amie DD @UnityUnite "New escape room, 50 degrees. One server down, nothing is labeled you have 2 hours...GO!"

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Locked Doors

New macOS High Sierra vulnerability exposes the password of an encrypted APFS container If you use Disk Utility to create an encrypted volume, and set the password hint, APFS will store the password as the hint, and show it to you when you're trying to decrypt the volume. Looks like a copy/paste error (h/t Daniel Martín).

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Peopleware

April Wensel Once an idea become entrenched, it's hard to root out:

Over 50 years later, & we're still dealing with the consequences of favoring programmers who "don't like people." http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142628

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Techtopia

Your Data is Being Manipulated danah boyd's keynote from Strata Data Conference, carries this important message with it:

The tech industry is no longer the passion play of a bunch of geeks trying to do cool shit in the world. It’s now the foundation of our democracy, economy, and information landscape.

Erika Hall 🌎 Remember when social networks where harmless fun?

If there is a future, we're going to look back at the social networks of today like we do the children's chewable heroin tabs of 1901.

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None of the Above

Olivia Bursee "It was a lot cuter when he sat like this before he was shaved"

Natalie Sun 💻

yes i'm still here netflix stop asking me and making me feel bad about my life

Nature is Amazing 🌴 "Kitty accidentally pressed the turbo button 😂"

IRS awards multimillion-dollar fraud-prevention contract to Equifax We live in The Upside Down:

The notice describes the contract as a "sole source order," meaning Equifax is the only company deemed capable of providing the service.

The FBI’s Hunt for Two Missing Piglets Reveals the Federal Cover-Up of Barbaric Factory Farms This article about big agriculture paying elected officials to silence animal advocates, is also an article about the cruel mistreatment of pigs. CW: disturbing read with graphic images.

Fluff Society "Small Corgis.... <- They're corgeous!"

Fluff Society "The life every puppy should have" (video)

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Design Objective

Chris Palmieri "This is how you design with graceful degradation: Muji's flashlight works whether you have one or four batteries, double or triple A."

Hacking Tables in Sketch App From which I picked a few more tips on how to use symbols in Sketch.

How we got a 98% success rate for our bot for Zalando — A UX case study "The internet is filled with articles on bot personality but there is so much more to the design process than just that." Boring but useful is just fine.

A new kind of map: it’s about time Amazing, try it out!

In this time map, we preserve the direction of each point, relative to the user. But the visual distance from that center point is determined by the time it takes to get there, whether driving, biking, or on foot.

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Tools of the Trade

Pieter Levels @ 🇳🇱 💯

Most important skill I learnt: just keep shipping day in day out. The emotional ups and downs average out. Just showing up every day adds up

How does Ethereum work, anyway? Introduction to Ethereum, explaining the core components: state, accounts, transactions, blocks, gas, mining.

The Coming Software Apocalypse Mostly talks about conceptual IDEs like Light Table, or cool ideas like Temporal Logic of Actions. I read it as a "let's give non-developers some hope that the software industry knows what the hell it's doing." So, okay.

an okay dril tweet "this is the perfect drink for when something's wrong with your PATH"

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Web-end

Writing CSS with Accessibility in Mind Accessibility with simple CSS tricks, like:

p {
  /* Maximum width of 65characters */
  max-width: 65ch;
}

Start Your Engines – Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition "Firefox’s new CSS [Rust] engine runs quickly, in parallel across multiple CPU cores"

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Lingua Scripta

Introducing Cloudflare Workers: Run JavaScript Service Workers at the Edge AWS offers something similar with CloudFront + Lambda, but CloudFlare went with the Service Workers API, a much better developer experience.

Wes Bos 🔥 "Node 8.6.0 brings support for Object Spread! Goodbye Object.assign()"

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Lines of Code

Stephanie Hurlburt 💡

"Look, it's only 2 lines of code!"

Maybe it shouldn't be 2 lines of code. Maybe it'd be MUCH easier to understand & debug if it was longer.

Ben Lesh 🛋️ 👑 🔥 Is true:

Just a reminder that you can have unit tests with 100% code coverage, everything type-checked, and your app could still be completely broken

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Architectural

Sarah Mei The premise: Computer Science degrees are not essential (I agree) The conclusion: we need a model that explains software development (it's not CS, it's not math, not engineering)

My favorite is this nugget about the difference between theory and practice:

I thought it was the job. So I started interviewing other places. More whiteboarding pointer operations! I was back in my element.

Oddly enough the jobs were mostly for java (then the new hotness - think node today) and java didn't have pointers 🤔

You'll Never Guess What Happened Next

Like most bleeding edge stacks, writing Java was 5% coding & 95% "getting shit to work."

Chad Fowler Now, if only we could find a simple solution:

The older I get, the more I realize the biggest problem to solve in tech is to get people to stop making things harder than they have to be.

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Devoops

0operator 🔥

me: this change is pretty small, should be fine to deploy to production

narrator: but the change was not fine to deploy to production

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Locked Doors

Post a boarding pass on Facebook, get your account stolen Barcodes: just because you can't read them, doesn't mean other people can't.

Jason Fagone Tweet thread to get you hooked on The Woman Who Smashed Codes:

I want to tell you a story. For 3 years I’ve been researching Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a puzzle-solving heroine of the world wars. /1

I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets It's not the data Tinder collects about you, but rather the data Tinder gets from/shares with 3rd party services:

The trouble is these 800 pages of my most intimate data are actually just the tip of the iceberg. “Your personal data affects who you see first on Tinder, yes,” says Dehaye. “But also what job offers you have access to on LinkedIn, how much you will pay for insuring your car, which ad you will see in the tube and if you can subscribe to a loan.

Even This Data Guru Is Creeped Out By What Anonymous Location Data Reveals About Us TL;DR information is only anonymous up to a few data points:

“There is a very clear handoff between the work line, which is the purple line, and home, which is the yellow-orange. Work was a little harder, because there was a number of different offices there, but because there is height [data] it makes it pretty easy to figure out that he is likely in this law firm, JB&P.”

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Peopleware

Fake Bus Stops For Alzheimer’s Patients in Germany Genius (h/t Julia Galef):

How the system works is that the bus stop diffuses the sense of panic. For instance, if a delusional patient decided that she needed to go home immediately because her children were all alone and waiting for her, the attendant didn’t need to restrain her or talk her out of it, she simply said, “Oh, well, there’s the bus stop.” Thus, the patient would go sit and wait. Knowing that she was on her way home, she would relax and, given her diminished cognition, she would eventually forget why she was there. Staff can then approach the patients and tell them that the bus is delayed and invite them in for refreshments while they wait. Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave.

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None of the Above

Turning Text into a Tweetstorm 😭

John May 🤔

A math meme that is funny rather than stupid:
Solve carefully!
230 - 220 x 0.5 =

You probably won't believe it, but the answer is 5!

Alanis King 🚗

I joked about Alfa reliability today. I was absolutely put in my place by an Alfa owner whose car has gone a FULL 1,800 miles with no issue.

This Tiny Country Feeds the World The Netherlands is 1/270th the size of the US, yet also the globe's number two food exporter. And it started with "a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry 'Twice as much food using half as many resources.'"

Emily G, Cville. 📺

RT if you remember the joy of degaussing monitors.

BWOOOONGGGGGGGGGG

Why Aren’t Mothers Worth Anything to Venture Capitalists? "The struggles of a breast-pump startup underscore V.C.’s blind spot when it comes to women and babies." But Juicero raised $120M …

Ashley McNamara 👖

Delivery Driver: I'm here.
Me: okay?
Driver: can you come outside?
Me: if I wanted to put on pants I would have gone out to eat.

Orctober Sky Every. Single. Time.

USPS tracking
step 1. We’re not sure it exists yet
step 2. it’s arrived

erin chack "di—did the cat write this"

Muselk "Whoever designed this floor is evil. THATS A FLAT CARPET."

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Design Objective

Optical Effects in User Interfaces (for True Nerds) How to make optically balanced icons, correct shapes alignment, and perfect corner rounding.

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Tools of the Trade

Tobie Langel "Finally captured a picture of the @github octocat in its natural habitat."

Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js The developer community has spoken, and Facebook is backing down and relicensing some of its open source technologies. No mention of GraphQL. I've seen many reactions from people who didn't understand how that patent clause works, so encourage you read 3 Points to Consider.

mozilla/valence First extensions, now Mozilla wants developers to embrace Firefox as drop-in replacement for Chrome:

Mozilla no longer maintains this project. Cross-browser remote debugging is still a priority. To enable browser/device agnostic inspection and debugging, we intend to make our tools be directly compatible with the Chrome DevTools Protocol.

Probot Github apps you can install with a single click.

Patrick McKenzie 🤔

Every time Git/Github/continuous integration/etc causes me to need to push a vacuous commit to trigger something I do a doc update instead.

This is rapidly producing the best, most consistent documentation progress of my career.

Dmitri Sotnikov "deploying Docker Compose to production"

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Web-end

Dan Abramov Summary of reasons not to use React. React is a great, but also not a fit for every project, the thing is the hype is so strong right now, lists like this need to be made and shared:

It is JavaScript-centric. If you don’t want to learn JavaScript, it is harder to work with than template-centric libraries.

It has a larger runtime than some libs so if you’re building something sensitive to that (e.g. embed widgets), may want to look elsewhere.

David Smith "Probably my favorite thing is the look of horror people get when I point out this section of the SVG 1.2 spec (yes, the image format)"

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Lines of Code

Sarah Mei "What if we design the test code, and let the code code fall out from there?"

I want some way to explicitly apply software design to tests, so we can let changes there drive parallel changes in code to make them green.

It's sort of like Conway's Law for testing. Your code recapitulates the structure of your tests.

Therefore, to make changes, you want to manipulate the source - the tests - and let that recapitulation happen to make them pass again.

Never Give Up, Retry: How Software Should Deal with Failures An introduction to retry logic.

The art of destroying software Going to watch this again today.

Vranac Srdjan 🐉

YOU ARE IN A LEGACY CODEBASE
> RUN TESTS
YOU HAVE NO TESTS
> READ SPEC
YOU HAVE NO SPEC
> WRITE FIX
YOU ARE EATEN BY AN ELDER CODE HACK.

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Architectural

Multiple Perspectives On Technical Problems and Solutions Why and how Etsy runs an architecture review process:

In other words, engineering (as an activity) does not have “correct” solutions to problems. As an aside, if you’re looking for correct solutions to problems, I’d suggest that you go work in a different field (like mathematics); engineering will likely frustrate you.

Breaking Up the Behemoth Does your codebase has that one piece of logic that no developer dare touch? What are you doing to fix that?

A 5,000 line class exerts a gravitational pull that makes makes it hard to imagine creating a set of 10 line helper classes to meet a new requirement. Make new classes anyway. The way to get the outliers back on the green line where they belong is to resist putting more code in objects that are already too large. Make small objects, and over time, the big ones will disappear.

Radoslav Stankov 👍

When a feature is very hard to implement, do something else make the feature easier, then do it. This tactic have saved me countless hours

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Locked Doors

Security Researchers Lose Faith in HTTP Public Key Pinning In retrospect, a bad idea and browser vendors should remove this feature:

It turns out that certificate pinning can cause more harm than good because it’s hard to configure and getting it wrong can leave websites inaccessible. On top of that, hackers can also potentially abuse it for ransomware-like attacks.

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None of the Above

Apple blocking ads that follow users around web is 'sabotage', says industry Of course advertisers feel that way. Also, fantastic new feature, may Chrome follow soon.

Octlantis: the underwater city built by octopuses "In Australia, the species has been seen to congregate, communicate and even evict one another at a site marine biologists call Octlantis."

Scientists Can Now Repaint Butterfly Wings Wow CRISPR:

By deleting the optix gene in a wide variety of butterflies, team member Linlin Zhang showed that red parts of the wing consistently turn black. The Gulf fritillary transforms from a vivid orange insect into a dark inky one. The small postman loses the vivid red streaks on its hind wings.

Magic Sudoku This app takes the fun out of solving Sudoku, but wow AR. Watch the video:

Anatomy of a Moral Panic Why is Channel 4 frightening us about high-school science projects?

The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama. This is particularly true for technical topics outside the reporter’s area of expertise.

ICOs are where the frauds will take place TL;DR "Anyone can promise anything and no one is overseeing it."

Alex Chaffee, 늙다리 미치 "Twitter is fun sometimes."