Labnotes

Rebecca Mix "my coworker has this hanging by her desk and I cannot stop laughing" (source)

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Design Objective

4 Reasons Why You Should Design Without Color First 🤔 Using B&W as constraints for your early design iterations:

When you start designing keeping the B&W color palette constraint in mind, most of your thinking time goes into figuring out how to space things right to be able to seem like things are grouped together. You start thinking about the invisible yet more important aspects such as readability (line height, paragraphs and typography), center of attention (call to action buttons and sizes) and scannability (grouping of elements, spacing)

don’t get clever with login forms Your login forms should be simple, predictable, and play nicely with password managers. That's it. Avoid clever interactions that ends up turning into daily annoyances. For example:

This pattern is incredibly tedious.

1. Enter email into login form.
2. Open new tab or switch programs.
3. Open your inbox.
4. Find message from service (if you don’t get distracted by other emails first).
5. Open message.
6. Copy gobbledygook password.
7. Go back to website.
8. Paste in gobbledygook password.
9. Submit login form. Holy shit.

Robin 💡

Good UI design is 90% making things load quickly and 10% typography.

How white space killed an enterprise app (and why data density matters) Know your audience. Also, use less “furniture”:

Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! Their jobs were incredibly fast paced—they worked in a tech support call center and were rated on productivity metrics. They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking.

Martyn Reding "Hey @Tesco the menu on your leaflet seems to be broken. You’re welcome 👍🏼👍🏼🤓"

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Tools of the Trade

Sebastian Markbåge Cool tip (better if you understand the underlying principles):

This is a little known React optimization pattern. React rerenders this component deeply when updateX is called, and since children can't have changed, it automatically bails out of trying to update the children. No need for sCU, memo, etc.

Paul Frazee Mighty useful:

ℹ️ Bash tip: if you need to run a quick command in another directory, surround your call in parenthesis. This causes the command to be run in a "subshell" which is discarded after the command runs, keeping your CWD the same.

Example: (cd ~/work/foo ; npm install)

Archmonad of Saturn "Reading up on the PDP-11 minicomputer system and the module control panels are all absolutely gorgeous!"

redactyl.js "Redact sensitive information from JSON for logging (Node.js)" Also, I just love the name of this module.

Alec Muffett "BEST #XCODE REVIEW EVAR"

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Web-end

Using the Little-Known CSS element() Function to Create a Minimap Navigator Interesting CSS feature, hopefully this one gets supported beyond Firefox.

1991 Server-side web framework written in Forth.

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Lingua Scripta

Leah "Have an inspirational quote™"

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Lines of Code

Nearby Cats 👍

A lot of programmers make the mistake of thinking the way you make code flexible is by predicting as many future uses as possible, but this paradoxically leads to less flexible code.

The only way to achieve flexibility is to make things as simple and easy to change as you can.

Mel Learn to throw code away:

Lessons from art school: one professor had us spend 4 hours on a still life painting only to have us reuse the same canvas for the following session with a different subject.

Don’t get attached because you can do it again and better.

Ryn Daniels 😭

OH: "I regret to inform you that that's a load-bearing yak you're trying to shave."

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Architectural

andrew turley 🙋‍♀️

Most people are capable of building systems that are twice a complex as the systems they are capable of maintaining.

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Peopleware

Tommy Collison 💯

I've had a couple of knee surgeries, and I've never forgotten a nurse who, after I told her how I was feeling, said "So — better than yesterday, and not as good as tomorrow?" If that's true of you learning a new thing, you're on the right track.

No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude. In spite of the title, this article makes some good points on setting boudaries and when to not respond to emails. Also, reminds me I've got a few emails to respond to brb …

I have a few general rules. You should not feel obliged to respond to strangers asking you to share their content on social media, introduce them to your more famous colleagues, spend hours advising them on something they’ve created or “jump on a call this afternoon.” If someone you barely know emails you a dozen times a month and is always asking you to do something for him, you can ignore those emails guilt-free.

On Being A Principal Engineer A career path that doesn't require managing people:

Yes I am still a maker not a manager and I do not have anyone reporting to me but my new position now requires leadership duties that are best not left implicit or not handled with the same outcomes oriented focus as my past coding assignments. One of the most important competencies of a principal engineer is to become a force multiplier.

Paul Bronks "How to finish an argument when you're wrong."

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Locked Doors

Amazon’s Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals” as Company Got Closer to Police At least this dystopia comes with free one-day delivery, and takes only 5 minutes to install:

Not only does this portal allow police to view Ring customers on a handy, Google-powered map, but it also makes requesting customer surveillance video a matter of several clicks.
...
“Many people are not going to feel like they have a choice when law enforcement asks for access to their footage,” said Cagle.

Ian Coldwater 😮

They call it C because it's short for CVE

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Electric Dreams

The Tinder algorithm, explained Can algorithms help you find love, or at least optimize for engagement?

New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators Definitely not "too dangerous to release", some sites specialize in producing daily content like that. But ignore the clickbait, and it's really interesting how far AI has evolved:

When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences.

Daniel Gross "During WW2 the RAF flew missions solely for the purpose of generating training data:"

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None of the Above

Gone In A Generation Washington Post interactive exploring how climate change is disrupting lives across the US.

Showerthoughts 🤔

House cats are basically lions that figured out how to get more calories out of a single human #Showerthoughts

Brett Wilson "This is what a Silicon Valley Thai restaurant looks like."

Benedict Evans So true:

Why is the default view in Google Docs an unsorted, read-only list of the 3,000 documents that anyone has ever shared with the team in the last 5 years?

Molly "Anyone need a job? A position just opened up"

MZS Rule to live by:

Roger Ebert was asked why he gave LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake 2.5 stars, mainly due to a graphic rape scene, but gave 3.5 to the original, which had a similar scene. "I wrote that original review 37 years ago. I am not the same person. I am uninterested in being 'consistent'."

James Melville "Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be amazed by the incredible product design magic show."

The Bad Science of Exercise Recovery TL;DR

They’ll run trials with a small number of participants or force extreme circumstances on their subjects. She refers to the findings of a team of researchers from the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, where researchers found that “if you apply evidence-based methods, 40 years of sports drinks research does not seemingly add up to much.”

flex tillerson "'how to survive an ostrich encounter' is the only wikihow article I care about"

Writer Louis Leung Please!

Million dollar idea: A smoke detector that shuts off when you yell "I'm just cooking!"

Kitten Rescuers Netflix and purr.

Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think How misinformation propagates and what we can do about it.

Pileup on the I-70 near Kansas today Stay safe out there!

Tess Rinearson This is absolutely how we "rough out" winter in San Francisco:

TERRIBLE WINTER WEATHER
seattle: 2 feet of snow
chicago: -20 degrees fahrenheit
san francisco: really bad clouds

1969 & 70 - Bell Labs check this photo album

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Design Objective

Can't Unsee Fantastic game. If you're a developer working to bring designs to life, and struggling with the finer graphics, this is a good way to train your design eye.

Freddie Iboy Thread:

I've felt absurdly lucky the past two years working at Tinder and now it's my last week here. I'm heading over to Amsterdam soon to go work at @Framer ❤️

A couple of lessons that I learned from the Tinder interface as parting advice. None of this is gospel.

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Tools of the Trade

Rodrigo Pombo Brilliant!

I was playing around with some text animations and thought I could use them to show a file's history on @github

Dan Abramov React components are … components. They're not functions, even though they can be written as such. They're not objects, even though they can be written as classes. They're something we're not as good at describing. This is thread makes the point and helps put React hooks in context:

If you look at it this way, there’s nothing magic about useState or useEffect. Of course they “know” which component they belong to! React knows it just like your language knows which variables belong to which function, and when to destroy them.

WebSockets the UNIX way "It's like CGI, twenty years later, for WebSockets"

$ cat my-program
#!/bin/bash

# Count from 1 to 10 with a sleep
for ((COUNT = 1; COUNT <= 10; COUNT++)); do
  echo $COUNT
  sleep 0.5
done
Start websocketd and tell it about your program:

$ websocketd --port=8080 my-program

Aron Griffis 🔥

Working on a new Bash book. So far:
Intro: You chose the wrong tool.
Ch 1: Have you considered Python?
Ch 2: Try calling Python from your Bash script.
Ch 3: If you're still here, try adding quotes.

Jochem I'm going to name my channel no-agenda-meeting:

TIL some @SlackHQ channel names that'll result in a nice message once someone leaves the channel... like a funny goodbye:

• my-phone-in-a-cab
• the-love-of-my-life
• running
• alive
• outer-join

After /leave the remaining channel members will see:
> John Doe left #running"

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Web-End

Gary "Wrong. The ONLY way you should organise CSS properties is like a Christmas Tree."

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Lingua Scripta

qntm "Try this, kids at home! (V8 only AFAIK so Chrome or Node.js)"

Lynn Hehe:

🌶️ HOT JAVASCRIPT TIP: 🌶️

to increment some counter on the page,

node.innerText += 1

doesn't work (0 → 01 → 011 → ⋯), but

node.innerText -= -1

works fine (0 → 1 → 2 → ⋯)

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Lines of Code

Eric Lawrence I feel seen:

I find myself running code I wrote with the irrational hope that it has developed some improvements since I wrote it.

The “Bug-O” Notation “The Bug-O describes how much an API slows you down as your codebase grows.”

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Locked Doors

Lesley Carhart 100%. Splitting hairs doesn't make people any safer.

Nest makes great points, but I dislike the trend of saying devices being maliciously accessed or abused weren’t ‘hacked’. It’s a weird kind of gatekeeping that kind of discounts the security hygiene and education issues most consumers are still struggling with. Outcome = same.

Kashmir Hill Unintended consequences:

Oh wow, Apple is getting rid of the mostly useless "Do Not Track" signal in Safari because it was a way to track people: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari_release_notes/safari_12_1_release_notes

Phishing email training The perfect excuse:

So every now and then my company sends out phishing emails to us to “test” us. The emails are obvious phishing emails but if you click one you have to sit through a boring hour long training that’s the equivalent of detention. The malicious compliance is I now open no emails from management with headlines that maybe a mundane task or generally something I don’t want to do. Whenever I’m asked why I didn’t respond I simply say I was being careful about phishing and I get praised for it rather than yelled at for dodging work.

Malware Unicorn The USB fairy is real!

In infosec folklore, if you leave a USB under your pillow at night, there will be malware on it the next morning.

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Techtopia

Five Things That Scare Me About AI Not AI per se, but the blind use of algorithms we don't understand (could be anything with if/else branches):

Returning to the account of the popular 5th grade teacher who was fired by an algorithm, she suspects that the underlying reason she was fired was that her incoming students had unusually high test scores the previous year (making it seem like their scores had dropped to a more average level after her teaching), and that their former teachers may have cheated.

Daniel Holland "The perils of modern living."

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Startup Life

David Frankel 🔥🔥🔥

"We learned a lot"

This phrase is almost always a euphemism for “We've spent nearly all of our capital, don’t have traditional traction, but need more money.”

Those four words that will chill a VC’s soul - here's what you should say if you're running out of cash/time. 1/9

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None of the Above

Alex Rampell "This is the most brilliant iPhone app grouping I’ve ever seen..."

White gold: the unstoppable rise of alternative milks How wellness upstarts spoiled milk’s healthy reputation – and built a billion-dollar industry from juicing oats and nuts.

Michael Hainsworth "I was Today years old when I discovered this #lifehack"

Oregon Zoo "The best part of snow days in Portland ❄️"

Jeff Bezos Brings the Receipts In which Jeff Bezos stands up to blackmail, comes across as everyone's favorite underdog, there are nude pictures, and even the Saudi government is involved:

That strategic positioning hasn’t gone without notice. As Kristin Kanthak, a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, put it on Twitter: “You know we are at a disgusting moment in our nation’s history when the billionaire sending out dick pics is the HERO of the story.”

ginaa wilsonn "So a month ago I dropped a ring & a clip down my bathroom sink and I’ve been scared to try to save it because I was scared it would just drop farther down but look at my cat being the fucking GOAT"

pico-8 Virtual console app for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. Looks like tons of fun!

Mike Rosenberg Journalism has a future, if you care about your subscribers:

The Seattle Times changed course to focus on stories that drive subscriptions - not clicks. Now we're at 41,000 digital subscriptions, up 21% in a year. And no layoffs.
Love working in a community that values independent journalism enough to pay for it

julius tarng Of course this blows up on Twitter:

So everyone was joking about Konmari-ing their Twitter, but I went ahead and made a tool for that:

Say hello to ✨ Tokimeki Unfollow ✨!

Hang out with virtual me and go thru your follows one by one. Do their tweets spark joy? If not, hit [Unfollow]!

Ryan Creamer created the most wholesome Pornhub channel.

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Design Objective

Nina Alli "Sometimes we forget who our user is" (source)

Jeff Chang Right size your A/B tests:

A/B testing best practices should change as a company grows:
👶: Do not A/B test, will not get stat sig. Talk to users.
👦: A/B test changes that you predict will affect metrics, testing everything too slow
👨: A/B test everything. Accidentally dropping metric by 1-2% is very bad

Reginald Braithwaite Amusing but apocryphal:

An IBM VP was being shown some new tape drives. When waiting, a yellow "Idle" light would come one.

The VP was aghast.

"Change that light to green, and rename it," he exclaimed:

"IBM equipment is never idle. It is READY!"

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Tools of the Trade

antonmedv/fx Command-line tool and terminal JSON viewer.

Peter Cooper Related:

If you're on macOS and have Homebrew installed, run brew cask install quicklook-json and Quick Look will let you look into JSON files properly.

Ben Halpern "Client-side validation"

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Web-end

Ben Furfie Absolute web dominance corrupts absolutely:

If you think there's no issue with Chromium having dominance in the browser engine market, then realise this. The Chrome team pushed a compat bug to their browser because they didn't want to fix an issue with their site. And it took a Mozilla dev to fix it. In a rival's browser.

zoe 😮

if you want to ruin someone's day, applying "font-weight:500.007797241211" to an element will make its text bold in firefox, but not chrome

anything between 500.007797241211 and 549.9999694824218181565811391 will work, but that one's just on the precipice so

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Lingua Scripta

Allen Wirfs-Brock Amen. And we do have compatible languages that can move at their own pace (ReasonML, TypeScript, etc):

JavaScript's success is as a "worse is better" (look it up) language. Adding many new features to improve it may actually be detrimental to its continued success. What it needs is slow addition of carefully considered features that enable key new use cases.

Mathias Bynens And this is what it looks like in practice:

🎉 New JavaScript features in ES2019:

• Array#{flat,flatMap}
• Object.fromEntries
• String#{trimStart,trimEnd}
• Symbol#description
• try { } catch {} // optional binding
• JSON ⊂ ECMAScript
• well-formed JSON.stringify
• stable Array#sort
• revised Function#toStringOrli Matlow

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Peopleware

Kenyon Laing 💡

You know how sports teams have “rebuilding years”? I think people should be allowed those too. When someone asks how you’ve been/what’s new in your life, you should be able to say, “It’s a rebuilding year” and leave it at that.

duretti hirpa Thread:

dear managers, here's a list of 10 items you should stop doing! love, your no. 1 best programmer pal, duretti

1. putting 10 minutes on my calendar for a "quick chat" with no context. it makes me think i'm gonna get fired
2. heck, just messaging and saying "have a minute?"

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Locked Doors

Major iPhone FaceTime bug lets you hear the audio of the person you are calling … before they pick up That's one way to remote activate an always-on close-to-target listening device.

Apple blocks Facebook from running its internal iOS apps The very next day: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps 🍿

QuadrigaCX Owes Customers $190 Million, Court Filing Shows Cryptocurrency is a distributed way of learning why banks operate they way they do:

Troubled Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX owes its customers $190 million and cannot access most of the funds, according to a court filing obtained by CoinDesk.
…
Cotten reportedly died of Crohn’s disease in Jaipur, India in early December 2018. The exchange announced his death earlier this month. A death certificate was included in the list of exhibits.

The founder seemingly had sole control or knowledge of Quadriga’s cold storage solution. Robertson wrote that after his death, “Quadriga’s inventory of cryptocurrency has become unavailable and some of it may be lost.”

The doorbells have eyes: The privacy battle brewing over home security cameras If you're considering a doorbell camera, read this first:

Okay, Big Doorbell hasn’t yet evolved to the point where police are peering through live to see who’s coming over for dinner. But we probably don’t want to build that.

How do we stop a potential civil liberties nightmare? By talking about ethics now.

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None of the Above

Abhishek "There is a story behind every tattoo. I used AR to bring tattoos to life."

Aaron W 🤔

In 2019, are phone calls really just real-time meeting requests with no subject, no agenda, an unspecified duration, and sometimes even a mystery attendee?

MrStinkEsq Punny:

Monday - Greg
Tuesday - Ian
Wednesday - Greg
Thursday - Ian
Friday - Greg
Saturday - Ian
Sunday - Greg

The Gregorian calendar

Aaron Parecki "How did we let the Web get to this point. All I wanted to do was read this blog post."

fiona Exactly!

all linear algebra textbooks are like

• 1 is a number 😀
• x can stand in for many numbers 🤯
• a vector is just an ordered list of numbers 😜
• the set of all polynomials of degree m with real or complex coefficients is a vector subspace of P(F), as you should verify 😇

WolfTron V 🔥

CNN & Fox News has done to our parents what they thought violent video games & Marilyn Manson would do to us.

Assumptions Objects in Pictures Are Not Always As They Seem.

Orli Matlow 😭

Is running for president just "starting a podcast" for rich people?

Lina Khan Can we get this in the US as well?

India has introduced a new rule prohibiting e-commerce platforms from selling their own goods on the platform. The idea is you can either run the marketplace, or sell your goods on the marketplace, but not both

iris "some earrings i ordered on aliexpress never arrived and they asked for photo evidence???"

Peter Bukowinski "Chaotic neutral"

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Design Objective

The ghosts of technology in today’s language Explores the origin of words/terms that we use figuratively, but once had a literal meaning. For example:

Both radio and TV stations still ask us to tune in, even though tuners don’t really exist in television any more (and in the radio, tuning is much more automatic, using buttons and programs rather than… another dial.)

The user interface component where you choose one of a few options is called radio buttons, based on old radio buttons you’d toggle to… tune in to different frequency bands.

Doug Collins Nobody thought this will be a problem?

Important controls should be separated by proximity and design.

Case in point: nobody wants to risk shifting into park instead of turning down the radio or adjusting the AC while cruising down the road. #ux #design

The Ideal Design Workflow I'm laughing, but also crying:

22.) Once Pixate has driven you to the brink of insanity, switch gears and download the free trial for Framer.

Looks promising!

23.) Now go get some lunch. You’ve earned it.

Tacos sound good.

24.) Come back from lunch and realize your Framer trial has expired. (Seriously, they give you a 32 minute trial)

@minebocek "Everything I know about colors of metals, I've learned from Keynote"

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Tools of the Trade

Zack Whittaker 🤔

I just found out that if you hit a Chrome security warning that you can't pass — like an HSTS issue or a revoked certificate — you can just type "thisisunsafe" and it'll load anyway.

You can try it out here: https://revoked.badssl.com

Dimensions.guide A comprehensive reference of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects.

David R. MacIver 😭

"Pandas is what happened when someone concluded that the problem with Python was that it wasn't enough like R, so built an R clone on top of numpy, the library that was written when someone concluded that the problem with Python was that it wasn't enough like matlab."

CORSAIR "This is your RAM. And THIS is your RAM on Chrome."

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Web-end

Tyler van der Hoeven Cool!

Today I learned about font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums; Basically makes a text value act like monospace so when you’re scaling it up and down via a slider etc. it doesn’t jump around as much.

Nicole He 🔥

when i go to a website and my computer fan turns on, that’s how i know it’s a good website

CSS LEGO Minifigure Maker h/t Smashing Magazine

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Lingua Scripta

@bterlson 🤠

Q: why do JS numbers-
A: IEEE-754
Q: ok but when I add-
A: IEEE-754
Q: fine but NaN doesn't even-
A: Aye. Triple-E. Seven five four.

Khalil Sehnaoui "Coffee calligraphy, or Java Script (pun intended) ¯_(ツ)_/¯"

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Lines of Code

How To Speed Up The Code Review TL;DR Don’t create huge pull-requests with mixed categories of changes.

For example, in feature changes, we check business requirements, but in the structure refactoring, we review backward compatibility. And if we mix several categories it will be hard for a reviewer to keep in mind more than one review strategy. And most likely the reviewer will spend on the request more time than necessary and thus may miss something. Moreover, in a request that has mixed changes any fix being made will force the reviewer to review all these categories again.

brianleroux 💯

Today I am going to write some tests for code I already wrote and it's going to be 🆗. Sometimes I write tests first.

Sometimes I don't or can't because either the tech is too early or my understanding of it is.

Per UNIX philosophy, distrust all claims of 'one true way'.

Des Traynor This is why some code is throwaway, and some tests come after the code:

Explore the solution space before refining the solution.
(aka 'Get the right design, then get the design right')

This is the biggest lesson I've learned from @wasbuxton.

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Locked Doors

Kate O'Neill Time to play the Harmless or Data Mining quiz:

Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram
Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition

Sarah Drasner "I photoshop to relax."

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None of the Above

detremura 👑 "Não consigo parar de ver"

Man unexpectedly locked inside 24 Hour Fitness after closing I have questions.

David Wohlreich "God bless the manual writers who really overdo it."

‘Close’ Proximity, ‘End’ Result, and More Redundant Words to Delete From Your Writing Advice on extraneous words from the Random House copy chief.

Why Gen Z Loves Closed Captioning Because close captioning is the best.

William Hanson "Either there’s a @netflix glitch or @MarieKondo’s methods have escalated."

Peter Rojas Competition comes in many forms:

Wow, in its latest letter to shareholders, Netflix (correctly, if you ask me) identifies Fortnite as being a bigger threat than HBO:

"We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO."

holly This thread is full of truth bombs:

What's a dirty secret that everybody in your industry knows about but anyone outside of your line of work would be scandalized to hear?

Simon Kuestenmacher "Amazing digital art installation on the Galata Tower in #Istanbul in #Turkey. Hope nobody walked past the tower while on drugs..."

Dr Sarah Taber Does "ugly" food really go to waste?

As someone who works in ag & food distribution I gotta disagree w this.

A lot of "ugly" food

-Won't survive distribution bc weird shapes makes it prone to getting smushed, bruised, start to rot, & make everything else in the box/crate rot. Broken skin does the same thing.

Dorsa Amir Legacy code, human edition:

Did you know the human body is full of evolutionary leftovers that no longer serve a purpose? These are called vestigial structures and they’re fascinating. (1/8)

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? Is it possible we got sun exposure and sunscreen all wrong?

In spring, as the sun strengthened, they’d gradually build up a sun-blocking tan. Sunburn was probably a rarity until modern times, when we began spending most of our time indoors. Suddenly, pasty office workers were hitting the beach in summer and getting zapped. That’s a recipe for melanoma.

Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and geologists don’t know why Interesting.

Jeremy Littau Thread:

For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot more going on. Though that is part of that. Here’s a cliffs notes version - not exhaustive but it hits the highlights:

Erik Wade Peanuts and flakes!

I am an American living in Germany. My grocery store currently has a temporary “American food” section. Join me for a tour of what Germans think Americans eat.

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Design Objective

Michael Bolton Hits nail on the head:

25. In most user stories, nobody is ever interrupted, distracted, naive, confused, under pressure, impatient, disabled, outside of wireless access. Nobody makes human mistakes. Nobody closes the damned laptop lid. The characters in user stories might as well be drones, robots.

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Web-end

Kent C. Dodds These are not alternative fonts, they're mathematical symbols abused to make the text look different. Play the video Kent prepared, to hear what this text really sounds like.

You 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 it's 𝒸𝓊𝓉ℯ to 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 your tweets and usernames 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖜𝖆𝖞. But have you 𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 to what it 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 with assistive technologies like 𝓥𝓸𝓲𝓬𝓮𝓞𝓿𝓮𝓻?

The Flexbox Holy Albatross Make Flexbox switch between multiple and single column layouts, without media queries or JavaScript. CSS tricks I could never have imagined.

Nicole Sullivan For real. We don't even need to convince, FOMO will do the convincing.

Unpopular opinion: CSS and HTML need to increment their version numbers again so we can convince business to invest in these technologies. 😂

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Lines of Code

This week we apply the KonMari method to our messy codebase, learn to let go, and tidy up. (Yes, I binge watched all the episodes, as one does)

Joe Groff

As you go through every line of code, you should be asking, does this bring me joy?

Edward Danilyuk

If not, tell that line of code 'Thank you for being in my life' - then toss it in the garbage along with its thousands of friends.

Alexis Gallagher

Before you start refactoring, copy all the code into one big file and just look at it in one place.

nickteissler

Leave the most sentimental lines of code for last.

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Architectural

JBD This:

Storage is the single hardest problem in our domain. Storage related tradeoffs are sometimes the hardest tradeoffs to tackle. Storage decisions often impact every other design decision. I don't know why we are acting like it ain't so.

Tom Eastman From a thread about the latest Ethereum incident, and relevant in so many contexts:

Douglas Adams, in 1992, describing the blockchain:

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

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Devoops

Ryn Daniels 💡

Konmari, but for PagerDuty. "I thank this alert for teaching me that we don't need to alert on things like this. Also this alert did not spark joy."

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Locked Doors

Alan Feuer Jealousy is the ultimate vulnerability:

A jaw-dropping twist this morning to the story of the Colombian IT guy who helped the FBI crack El Chapo's encrypted comms network.
He also helped the feds tap the kingpin's texts w/his wiife, Emma Coronel, taking us deep into the intimacies (and crimes) of their marriage.

@notdan Yes. Also, I'm Californian and we're soft like that.

Being able to turn the heater on from bed is totally worth getting hacked.

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None of the Above

Kevin Liao "2019 is still young but nominating this for press conference prop of the year"

dream ghoul Life hack:

in college we named our intramural softball team “NO GAME SCHEDULED” because if the other team didn’t show up they lost their league deposit and
forfeited. it worked several times. everyone hated us and nothing as cool as that has happened to me since.

third looks 😭

A Blade Runner sequel where Deckard just walks around the city trying different ramen joints

Harvey Newman "A 3D printed light projected animation. Proof that there's always new ways to animate everything."

@EmeraldJhannae 🕶

“I came, I saw, I left early.” A lifestyle.

Shit Academics Say

If you can't say anything nice¹

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¹Say it in a footnote.

Rotarywing "Unbelievable flying and landing at that slope to rescue an injured skier
By French mountain police 👏"