Labnotes

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Josh Gondelman "At the very least, you've got to use a smaller font, guys."

Design Objective

Design Better Data Tables This article is an illustrated collection of data table design patterns:

Good data tables allow users to scan, analyze, compare, filter, sort, and manipulate information to derive insights and commit actions.

The Path to Design System Maturity How a design system is, and should be treated like, a product:

When you’re in the early stages of design system development, consistency often works upwards. Rather than a set of guidelines dictating practice, emerging patterns dictate guidelines (sometimes to a fault).

Why Silicon Valley is all wrong about Amazon’s Echo Show Some great points, some unnecessary hype (didn't cell phones already spell the end of PCs?):

What we see in the Echo Show video is Amazon scratching away at the sheen of today’s leading technology products and asserting a more utilitarian aesthetic. By reducing the importance of appearance, Amazon can emphasize function over form, keep its prices anticompetitively low, and drown the market with products that offer access to its AI voice assistant.

Tools of the Trade

Ben Schwarz "Android is now the worlds most used OS" (source: StatCounter)

omg-img Is a CDN that hosts over 48,000 icons, doesn't get any easier than that. PNGs are free with attribution, so try before you buy.

cookiengineer/git-ddiff "A better git diff for humans with lack of memory" lets you run diffs like:

git ddiff yesterday morning;

Sarah Drasner

Sometimes I open source code just so I can find it again

Alyssa Ross

TIL you can hit ⌘I in macOS Terminal and get a handy tree of processes for the current tab. You can even select and kill them from it!

ira in 🇮🇹 🍝

hi 👋, bashing other people's libraries during talks ain't cool -- building and maintaining OSS projects is hard, sweaty work.

Jason Pontin

Q: "Why did the convolutional neural net cross the road?"

A: "What do you care? Get off my case. It works, doesn't it?"

Web-end

How to Think About HTTP Status Codes Is the reference you want to keep handy, and share with fellow developers, when designing applications that use HTTP status codes:

Beyond that, it’s a mistake to try to map each part of your application “deeply” into HTTP status codes; in most cases the level of granularity you want to be aiming for is much coarser. When in doubt, it’s OK to use the generic status codes 200 OK, 400 Bad Request and 500 Internal Service Error when there isn’t a better fit.

Ryan Hayes 💻 🎮 👍

Windows store will search the web for PWAs and auto-ingest quality ones into the store. No difference in PWA vs Native.

Pinboard No you don't:

If you make your web page 200KB and avoid javascript, you won’t need a Google distinguished engineer to make it load fast

Giana Schrödinger's CSS:

Can these two groups

"CSS is so easy, it's not even coding!"

"CSS is so hard, we need to replace it with JS!"

please talk to each other

Zach Leatherman "👀 has anyone tried this new css framework yet"

Lingua Scripta

util.promisify You will not believe what just got added to Node:

Takes a function following the common Node.js callback style, i.e. taking a (err, value) => ... callback as the last argument, and returns a version that returns promises.

The Practical Dev "undefined is catching up to null"

Lines of Code

Five Factor Testing Good tests can…

  1. Verify the code is working correctly
  2. Prevent future regressions
  3. Document the code’s behavior
  4. Provide design guidance
  5. Support refactoring

David R. MacIver Don't forget:

PSA: If a function accepts a string then it's a parser. Parsers are hard to get right and dangerous to get wrong. Write fewer of them.

Stephanie @ OSCON

Also a lot of people forget that code is often the easy part

Hard parts: communication, prioritizing, planning, learning, designing systems

Architectural

Reginald Braithwaite A Twitter thread that should have been a blog post:

When “convention over configuration” first appeared, it was great, because the configuration it replaced was largely accidental complexity.

Convention in Ruby over parsing XML files to configure Dependency injection in Java?

Make mine a double!

But today it isn't Convention over Accidental Complexity. Now it’s often Convention over composing small and elegant functional pieces.

Locked Doors

NHS seeks to recover from global cyber-attack as security concerns resurface New ransomware attack. This one affects more than just hospitals, but the damage to emergency services, that's a new twist.

Barry Dorrans And why "just patch it" is not as easy as it sounds:

The release of the patch probably isn't going to help that £15m MRI machine that runs XP embedded whose maker went bankrupt 10 years ago.

So it's not a matter of £100 for a license it's £15 million for a new machine and you need to rip the building open to install it

How to Accidentally Stop a Global Cyber Attacks And how one young security expert accidentally stopped the malware from spreading (though, not for long, I hear a new version is out.)

The hijacking flaw that lurked in Intel chips is worse than anyone thought So, some Intel chips come with a web server, it's baked into the hardware, and of course you can't turn if off, and of course it's easily compromised …

April King 🌀 All of the above?

You're being interviewed for an infosec position in Hell. Which of these are you forced to explain, again and again, for all eternity?

29% DNS / DNSSEC / DANE
27% SPF / DKIM / DMARC
44% TLS / PKI

Techtopia

Silicon Valley: A Reality Check When self-centered social-media-obsessed journalists report on Silicon Valley, they see it in their own image: self-centered and social-media-obsessed. There's much more to Silicon Valley than $400 juicers:

If a deeply good person crusading for a better world enters Silicon Valley … she’ll see mobile apps that track tropical diseases, clean energy startups that fight global warming by directly sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, companies bringing microbanking to poor Nepalese villagers, and boutique pharmaceutical labs searching for cures for orphan diseases.

We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment Spoiler alert: they didn't. This article has interesting lessons, and a checklist, for anyone designing chat-based systems.

Alexa Calling Has a Major Privacy Flaw Related:

Instead, every contact that also has the Alexa app is now in my Alexa Calling contacts. Among my contacts were old landlords, many co-workers, random vendor account managers, city councilmen, and of course, crazy ex-boyfriends. And each one now has a direct line into my home.

Tom Gara

My friend's toddler babbled "don't forget to subscribe" as he was put to bed. Kid watches so much YouTube he thought it means "goodbye"

None of the Above

How Pixar Lost Its Way And how Disney Animation Studios found its groove.

Ben Sandofsky Me too:

I will consider iOS 11 a game changer if I can plug my phone into a car and it doesn't play the the first song in my library.

The Forgotten Story Of The Radium Girls, Whose Deaths Saved Thousands Of Workers' Lives From the "corporations have no incentive to harm" department:

But that belief was founded upon research conducted by the very same radium firms who had built their lucrative industry around it. They ignored all the danger signs; when asked, managers told the girls the substance would put roses in their cheeks.

Machine Pix "Pre-fading jeans with a laser."

Parker Thompson. "I feel like CNBC is astrology for day traders."

While bitcoin has seen a recent rally, previous peaks have seen sharp pullbacks in prices. Masters said the price rise has been "violent in the short-term" with bitcoin "fully valued for the moment". This could lead to a pullback to around $1,100.

However, the long-term outlook remains strong.

The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked When big data meets big money from the far right of the political spectrum.

IM 🍑HIM "This is hands down, the most bad-ass bird photo that I've seen."

Published on

Colm

Design Objective

Meetup: A Usability Case Study Tweaking and fixing usability issues in the new Meetup app (ps: this is a passion project, not affiliated with Meetup).

Mobile First, Desktop Worst Mobile-first is not a license to over-simplify, just like desktop-first is not a license to over-complicate.

Designing forms for gender diversity and inclusion "As with any form field, if there isn’t a clear benefit to the user, you probably shouldn’t ask about it." And if ask you must, this article discusses important considerations and UI choices.

Brandon Jones "Car UX designer: I replaced the gearshift with a volume knob, put it where the volume knob usually goes, and put the volume knob next to it!"

Tools of the Trade

Kryptonite Use your phone to authenticate with SSH. Slick app with easy setup for common providers (AWS, Github, Heroku, etc), open source so you can code review before installing.

zenorocha/codecopy A browser extension that adds copy to clipboard buttons on every code block.

github/octodns A tool for managing DNS across multiple providers. Because your DNS provider will be DoS-ed at some point.

Same Stats, Different Graphs: Generating Datasets with Varied Appearance and Identical Statistics through Simulated Annealing This is why you always plot the data!

Samsung DeX brings a new Dimension to the Mobile Web The Samsung S8 phone can dock and turn into a desktop computer!

Colin Percival

Closures and Objects are just Structures which have function pointers and delusions of grandeur.

Web-end

Launchpad Publish responsive websites directly from Sketch.

Finding that pesky listener that’s hijacking your event "This is a debugging story of how to determine what event listener is calling event.preventDefault() or event.stopPropagation() or some other completely random thing which is not allowing your intended action."

Sam Saccone "The perf gutter in devtools makes it trivial to identify non-obvious costly paths in your code execution."

Lingua Scripta

Prepack Is this week's JavaScript hotness. It's mind blowing what JavaScript can do (I'm not endorsing using this in production, but do check it out):

Prepack is a tool that optimizes JavaScript source code: Computations that can be done at compile-time instead of run-time get eliminated. Prepack replaces the global code of a JavaScript bundle with equivalent code that is a simple sequence of assignments. This gets rid of most intermediate computations and object allocations.

Functional pattern: flatMap Can easily filter and map at the same time.

Native ECMAScript modules Are now supported by all the major browsers.

Axel Rauschmayer "Failure by hoisting. ;-)"

Jim Perrin

OH: "So far, the Infinite monkey theorem is just giving us an infinite number of javascript frameworks, and no Shakespeare"

Lines of Code

Plan Your Commits Like readme driven development, test first, etc, this life hack will make you a better developer, for the simple reason that it will force you to slow down and think:

try writing your commit message (in your head) before you write the code

Kent Beck

infallible recipe for creating a new abstraction:

  1. write variants of the same damn program twelve damn times

  2. say, "damn it, this line and this line and this line always show up somehow"

  3. put those lines somewhere, together

Strategic Code Deletion Everybody enjoys deleting code and few get to do it often enough.

Readability Matters More Than Correctness 💯

If we have readability but not correctness, that means a buggy program that’s easy to understand. We can debug it. Then we’ll have a correct program that’s easy to understand. It’ll probably stay that way.

If we have correctness but not readability, that means a functional program that’s hard to understand. It’s likely we’ll introduce a bug. Then we’ll have a buggy program that’s hard to understand. It’ll probably stay that way.

Why a clear error message matters "Sometimes the "natural cause" is not the real cause for a problem, and if we have a great error message to help us out, we can avoid wasting a lot of time"

Bryan Boreham 🤔 "Where is your god now?"

Architectural

@ag_dubs "people had no idea how/why to module but they felt very strongly that it was good"

Gwen (Chen) Shapira

Software architects must be accountable to ops. If your Microservices are a mess and no one can debug the dataflow, they did it wrong.

Clive Thompson Software engineering is making decisions like this:

Memory leaks on missiles don't matter, so long as the missile explodes before too much leaks. A 1995 memo: https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ada/E9bNCvDQ12k/1tezW24ZxdAJ …

Verena Haunschmid

Just reduced the runtime of an algorithm from 9 hours to 3 min. by using a different data structure... Know you data structures :) #rstats

Parker Thompson

God grant me the budget to buy the things I shouldn't build, the eng team to code the things I must, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Peopleware

Start holding a domain knowledge meeting "It shares knowledge across the team, it builds rapport with team members, and it helps us professionally develop ourselves."

The 2017 Tech Leavers Study A national study examining why people voluntarily left their jobs in tech:

Employees indicate that improving workplace culture can improve retention. 62% of all employees would have stayed if their company had taken steps to create a more positive and respectful work environment. 57% would have stayed if their company had taken steps to make the company culture more fair and inclusive.

Locked Doors

All your Googles are belong to us What you need to know about the recent phishing attack, because this will happen again:

Today's phish asks the target to grant access to "Google Docs"—a fake application using the name of Google's service. If the target grants permission, the malicious site will immediately harvest contacts from the target's e-mail and send copies of the original message to them.

Also, this Onion headline from 2014: Security Experts Advise Americans To Not Click Anything

After years of warnings, mobile network hackers exploit SS7 flaws to drain bank accounts "customers have had their bank accounts drained using a two-stage attack that exploits SS7" (SS7 in this context means SMS)

Hundreds of Apps Can Listen for Marketing ‘Beacons’ You Can’t Hear The technology behind free apps/games that "need" to access your phone's mic.

Don Lor "the famous 'dining cryptographer' problem, where you can't shake hands until you are certain of the identity of the other individual"

None of the Above

Nathan W. Pyle "pro drawing tip"

Merlin Mann

It's okay not to have an opinion about everything.

I know you know this.

But, sometimes it's useful to be reminded that you know this.

Panda Reactions! "when u are at a restaurant and u see another table getting their food first before u but u sat down first"

How a Single Gene Could Become a Volume Knob for Pain People who feel no pain, and people who can't stop feeling pain.

Adrienne Porter Felt "MY FAVORITE REVIEW OF A CHROMEBOOK"

You are not going to believe what I'm about to tell you Outstanding comic by the Oatmeal explaining "the backfire effect". I want to believe this is the explanation for ever more divisive partisan politics, but the facts don't support it:

Evidence of factual backfire is far more tenuous than prior research suggests. By and large, citizens heed factual information, even when such information challenges their partisan and ideological commitments.

Tom Wysocki "Brilliant poster. Nice one Dave."

Published on

Hsing-Hui Hsu "I thought I had a handle on this"

Design Objective

Information Architecture. The Most Important Part of Design You’re Probably Overlooking. Indeed:

Tips for Creating Good, Clean Information Architecture

  1. Be very clear about what’s important (and what isn’t).
  2. Think in terms of “buckets” of information
  3. Don’t be afraid to revisit your Information Architecture

Jen Simmons

Every team should be required to test their alpha on the NYC subway before shipping. Make it work under those network conditions. Seriously.

Stark Color-blind simulator and contrast checker for Sketch.

Graphic Means "The graphic design office of 1980."

Andrew Stacy Hamburger menu!

Just released our new Menu Board software to every McDonald's store in the US. Built with @polymer to be completely modular.

Tools of the Trade

A Better Way to Code d3.express is a better Jupyter Notebook, all JavaScript, with d3 APIs (for better or worse).

Roughing It Dev Style: Coding Without a Computer I remember when "coding without a computer" meant pencil and graph paper, or punchcards. This article explores coding with an iPhone. We made some progress in a few short decades.

Spending 100K USD in 4,5 days on Amazon Web Services The unintended consequence of leaving AWS credentials in a public Github repo, and what to do when your account gets hijacked.

How SSH port became 22 Back when you could send an email, and get a designated port number.

Competitive Programmer's Handbook Will prepare you to participate in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

Gameleon "Out of context IT jargon makes you sound like a psychopath"

README.md

Webtech

Journey to Highly Effective and Maintainable CSS Media Queries Has good ideas on how to write media queries, how to structure stylesheets with many queries, and how to choose breakpoints and tweakpoints. Also, this: "breakpoints should be content-based, not device based."

Sizzy A tool for developing responsive websites.

It’s Time To Start Using CSS Custom Properties CSS catching up with Less/Sass.

Fathom: a framework for understanding web pages A better way for browsers to act on page content: sign in forms, products pages, articles, etc. Uses logic programming, so no control flow, plugin systems, etc.

Painting with Code Bridging the gap between designers and engineers: "React-sketchapp is an open-source library that allows you to write React components that render to Sketch documents."

acathrow

An engineer just suggested an RFC for HTTP response

HTTP 299 Disappointed: The server has accepted your request but thinks you can do better

Lingua Scripta

ryanmcdermott/clean-code-javascript "🛁 Clean Code concepts adapted for JavaScript" A few misses (e.g chained methods are better immutable), but overall solid write up, and every suggestion comes with examples.

7 tips to handle undefined in JavaScript Even experienced developers get undefined wrong.

Axel Rauschmayer And besides, you may want to use Map for clarity:

Object.create(null) for dictionaries is only safe in ES6+. Don’t forget there’s also Map! http://speakingjs.com/es5/ch17.html#dict_pattern

Mark Dalgleish

To a non JavaScript developer, it must sound extremely redundant that we run our code through both Prettier and Uglify.

Lines of code

Cory House 🏠 Check rest of thread for more details/nuances:

A function name should describe what it does, not when it's run.

Why? Good function names summarize what happens inside.

Code Standards

I like to title my code reviews like clickbait so people actually read them:

"You'll never believe this one quick fix that solves our bug!"

sean 🌹 Is exactly:

Writing is hard because it often ends up being the process through which you realize that you don't actually understand something.

Manisha Agarwal

A programmer started to cuss
As getting to sleep was a fuss
As she lay there in bed
Looping 'round in her head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++

Architectural

Hype Driven Development And how to make sure it doesn't kill your development process.

Michael D. Hill This thread, on why, when, and how to TDD:

i use TDD for one reason and one reason only: to move features faster. more faster features is my job. TDD does that.

And:

we use our judgment to decide when to write a test, or not. when to write a faster one, or not. how to 'joint' a problem testably, and so on

Dan Woods #NoDramaOps

For production, I fucking love "boring". I favor consistency and reliability over speed every day of the week.

Peopleware

Why your programmers just want to code Creative problem solvers need an outlet for their creativity:

How you handle ideas from new programmers sends an important signal. Good or bad, it sets the stage for what they expect. This determines if they share more ideas in the future… or keep their mouth shut.

syd

Simply telling someone you like the work they did today could be the reason they make something again tomorrow.

Techtopia

Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities This article can be summarized as: learn some ethics, apply some ethics to your work, just because ethics are taught in humanity studies, doesn't mean they don't belong in STEM.

Lyrebird Ethics One company that has an ethics page. Though we may not like what they have to say, at least they're giving us a head's up:

Lyrebird is the first company to offer a technology to reproduce the voice of someone as accurately and with as little recorded audio. …

Voice recordings are currently considered as strong pieces of evidence in our societies and in particular in jurisdictions of many countries. Our technology questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings.

Locked Doors

I Got Hacked So You Don't Have To What is spearphishing and why it's so damn effective:

You can’t sell a box that stops people from trusting their daughters, from missing a typo in an e-mail address, from being a little too tired to check the URL of a link.

None of the Above

maple cocaine "Fuckin rené magritte is my landlord"

On the spelling of Resumé That settles if for me:

“Resumé” in this sense is an English word, not a French one. It’s not pronounced like the French word. And it doesn’t even have this meaning in French—French, like British and International English, uses the Latin term “curriculum vitae”

Ikea Had a Great Reaction to Balenciaga Making a $2,145 Version of Its 99-Cent Blue Bag "How to identify an original Ikea Frakta bag." Brilliant.

Facebook Data ‘Does Not Contradict’ Intelligence on Russia Meddling That's one way of phrasing what happened.

The earth is flat (p>0.05): Significance thresholds and the crisis of unreplicable research How p-values came to be the standard bearer, and why it's time for researchers to move on.

daphne "Life Hack 😂"

Published on

Biisuke Ball's Big Adventure Part 2 Brilliant.

Design Objective

Everyone is a designer. Get over it. Exactly:

Whether you like it or not, whether you approve it or not, people outside of your design team are making significant design choices that affect your customers in important ways. They are designing your product. They are designers.

John Ferguson Smart "The problem with software development:"

Tools of the Trade

Debugging Tips and Tricks Fantastic tips for front-end developers. This one is under-utilized:

I have a lot of different methods of isolation in practice. One is to create a reduced test case on a local instance, or a private CodePen, or a JSBin.

So what’s this GraphQL thing I keep hearing about? In a nutshell:

The solution Facebook came up with is conceptually very simple: instead of having multiple “dumb” endpoints, have a single “smart” endpoint that can take in complex queries, and then massage the data output into whatever shape the client requires.

dan… slimmon?!?! "thinking about estimation. i think we usually go past 'probably good enough' and even often go past 'definitely stop'"

Lies My Parents Told Me (About Logs) Continuing the tradition of "myths developers believe about …"

notwaldorf/tiny-care-terminal "💖💻 A little dashboard that tries to take care of you when you're using your terminal."

Latchkey Devops

OH: "We're doing soviet style agile - every two weeks there's a new five year plan" // Will Whittaker

Huenry Hueffman "I fucked up Git so bad it turned into Guitar Hero"

Lingua Scripta

Stanford CS department updates introductory courses: Java is Gone Since most people get a CS degree in order to work in the industry, schools need to pick practical languages. UC Berkeley, for example, starts with Python. Where do other schools stand?

The SIGCSE-Members list recently polled all of their members to talk about what they’re currently teaching. The final spreadsheet of results is here. Python appears 60 times, C++ 54 times, Java 84 times, and JavaScript 28 times. I was surprised to see how common C++ is, and if Java is dying (or “showing its age,” as Eric Roberts is quoted below), it’s going out as the reigning champ.

Async iterators and generators Using async iterators to read from a stream, as simple as:

async function getResponseSize(url) {  
  const response = await fetch(url);
  let total = 0;

  for await (const chunk of response.body) {
    total += chunk.length;
  }
  return total;
}

Bodil Another JavaScript curiosity that didn't age well:

Here's a fun JS thing @brianloveswords showed me:

let x=5;
let y=1<!--x;

What are x and y after evaluation?

Why?

Are you crying yet?

Lines of Code

NodeJS and Good Practices I'm no fan of complexity dependency injection, but if it helps you tame complexity:

In software development, a responsibility is a task that a unity is committed to achieving, for example: represent the concept of a product in an application, handle network requests, persist a user in the database, and so on and so forth.

A quick look at reduce, foldl, foldr, and associative order "In sum, the order of consuming values and the order of associating a folding function are two separate concepts."

RE: A revolution in audio rendering When audiophiles write software:

found that a function called memcpy was the culprit, most memory players use memcpy and this is one of the reasons why memory play sounds worse ie digital sounding. Fortunately there is an optimised version of memcpy from http://www.agner.org/optimize/, using this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy. the other thing I did was to close the file after reading into the buffer.

Christian Rebischke "So that's the trick.. 🤔"

Architectural

The Rise of the Data Engineer A new specialization:

Unlike data scientists — and inspired by our more mature parent, software engineering — data engineers build tools, infrastructure, frameworks, and services. In fact, it’s arguable that data engineering is much closer to software engineering than it is to a data science.

Sarah Mei

People use the word "monolith" as a epithet, but if your boundaries need to be easy to change, a monolith is your best architecture choice.

Sebastian Markbåge

The next time someone presents an architecture idea, ask how does it perform in the presence of existing code that doesn't play into it?

Peopleware

The 15-minute weekly habit that eased my work anxiety—and made my boss trust me more Management is a two-way street:

The approach was simple. Every Friday afternoon, I’d send my boss a short email with three categories:

  • The work I had completed that week
  • What I was working on, including any deadlines that may have shifted or obstacles I’d encountered
  • What I was waiting on—that is, tasks that I’d completed, but require sign-off from my boss or contributions from someone else

Jeff Bezos' 2017 letter to shareholders How to run a company at high velocity:

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

And also:

Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.

Parand Darugar Then again:

Everybody generalizes from too few data points. At least I do.

Locked Doors

A 3D-printed key that can’t be copied The lock pattern is 3D printed on the inside!

Chrome and Firefox Phishing Attack Uses Domains Identical to Known Safe Sites Upgrade to the latest Chrome, see the article on how to fix in Firefox, doesn't affect IE/Safari.

A Remote Attack on the Bosch Drivelog Connector Dongle If you have an older (read: hack-proof) car, don't fret: Drivelog Connect is quite affordable and properly insecure.

Abusing NVIDIA's node.js to bypass application whitelisting The shortcomings of application whitelisting, as illustrated by NVIDIA's Web Helper app.

Malware Unicorn "This should replace hacker stock photos"

Artificially Intelligent

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI "No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem."

AI programs exhibit racial and gender biases, research reveals Well before AI rises to eradicate the human race, it will ruin us from the inside:

Machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use, scientists say

Amy Hoy

by today's definition, y=mx+b is an artificial intelligence bot that can tell you where a line is going

None of the Above

Mr Bones "Do not feed the birds adderall"

Siobhan Thompson

The numbers for the Science March seem high but we won't know until we compare it to the numbers at the placebo march that's also happening

World’s “Mattest and Flattest” Black Paint is Now Available for All Worldwide TIL artists are fighting for who can use the blackest of black colors.

Showerthoughts Every "Millennials are …" article ever:

Most people hope their kid's future will be easier, but most people also get mad at the younger generation for having it too easy.

Patrick Dalton "Pound shop gold. The instructions are the greatest thing I've ever read."

Google Plans Ad-Blocking Feature in Popular Chrome Browser I'm going to guess … Google ads … would not be blocked …?

gifs de gatinhos

Tom Brown

ever since I was made aware that the word "homeowner" contains "meow" in it I am incapable of reading that word without thinking about it

Sleep Is the New Status Symbol "Sleep today is a measure of success, a skill to be cultivated and nourished." I've been preparing for this moment my entire life.

@DrewTumaABC7 How to report the weather:

Emoji Forecast: 👍🏻👍🏻overall; need 🌂 then 🕶
Wed: 🌤➡️🌧(at night)
Thu: 🌤➡️☀️
Fri: ☀️🌡⬆️
WEEKEND: ☀️😎👌🏻
Mon: 🌤
Tue: ⛅️

Flying Snoopy Doghouse Remote Control Quadcopter Drone Not quite flying car, but close enough.

Published on

Downtown Josh Brown "I found it. The coolest dog of all time."

Design Objective

Factory vs. Studio Pick the right start conditions, the rest will follow:

The first time I did this activity, I had no idea what to expect, but the results blew me away. Start conditions matter. Choose wisely and mix and blend to suit your taste.

How United Onboards New Users As bad as you imagined?

Tools of the Trade

AutoDraw Amazing. Draw your best (or worst) stick figure, and AutoDraw's AI will find a high quality sketch for you.

Introducing Increment A software engineering magazine dedicated to practical and useful insight into the ostensibly small things that are actually big things: testing, deployment, development tools, code review. Subscribed.

The invisible parts of CSS This article will help you understand how different parts of CSS come together (cascade, box model, display types, etc).

Using the Chrome devtools new code coverage feature Code coverage lets you run your web app, and for each JS/CSS file, see which lines of code ran and which didn’t.

Headless Chromium Using headless Chrome from the command line and from Node. And with that, PhantomJS project is shutting down.

Source Still searching for the perfect client, but here's one more to review.

The History of the Web Stories of how the Web came to be.

Nat Pryce I need this!

Product idea: a calendar app that automatically adds "Get audio working: 10 minutes" as the first agenda item of any remote meeting.

Lingua Scripta

Why you should use Object.is() in equality comparison Explains the difference between ==, === and Object.is.

Lines of Code

Software Complexity: The Art of Naming If you can break things into specific responsibilities, naming becomes much easier.

Gigasquid

How to recognize a programmer: Do they use the word "orthogonal" in a conversation?

Architectural

Sinjo ✌🏼 💖

A thing SRE has taught me more than previous roles: non-uniformity (of code, infra, process) is expensive.

Not to say you should never do it, but every time you have to say "oh that one's a bit different" costs you.

Peopleware

Stephanie Hurlburt

After thinking on it & talking to lots of teams, I'm convinced that the best developer job interview is a simple discussion about past work.

Ian Chan

My eng management book will have a chapter: 'How to eat your lunch in 5 minutes then drink 5 coffees/day during 1:1s without dying'

Locked Doors

Shields Up: Developing Security Skepticism Critical reading is necessary. Also, cut click-bait journalism of out your diet, replace with sources that help you parse the news, and put things in context.

A quick look at the Ikea Trådfri lighting platform At least Ikea is getting IoT right.

Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling Dedicated hackers.

None of the Above

Max Weiss "Get into a Twitter war with @Wendys at your own peril."

Google Disabled Burger King’s Ad Hijacking Google Home, but BK Got Around That Too Now that TV ads can command any device in your home, what's left for us people to do? Sleep more?

How “News Literacy” Gets Web Misinformation Wrong I wholeheartedly agree. Forget the rest, and follow these three steps:

  • Check for previous fact-checking work
  • Go upstream to the source
  • Read laterally

Australian rapper skips dinner bill by swimming off, court told Every paragraph of this story gets better and better:

An Australian rapper called 2pec racked up a large bill in a seafood restaurant, before running into the sea to avoid paying, a Queensland court has heard.

Dave "I altered my light switches to dispense potatoes. Why? Because I can"