Labnotes

Glenda Adams "This took nearly 6 months, working on and off- so many little pixels to stitch."

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Tools of the Trade

Christine Love So Vim ported to run in the browser:

This is by far the best version of vim because they finally implemented the one feature that everyone’s been demanding for decades: there’s a little X in the corner, and you can click it

Andy Gocke This is so true. I believe the expression is "squandering their time":

Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth.

browsh This terminal-based web browser renders everything a modern browser can (HTML5, CSS3, JS, video, even WebGL). Use case: run the browser in a data center with fast internet, and access it over SSH from a device that has slow/limited internet.

EricaJoy I'll sign. Meanwhile, this hack mostly works:

petition to make "paste and match formatting" the default paste option.

Defining Component APIs in React Collects some of the best practices for working with React:

The following is a collection of thoughts, opinions, and advice for defining component APIs that are meant to be more flexible, composable, and easier to understand. None of these are hard-and-fast rules, but they’ve helped guide the way I think about organizing and creating components.

Daryl Ginn "React documentation out of context makes you appear to be some kind of monster."

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Lingua Scripta

ES modules: A cartoon deep-dive A quick intro to ES modules that covers everything you need to know about them.

Amit Patel 🤔

Little known trick: the <script> tag in html runs the code inside, and also hides it using css display:none. But I can change that to display:block, so that I can show sample code to the reader and also run it on the page to generate diagrams. (need to test across browsers)

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Lines of Code

Chris Ford 💯

I get more programming productivity out of reducing the time that I'm stuck than from increasing my speed when I'm not stuck.

Fabien Ninoles Related:

Too many programmers forget that the fastest way to get out of a dead-end is to drive backward.

JBD 🔥

One important thing that sets us apart from the other primates is that we make tools before we need them. It is also called the phenomenon of ending up with 43 levels of inheritance and no one knows why.

Sarah Drasner Greater context:

I guess "good at code review" can mean different things to different people. For me, it means:

• looks for greater context beyond what's been changed
• doesn't get super pedantic
• notices when something doesn't fit an overall pattern
  extra points: teaches without talking down

Jake Archibald Click the link for more of this:

I'd like "// this should never happen" on my headstone.

mattiasgeniar "These captcha’s are getting out of hand ..."

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Architectural

Jared Forsyth "Speculative generality" is a good way to frame this:

Over the past couple years I've gotten much more sensitive to the cost of speculative generality. So many bugs could have been avoided by just solving the problem at hand instead of trying to solve a ton of potential future problems.

Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar This is a cautionary tale of going extreme with no plan in hand, and then having to hard bounce to the other extreme:

Once the code for all destinations lived in a single repo, they could be merged into a single service. With every destination living in one service, our developer productivity substantially improved. We no longer had to deploy 140+ services for a change to one of the shared libraries. One engineer can deploy the service in a matter of minutes.

llogiq 🕵🏻‍♂️

You have a problem. You: Ah! I know! I use a distributed system. Now you still have a problem, but you no longer know where.

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Peopleware

Jonathan Betz The manager's path:

Career phases in software engineering:

• Write code
• Build products
• Grow teams that build products
• Develop leaders to grow teams that build products
• Devise a culture that develops leaders to grow teams that build products

Bilgem Cakir Fortunately, our industry also has a rewarding maker's path:

This is the manager's path. There is another path: technical IC's path. In that, you get deeper and deeper in your coding and design skills and solve progressively harder problems.

endingwithali 😭

My Myers Briggs type is HDMI

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Locked Doors

I was billed for 14k USD on Amazon Web Services 😱 TL;DR Don’t commit private keys to public repos.

John Michael So in 6,000 years, all that changed is keys got smaller?

The earliest known key/locking mechanisms were discovered by archaeologists in the mid-19th century at the Palace of Khorsabad in Assyria (modern day Iraq). The key and lock system dates back to 4000 B.C.

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Techtopia

maya kosoff This is way creepy (it has a website, but I won't share the link); as Aral points out, exactly the business model of Google, Facebook, et al:

How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System Sums up SV very well: the Inner Party of venture capitalists, the Outer Party of skilled technicians and marketers, the Service Class in the “gig economy”, and the Untouchable class of the homeless.

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None of the Above

Creatrix Tiara "Malaysian TV show synopses are something else"

Mr_Kapowski 🦖

When buying watermelons, make sure to do the knock test by rapping your knuckles twice on the watermelon

If something knocks back, that is a dinosaur egg

Watermelons are in the next aisle over

Comparing City Street Orientations Why are some cities (*cough*Boston*cough*) impossible to navigate? Interesting analysis using the polar histogram (aka rose diagram) of street orientation.

Wikipedia:Unusual articles Because you're not wasting enough time on Wikipedia already, this page lists hundreds of interesting articles, like these three I link to below. You're welcome. (via Lifehacker)

Rai stones: “coins” that weigh four tons each
United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins: the best-titled court decision in maritime law
Cadaver Synod: that time the Pope dug up his predecessor’s corpse and put it on trial

This sun-chasing robot looks after the plant on its head A robot that moves your house plant from shade to sun and back, and dances when it needs watering.

Interrobang Is this the most under-used end mark or what‽

In the Tribune article, the writer called the interrobang true genius. Unfortunately, his article was published on the first of April and it may have been that the readers took it as an April Fool’s joke.

Tiny Emus In-browser emulators of your favorite early 80's computers: ZX Spectrum, Commodore C64, Acorn Atom, and friends.

Venkatesh Rao "Random acts of solutionism", a perfect phrase:

Phrase "random acts of solutionism" just popped into my head. I don't buy the critique of solutionism by tech backlashistas in general... but increasing incidence of RAoS definitely a symptom of idiotic reluctance to just raise taxes and do the things governments are supposed to.

Fluff Society "When you remove the glass table top"

Persian Rose "Animals who look like they’re about to release a chart topping single"

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Design Objective

How to add product features without making it more complex Interesting idea. Is your design "default valid" or "default invalid"?

The conversion rate for this version ended up being 13.3%. That’s nearly an 8x better result, just by changing one thing. By making as much of the booking default valid as possible, we were able to get a much much better result.

Wahyu Ichwandardi Wow. Donald Glover’s dance recreated with MacPaint on the Macintosh 128K. You can follow the thread to see how it evolved day by day.

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Tools of the Trade

DevTube All the developer videos in one place.

Hadron I like this direction. Please more design tools that can use native (HTML/CSS) components.

U-M researchers create world’s smallest ‘computer’ That tiny little thing is a temperature sensor, with an ARM Cortex M0 CPU, uses light to communicate. For scale, a grain of rice.

Kate Compton Without a doubt, printers are the hardest problem in Computer Science:

P=NP stands for "printer = no printer"

Ben Markowitz "BRB, making Harry Potter spells into Siri Shortcuts."

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Lines of Code

Andrey Okonetchnikov This applies to many programming languages:

When in doubt, always bet on idiomatic JS i.e. write clean and maintainable code and let vendors figure out performance for you.

Paul Stovell 🎸🌟

To really confuse recruiters, someone should make a programming language called Rockstar.

15 jokes only programmers will get "I feel like one of these books is misleading me"

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Techtopia

Anton Troynikov This thread. I laughed. I cried. So true.

Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union:

• living five adults to a two room apartment

• 'totally not illegal taxi' taxis by private citizens moonlighting to make ends meet

• failures are bizarrely upheld as triumphs

Eric Lawrence When time is money:

5yo doing a matching game.

"Circle the one that is not related". Picture is:

• Alarm clock
• Watch
• Pile of coins

Circles alarm clock.

Mom says "No. Pay attention."
I say: "Wait, explain."

5yo says "That clock isn't money. You can buy ice cream with your Apple watch."

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None of the Above

A Crow "Wondered why the car blowers didn't seem very effective then realised half of them were set to 'email' instead of 'bacon'."

Bryan Cantrill Genius:

How about a conference called "In Retrospect" in which presenters revisit talks they've given years prior -- and describe how their thinking has evolved since?

If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is? A survey to document how people interpret probable words like "always", "probably", "more often than not".

foone How the brain flips images, time shifts events, and makes up the rest of what we "see":

You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?
OK, so there's a physical problem with our eyes: We move them in short fast bursts called "saccades", right? very quick, synchronized movements.
The only problem is: they go all blurry and useless during this

Jon Jones "Amazing. Fully functional LEGO Technic bridge girder."

Dr. Holly Witteman Good to know:

That $35 that scientific journals charge you to read a paper goes 100% to the publisher, 0% to the authors. If you just email us to ask for our papers, we are allowed to send them to you for free, and we will be genuinely delighted to do so.

Paul Bronks "Troll Level: over 9000"

Dr Veronika Cheplygina We really do need better emoji etiquette:

Tweeps, if you have lots of special characters in your name, consider an update for people who are using screen reading software

Matt Biddulph US healthcare is so broken:

invoices for my hospital stay are starting to come in. each Halls Cough Drop, individually packaged by SAFECOR of Columbus OH, is billed at $10.

Disposable America “A history of modern capitalism from the perspective of the straw. Seriously.”

A Brief History of Shimano Compatibility Because I'm rebuilding my road bike with upgraded parts, and the similarities between bicycles and computers — the fads, the designs that get worse with time, the incompatible components, cables and more cables:

People think under-the-tape shift cables are so hot right now. Plus, the all powerful bar tape lobby is pushing for a way to trick people into replacing their bar tape whenever they replace their shift cables.

Highlight the Remarkable - Katherine Brilliant ad campaign:

Everyone knows the phrase "Behind every great man is a great woman." But what does it mean? That the man is always the hero and the woman his sidekick? The truth is, all too often women were upstaged, and their actions and successes not mentioned. 2018 is the year to rewrite history: with Stabilo Boss.

Fobski "my new stock photo for depicting hacking"

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Design Objective

Greg Greiner The difference between materials (left) and tools (right):

Left: Long term investment.
Right: Don’t get too attached.

A Beginner’s Guide to Rapid Prototyping Overview of the current crop of wireframing / rapid prototyping tools. Amazing how 2018 and still most of these tools do not work on an iPad.

Scott Belsky True:

Strong product leaders are persuasive. So much of getting a bold idea through the valley of doubt comes down to vision and persuasion.

amy nguyen 📦

FRONTEND DEVELOPMENT TIPS:
a dialog box is when you add a small window to a screen and prompt a user for input.
a dialogue box is when you force your designer and PM into a conference room and refuse to let them out until they make a decision.

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Tools of the Trade

bit Bit is all about sharing and reusing components across projects. It works with Git and npm, but without the complexity of setting up a Git/npm project just to share 30 lines of code. Like nothing I've seen before.

mkcert Command line tool for making HTTPS certificates for local environment (localhost, myapp.dev, etc).

Design from Code Currently in early access, new UXPin feature that allows you to design new screens from the same React components you use to build your app. Make code the source of truth behind new designs.

pure-bash-bible Known and lesser-known Bash tricks, using only Bash language and built-in commands. Things like arrays, string manipulation, processing text files. Quite useful when you don't want to lookup awk syntax (I can never remember) or use a proper scripting language.

Debugging data flows in reactive programs RxFiddle, a data flow graph visualiser, and a dynamic Marble diagram generator. Try it yourself.

Ron Bowes 👑

I've always loved that The Queen of England is specifically allowed to buy a .ca domain - and so hard not to choose that option right now!

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Lingua Scripta

Pranay Prakash I used to complain that Java is verbose, so yeah:

When I first began learning to code, I saw public static void main in Java and was super confused. I was also reading a book that spent a page explaining each keyword. JavaScript was a relief coming from that verbosity.

Well, today I wrote this line of code 🤷‍♀️

export default async function* (f, it) { }

Adam Rackis 🔥

The latest Node.js supports BigInts (flag --harmony-bigint)

Looks like Node can finally calculate the size of your node_modules.

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Lines of Code

A coffee-break introduction to time complexity of algorithms I love tutorials like this — well written and illustrated, easy to learn from:

Becoming familiar with time complexity gives us the opportunity to write code, or refactor code, to be more efficient.

Lars Doucet Apropos time complexity:

Due to my elite programming skills, I figured out how to shave off THIRTY SECONDS from my app's startup time. Here's some optimization tips:

1. Remove the sleep(30) call you added a month ago and forgot about

Patrick McKenzie 🤔

you mean a one layer neural network with identity activation and no hidden layers

I am stealing this branding for "if/else statement" until the end of time.

Adam Rawnsley "Coding tutorial vs your first script"

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Peopleware

Tobi Lütke DO listen to your body. DO NOT take startup myths seriously:

I need 8 hours of sleep a night. I experimented with less at many times in the past because I always saw these stories that made me think I was broken somehow. Eventually decided the stories were broken instead.

Martin (马丁) Hynie Please don't be this PM:

Me: You tried to book me at lunch... my calendar shows that I am busy then.
PM: Oh, I looked and saw that it said "lunch" and thought that meant you were free.
Me: It is my lunch.
PM: So you are free.
Me: No. I am at lunch.
PM: Are you meeting someone?
Me: You're bad at this.

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Seeing is Believing

Live Streaming Paper Airplane Drone Paper airplanes have come a long way since I was a child.

Ajit Johnson "Wish we had tech like this when we were at school. 👌"

Andrew Chen "🏓 Pong 2.0 in AR. No running around to pick up the ball afterwards. 👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼"

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Locked Doors

Catalin Cimpanu Because of course: "Live chat widgets are an attack surface now"

Shodan How secure is your database? Public MongoDB instances are exposing 24TB of data, Elastic Search clusters are exposing 904TB, and HDFS a whopping 5.1PB!

Nmap Project Since nmap is the one tool all Hollywood hackers use, the nmap project has a page to document these exploits. The latest addition:

Nmap is a movie star (again)! Rihanna uses it for a diamond heist in the new Ocean's 8 film.

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None of the Above

Fluff Society "Exhausted after a long day of being a cat."

Corey Quinn Genius:

The secret to getting off of calls you don't want to be on is to hang up in the middle of your own sentence. Only a maniac would hang up on themselves, so you must have gotten disconnected.

How To Make a Mini BBQ It's BBQ season around here, so here's how to make a bitty-Q from a can of soup.

Chocolat Pine "chair.exe has stopped working"

Per Thorsheim (🔎 clue)

5683 is one of the most popular PIN codes in the world, especially with ppl with English as their native language. I'll bet you don't know why.

"Extended: Two arrested in Spruce Grove store This CCTV footage is bonkers, keep watching because it has more plot twists than a Marvel movie:

Sarah Day I call this feature "find and regret":

I changed a character name from ken to keith with find & replace and I have many regrets. Manuscript now filled with 'brokeith', 'spokeith', 'wokeith.' Errors have been made, lessons have been learned.

Carl Forrest "Students designs a “mobile airbag” for your phone when it’s dropped."

Ryan Caldbeck Disruptions befall industries that refuse to innovate:

2/ In almost every category large brands losing market share to small brands b/c 1) consumers are demanding products that meet their unique needs, 2) mktg costs switching from fixed to variable, 3) direct distribution becoming more imp. Net = higher demand & lower barriers.

Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall The shady industry that will spam you to death:

As an ex-telemarketer tells us, parties who express interest are hounded with up to 5-7 “follow-up” calls per week. The “repackaged” into a new data set and sold to another telemarketing company.

Wiley Cash The difference between the romantic fantasy and the real world of hustle:

When people learn that I'm a writer, I'll often hear things like, "I would love to write, but I don't have the time" or "It must be amazing to sit at your desk all day & write your book." Years ago, when my wife and I first moved in to our neighborhood, a woman down the street...

Diy Ideas "Folding like a boss" This will stretch your pants on one side, but such a great trick for travel packing.

allad8 Office classics.

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Design Objective

Brianne Kimmel Keep on innovating!

6/ As a founder, you may never know the impact you have on the lives of individual users. There is so much more to life than curing cancer. Anything that makes someone smile & feel better about their current situation is worth building.

noahsussman "What you shipped vs. what the client actually needed."

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Tools of the Trade

Daniel Rosenwasser 🤔

Debuggers don't actually remove bugs, they just run your code as slow as you can think.

Louis D'hauwe Hooo!

I created a proof of concept Xcode for iPad! Code is compiled on a Mac, which acts as a remote server. Generates an .ipa that is uploaded by the Mac, the iPad then installs it. 🚀

Drew Conway "Who made this? 👏🏻...👏🏻...👏🏻" (original)

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Lingua Scripta

Axel Rauschmayer TIL Node 10 has a “strict mode”, where assert.equal() and friends use ===.

Hector Martin ARMv8.3 processors include an instruction designed specifically for JavaScript performance:

FJCVTZS Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero.

Once upon a time:

Before the RISC philosophy became prominent, many computer architects tried to bridge the so-called semantic gap, i.e., to design instruction sets that directly support high-level programming constructs such as procedure calls, loop control, and complex addressing modes, allowing data structure and array accesses to be combined into single instructions. Instructions are also typically highly encoded in order to further enhance the code density.

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Lines of Code

Dmitry Alexandrov "The way we programmers explain what we've written"

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Architectural

KenScambler Components, objects, microservices, distributed systems …

1,000,000 components but you only need to think about 5 at once = a simple system.

20 components but you need to fit them all in your head all the time = a complicated system.

Stopping things from knowing about each other is the big game in growing a system

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Devoops

Esteñ Classic Someone is exceeding their OKRs:

on one hand, yes, I did take the site down, but on the other hand, I improved latency by 10x through exclusively serving the 404 page

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Techtopia

Through-Wall Human Pose Estimation Using Radio Signals Translated to plain English, this tech can see through walls, using WiFi signals. Sci-fi. Also, everyone looks skinny.

Michael Feathers ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Taxi driver was sour on the trip from the airport this morning, but so was I I.. no sleep. There was something beautiful and reassuring about the fact that we were not going to rate each other at the end of the trip.

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Locked Doors

LockPickingLawyer Seriously, do not buy this "smart" lock:

The company that sent me the pictured fingerprint lock has provided the security quote of the year: “...the lock is invincible to the people who do not have a screwdriver.”

Iowa man receives 20 years for armed "domain hijacking" When 2 factor authentication is not enough:

According to The Telegraph, Sherman Hopkins Jr of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, broke into the apartment of “internet entrepreneur” Ethan Deyo, wearing pantyhose over his head and dark sunglasses. He threatened Deyo at gunpoint demanding he get on his computer and transfer the registration of his domain name "DoItForState.com" over to another account.

Sean Gallagher "You have the wrong threat model."

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None of the Above

Philip Oldfield Street in Macau. Photograph by Paul Tsui, National Geographic travel photographer of the year contest.

Phil Burgess Punny:

Dragons had been around for a while, but it was cartographers who really put them on the map. 🐲🗺️🐉

What really happened in real life that if you saw it in a movie you would say "that's totally unrealistic"? Roadside motel, a shower curtain, you won't guess how this story ends.

Jon Levine "Someone decided to use a drone with a flamethrower to clear debris from power lines and now my life is complete"

KashannKilson Story time:

Ok, I’ll try and keep this brief, but lets talk PT Cruiser and the 2007 recession. FYI, I’m not blaming the crash on the PT Cruiser, just generally laying out how the story of the PT Cruiser and the people who bought them provides an early window into the lending meltdown...

Pulsar Fascinating:

How did the “most successful people” meme go viral?

Our analysis shows that the tipping point for this meme (now at 32 million impressions & counting) was @sarah_edo’s clever spin on @APompliano's tweet.

Here’s a play-by-play of how it spread

Lee McIntyre This goes for all of us, double for journalists:

Cognitive scientists recommend using a "truth sandwich" to report lies: say the truth, then show the liar telling the lie, then fact check it. Otherwise the well known "repetition effect" allows the news media to be used to amplify lies.

LAD "This is a full scale diplomatic incident."

Michael Margolis "Alexa: remind me to feed the baby"

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Design Objective

Iván "This is what person with low vision sees (2008: 45m people in the US alone)
Supporting dynamic type in iOS is not a nice to have. It’s a must."

Ha Phan 🤔

Is that metric true engagement or is the user merely lost in houseware trying to get to checkout at IKEA?

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Tools of the Trade

The Land Before Binary Curious how a balanced ternary computer would work? Why is binary-coded decimal a thing? And why do mainframes, like this 650, have blinking lights?

Alexander Payne 🤔

You can tell TCP was written by a Catholic because nobody else begins a conversation by one person shouting sin and the other having to acknowledge it and move forward

Andrew Emerton Speaking of TCP, how about that RFC 1149?

Yesterday, my coworker very casually mentioned that as a raft guide, he used carrier pigeons to send SD cards back to the shop so the guest photos would be printed on time. I still haven’t figured out how to process this in my mind.

Istar Nil 0x47617921 "For a moment I thought the tea had a MAC address..."

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Web-end

Making Web Components Work Some growing pains, missing features, a global namespace, but overall bullish:

Being able to work with the DOM API directly and browsers’ built-in development tools comes with distinct advantages, and helps replace the cognitive load of framework specifics with standardized techniques and tooling (HTML element attributes/properties, encapsulated styling via CSS, etc.).

CSS Bear Toggle Adorable.

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Lines of Code

Abby Fuller Guilty:

"abstract driven development": looking up your own abstract on a conference website so you know what to write your slides about

Lynn "I wrote a sorting function that only works when you're looking at it"

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Architectural

John Cutler "Value throughput", I like that:

“Velocity” makes me cringe as I imagine all this unvalidated complexity rolling out the door, bloating up the product, adding debt.

Value throughput matters. And ratio of value to added complexity.

Oleg Isonen It's also ok if your employer sets up a sacrificial project that you can over-engineer and get it over with:

Please DO totally overengineer your side projects with the coolest tech you can probably find.

Maybe this way we will be able to not overengineer real apps and learn when to use the cool tech.

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Devoops

Jean-Paul True:

FYI
Everything that goes to production is tested in production.
It just might not be so well organized, structured and informative as you would like it to be. And in stead of a bug report you might get a bad review or lose revenue.

Gene Kim Also watch DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018:

I've always been fascinated by how work can get atomized into various ticketing systems, and almost impossible to reassemble back into business intent. @fgoulding #does18

Fluff Society "An error occurred."

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Peopleware

Cyan I would go:

Maybe someone can create a SleepCon, where there’s no schedule for speaking and you come and you sleep as much as possible then have random interactions with people in the lobby.

The Lifespan of a Lie How a sham experiment got to be world famous, for so long, in spite of the evidence:

The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that we desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As troubling as it might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human nature, it is also profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook.

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Locked Doors

Tinker Story time:

I breached a company through a newly constructed branch location.

I slipped in in that short moment between them implementing the network and them implementing the security to protect that network.

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None of the Above

World and Science "Oddly satisfying"

nadirah 😈

today I learned that there is a word for the fear of palindromes (aibohphobia) and that it was deliberately constructed to itself be a palindrome.

this is truly the worst thing about the English language since whoever decided the word “lisp” should have an s in it.

The Psychology of Money Worth a read. Our relationship with money is more emotional than (we'd like to admit) rational:

It helps, I’ve found, when making money decisions to constantly remind yourself that the purpose of investing is to maximize returns, not minimize boredom. Boring is perfectly fine. Boring is good.

Malte Ubl This is why people hate banks:

Wells Fargo charges $15 for an incoming wire transfer because, as everyone knows, that is how much a database transaction costs if you use Oracle with more than 2 cores.

Sarah Taber The thing about diets and sustainable agriculture:

Traditional vegetarian societies are trotted out to showcase that low/no-meat diets are possible. But it's done w/o recognition as to why those particular societies did it, and others did not.

Janelle Shane They're still entertaining, but don't take them too seriously:

These "I forced a bot to watch X" posts are almost certainly 100% human-written with no bot involved. Here's how you can tell. 1/12

Don’t Eat Before Reading This This Anthony Bourdain piece has me convinced to avoid restaurants on weekends and Mondays. And never order a steak well-done.

Khalil Sehnaoui "Simultaneously the coolest & cutest thing I’ve seen today."