Published
Weekend Reading — Anonymous sources
HelenKennedy "Best reason to go off the record."
Design Objective
Product managers seem to expect a designer to walk up to a product, say something brilliant, and drop the mic. Experienced designers deeply understand a simple fact: design isn’t a deliverable, it’s a process. A process paved with dozens of small empathic observations that lead you, slowly, iteratively to a better product.
Max Emerging trend: the "conversational UI"
Forge by Adonit Slick sketchin app for the iPad (link to App Store).
Astropad Use your iPad as a graphics tablet. Works with apps like Photoshop.
"When I was your age, there were no web fonts! We had to read our New York Times headlines in badly antialiased Georgia!"
Tools of the Trade
Node-Webkit, WebRTC and Angularjs – A Video Chat Client The cost of building a video chat has gone down to a few hours of coding.
Nginx Optimization: Understanding sendfile, tcp_nodelay and tcp_nopush Three TCP flags that affect you server's response time.
HTML5 number inputs – Comma and period as decimal marks Not everyone writes numbers the same way.
CTO's ex-wife canceled the credit card our AWS account was on.
Lingua Scripta
Iterables and iterators in ECMAScript 6 Everything you need to know about for (let x of [1,2,3]).
ES6 Coding Style A modern style guide for a modern JavaScript. I nod in agreement to most of it, e.g. "var MUST NOT be used. const SHOULD be used dy default", although … void 0?
babel-eslint "Lint ALL valid Babel code with the fantastic ESLint."
babel-library-boilerplate "A boilerplate to author Javascript libraries in ES6 for Node and the browser."
Excess XSS "A comprehensive tutorial on cross-site scripting."
App vs applet, now vs then #reminiscing #90s
Lines of Code
The nice thing about single-responsibility functions isn't just that they're easy to test, you can look at them and tell that they work...
Frontend Guidelines Superb collection of guidelines for authoring HTML5, CSS, and ES6.
- Currying might have its place in other languages, but avoid it in JavaScript. It makes your code harder to read by introducing a foreign paradigm while the appropriate use cases are extremely unusual.
- Don't obfuscate the intent of your code by using seemingly smart tricks.
- Don't be afraid of creating lots of small, highly composable and reusable functions.
- Minimize dependencies. Third-party is code you don't know. Don't load an entire library for just a couple of methods easily replicable:
Why your code is so hard to understand
In the end it boils down to this: as a programmer your goal is to construct the simplest possible semantic model that would solve your problem. Translate that semantic model as closely as possible into a syntactic model (code) and provide as many clues as possible so that whomever looks at your code after you can re-create the same semantic model you originally had in mind.
How to end your technical presentation:
- Yell “FREE PIXELS FOR EVERYONE!“
- Throw fistfuls of glitter into the crowd.
- Run.
Locked Doors
Yahoo exec goes mano a mano with NSA director over crypto backdoors Epic!
How Hackers Abused Tor To Rob Blockchain, Steal Bitcoin, Target Private Email And Get Away With It
Software Privdog worse than Superfish Privdog is another piece of software that breaks HTTPS security in a similar way to Superfish, except Privdog comes to us courtesy of Comodo, a Certificate Authority that sells HTTPS certificates. If that's not a statement about the current state of Internet security.
Fines Remain Rare Even As Health Data Breaches Multiply No longer shocking:
Since October 2009, health care providers and organizations (including third parties that do business with them) have reported more than 1,140 large breaches to the Office for Civil Rights, affecting upward of 41 million people. They’ve also reported more than 120,000 smaller lapses, each affecting fewer than 500 people.
Looking forward, however, I think of GPG as a glorious experiment that has run its course. The journalists who depend on it struggle with it and often mess up (“I send you the private key to communicate privately, right?”), the activists who use it do so relatively sparingly (“wait, this thing wants my finger print?”), and no other sane person is willing to use it by default. Even the projects that attempt to use it as a dependency struggle.
Venmo Money, Venmo Problems TL;DR don't connect your checking account to Venmo, use a credit car or debit card with fraud protection.
Startup Life
Son, It’s Time We Talk About Where Start-Ups Come From
I want you to know I love you, even if you’ve experimented with JavaScript or started wooing venture capitalists.
None of the Above
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About "Women In Tech"
Sans Bullshit Sans Perfect for all corporate memos. This font uses ligatures to replace buzzwords with a Comic Sans-styled censorship bar.
Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person How our need to perceive the world as a just place, reconciles with reality by attributing fault to the victims. This explains so much of racism and sexism.
15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs "Shorter > longer" and other advice to heed when designing URLs.
mathemaniac Mathematical argument debunks motivational poster
