Labnotes

Published

Weekend Reading — Surprise holidays

11 Perks of Having the Worst Memory Ever My life, explained.

Design Objective

What happens when an Apple guy explores Material Design? I'm a fan of material design. The UI is good, as good as anything Apple makes. And also, you can use it for mobile and webapps.

Material Design Lite Exhibit A: MDL is a library of components & templates — vanilla HTML, CSS and JS — for building web apps/pages with Material Design.

The decline of Stack Overflow Designing software for communities, especially self-moderating communities, is hard.


Tools of the Trade

Introducing Incremental DOM Google picks a fight with Facebook (React):

  1. We really like templates. Our designers like templates. Lets make sure we can continue to use our existing templating languages.
  2. Performance, especially on memory constrained mobile devices, can suffer when large virtual DOM trees need to be updated a lot.

React with C++: Building the Quip Mac and Windows Apps First of all, if you're still using Google Docs, why? Quip is just better. Second, check how they designed and built their hybrid app.

A Javascript Natural Language Parser Cool library that parses plain text, to extract date, time, place, phone number, etc.

changed-log Shows all commit messages between two versions of an npm module.

Amazon API Gateway This is big deal. I'm not saying it's a good solution for your service architecture — AWS has a certain unnecessary complexity about it — but when Amazon does something, the rest of the industry pays attention.

Open source behind the firewall What government can learn from startups and the open source community.

Phabricator "An open source, software engineering platform". Quite possibly the funniest of them all:

Have terrible software? Keep track of all the defects and problems with your awful code using Maniphest.


Lingua Scripta

A Quick Tour Of ES6 (Or, The Bits You’ll Actually Use) This blog post is "The Good Parts" for all the new parts in ES6. Includes a very handy cheatsheet.

Jafar Husain: Async Programming in ES7 Video talk from JSConf US 2015.

What is npm’s prepublish, and why is it so confusing? Unraveling one of npm's biggest mysteries.


Lines of Code

@securedmh

Insanity is compiling the same code over and over again until that one time it somehow works.

coderproverbs dot tumblr dot com

@molily

The tests are always greener in the other branch


Architectural

Why the Great Glitch of July 8th Should Scare You

That is how a lot of our older software systems that control crucial parts of infrastructure are run. This works for a while, but every new layer adds more vulnerability. We are building skyscraper favelas in code — in earthquake zones.

Fight against Software Complexity It starts from the top.


Locked Doors

How to Configure OS X to Protect Your Privacy I also recommend turning Keychain off and using a proper password manager.

Adobe Flash exploit that was leaked by Hacking Team goes wild; patch now! We software developer need to be more responsible and say no to Flash.

Secure Your Node.js Web Application: Keep Attackers Out and Users Happy Book now in beta. I've seen one excerpt and it suggested using password recovery "security" questions, so I'm not about to recommend this book, but check it out for yourself.

Wi-Fi Sense: How Microsoft Has Effectively Broken Wi-Fi Security No, I do not want social sharing of my Wifi password, thank you very much.

Hacking Team Is Hacked Couldn't have happened to a worse company. Of note:

Hacking Team had no exploits for an un-jail-broken iPhone. Seems like the platform of choice if you want to stay secure.

And also:

It's one thing to have dissatisfied customers. It's another to have dissatisfied customers with death squads. I don't think the company is going to survive this.

@joshcorman

I don’t fear SkyNet. We write such terrible code we could always just hack it w/ 12yr old known vulnerabilities and/or default passwords


Techtopia

You’re blaming the wrong people

Those hideous ads? The nerds may hate them, but in the really real world, they work. I’ve seen the numbers. … Again, Google and Facebook. Ads work. Even the ones you hate. Maybe especially those.

@incloud Every new technology will be repurposed for targeting ads:

WebRTC being used now by embedded 3rd party on http://nytimes.com to report visitors' local IP addresses.

@helytimes

Crazy how the phrase "left to their own devices" predates the time when everybody carried amazing devices.


Peopleware

Success Skills for Introverts A video workshop based on the book Quiet Influence: The Introvert's Guide to Making a Difference: tackling the workplace challenges of being an introvert.

A Holacracy of Dunces So, Pando, tell me how do you really feel about Holacracy?


None of the Above

I, Racist America, 2015:

But here is the irony, here’s the thing that all the angry Black people know, and no calmly debating White people want to admit: The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.

Can you solve it? Is beehive Hidato the new Sudoku? You can play it here.

Amazing photos from Le Mans 2015

Panda “Daycare” Exists And Is Most Adorable Place On Earth

@tbhjuststop

I hate when Netflix asks if I'm still watching. You really think I got my life together in the last 2 hours?

US challenges Japan to giant fighting robot battle Well, this is going to be fun.

Calvin and Markov Calvin and Hobbes strips generated using Markov chains, perl, and Imagemagick

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