Labnotes

Published

Weekend Reading — High five, fist bump

Jon Ostrower "Boeing 004, a 787 from BFI-BFI, files a flight plan: Route? Airplane. We’re going to draw an airplane"


Design Objective

Designing interactive experiences The ‘what, when and how’ of interactive prototyping.

Mark Dalgleish My main beef with tools like Sketch and Photoshop is that they're divorced from the medium:

Designers shouldn't have to code—trouble is, code is the only design tool that doesn't outright ignore the physical properties of our medium

InVision Freehand InVision continues with their masterplan to dominate all our designs, just added a free-hand drawing and collaboration tool.

Supernova Studio Turn Sketch designs into native mobile apps in minutes.


Tools of the Trade

crossenv malware on the npm registry The package you were looking for, and a package that will steal all your passwords, are one typo away, as was the case with crossenv and cross-env (can you guess which of the two will steal all your environment variables?)

Running Selenium and Headless Chrome on AWS Lambda Is not that complicated, but do note the space constraints:

By going through the process above, I was able to get ChromeDriver and Headless Chrome running inside an AWS Lambda function — barely making it under the compressed 50mb size limit for functions (the Chrome binary is around 80% of this).

on: The Decline of the American Laundromat Apropos cloud, an apt analogy:

I live in a house with a washer and dryer.

After we had our first child there was a stretch where my wife and I were both sick for about 2 weeks and the laundry ended up building up significantly. We had probably 10 loads worth to catch up on and it was going to take all of at least one day, maybe two.

Threw it all in the car, went to the laundromat and had it done in 2 hours. Laundromat's are now how I explain "the cloud" to non-technical people.

Paul Ford Words to live by. Just click the link and read the thread, it's only 5 tweets:

A fable. There was a little bird that believed in a powerful super-bird that watched over all birds everywhere. 1/5


Web-end

The Critical Request Understanding how browsers prioritize network requests when loading assets, and tips for optimizing time to first meaningful paint.

Brian Ketelsen 😭

Child: THE INTERNET IS BROKEN

Me: Looks like code 423

Child: What's that?

Me: Failure to unload the dishwasher.


Line of Code

Why Composition is Harder with Classes I can think of better reasons to avoid inheritance than edge cases of instanceof. Quite often, classes are indeed an implementation detail that should be abstracted behind a factory:

Avoid exporting your class. Use class internally for performance gains, but export a factory that creates instances in order to discourage users from extending your class and avoid forcing callers to use new.

Sharon null "Why is this code here? We don't need this."

pug-fail


Architectural

Matt Olson This:

What makes a sr dev to me is someone who says "that sounds hard, why are we doing it?" instead of "that sounds hard, I better get started!"

Three stages of startups and how to chose tech-stack for each of them From "just build it" while you're searching for product/market fit, to multiple stacks, as you grow to address different customer segments.

Arnaud LEMAIRE "Single Responsibility Principle violation illustrated ;)"


Devoops

colonel panic "the stages of oncall"

(Picasso’s self-portrait at ages 18, 25, and 90.)


Peopleware

Soft Skills in UX Design Leadership Not just for UX design:

The ability to be patient with people who aren’t experts in our craft only becomes more important as our skills advance.


Techtopia

The Internet is for End Users An RFC I can stand behind: "This document requires that Internet Standards consider end users as their highest priority concern."

Millennials Unearth an Amazing Hack to Get Free TV: the Antenna What's alarming about this article, people no longer believe free TV could even exist:

Carlos Villalobos, 21, who was selling tube-shaped digital antennas at a swap meet in San Diego recently, says customers often ask if his $20 to $25 products are legal. “They don’t trust me when I say that these are actually free local channels,” he says.

Caroline O'Donovan The Internet of Don't You Dare Leave The City:

i used a new car share app to rent a car and took it to the country and now it won't turn on bc it doesn't have service and i am stranded


Locked Doors

How to use a single download to remotely steal proprietary files from MacOS TL;DR if you saved HTML pages from the web, do not open them with Safari.

Pwn All The Things As you'd expect:

Every single e-vote machine at @Defcon got hacked in < 2.5 days (some in minutes) to hackers without inside or domain-specific knowledge.

And, Kim Zetter:

One of the Express epollbooks at the Defcon voting machine hacking village had 600,000 voter reg records on it from Shelby County, TN

Assaf #infosec


None of the Above

Christoph Niemann "The Abstract-O-Meter." (more)

childish sadbino 💡

yall tired of boiling water every time you make pasta? boil a few gallons at the beginning of the week and freeze it for later.

Petcube bites For stay-at-home pets, an HD pet camera that monitors and flings treats.

ACLU Brief on Behalf of John Oliver So John Oliver got sued, ACLU filed amicus brief, and it's every bit as funny:

Showerthoughts 🐟👽

Humans are basically aliens to fish. We abduct them while fishing and some live to tell the tell while others go missing.

News site makes readers answer questions to prove they understand story before posting comments All news sites and social media should do that!

Business Insider Hand-held inkjet printer that can print on almost anything. Also, very satisfying to watch it in action.

Alastair 😹

To find out your cat name, pick any name at random and refuse to answer to it

If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef Interesting proposition: "this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target."

Internet of Shit Brings us this video of one pilot AirDopping photos to another airplane at 36,000 feet. Airplane mode indeed!

James Breakwell

7-year-old: Which of us is your favorite?

Me: I love all my kids equally.

7: Blink if it's me.

Laura Anthony You know house prices are out of control when …

It's the definition of "as is." Lafayette home teetering just above landslide has a red tag and a price tag of $830,000...or best offer.

I watched in bewilderment while a man tried to return butternut squash because he thought it was cheese Pet peeve — people like this.

Henry Fraser 👨✋🤜🐈

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