Published
Weekend Reading — Codeapillar
Heidi Howard "It seems it’s never to early to start learning computer science, even at age three #codeapillar #STEMtoys"
Tools of the Trade
The new Firefox It is fast. It is pretty. It eats up less memory. It includes some ad blocking tech. It's a big milestone, and maybe time to switch default browser?
React Bits A compilation of React Patterns, techniques, tips and tricks.
I love how React uses
dangerouslySetInnerHTMLas the attribute name for raw InnerHTML, just to make sure you're aware that you're probably doing something stupid. #reactjs
Introducing security alerts on GitHub "With your dependency graph enabled, we’ll now notify you when we detect a vulnerability in one of your dependencies and suggest known fixes from the GitHub community."
Apparently “mocking tests” doesn’t mean what I thought it did, and I owe QA a massive apology.
Web-end
Service Workers Break the Browser’s Refresh Button by Default; Here’s Why Biggest problem with Service Workers (like appcache beforehand), is how quickly you go from "cool demo, app works offline!" to "broke in production, users are stuck, can't use site!":
By default, users have to close all tabs to a site in order to update a Service Worker. The Refresh button is not enough.
Service Workers break the Refresh button because they behave like “apps,” refusing to update while the app is still running, in order to maintain code consistency and client-side data consistency.
Advanced CSS-Only Form Styling Pseudo selectors to the rescue!
input:invalid {
border-color: var(--color-error);
background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml,…");
}
My web app died from performance bankruptcy When you're the dominant browser vendor, you can decide to break the web:
Breaking changes might happen pretty fast. Current version of Chrome is 62. Your code might being broken by the time Chrome 67 arrives. It almost certainly wouldn’t work in Chrome 100.
Lines of Code
hemanth/functional-programming-jargon Glossary of functional programming terms, with examples in ES2015, and translations in several languages.
Architectural
The GraphQL stack: How everything fits together A look at caching, tracing, schema stitching, and GraphQL’s future from GraphQL Summit 2017.
Donald Knuth - The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves And once again, Weekend Reading on the subject of TeX:
Yak shave 1: Somewhere along the road, implement your own programming language…
Yak shave 4: Design a font
Yak shave 8: Implement a custom language for printable documents
Devoops
Punishment Driven Development? Lessons from troubleshooting industrial monitoring systems:
Having a motivation to make your software better really helps, hence Punishment Driven Development
If having a coffee in the morning doesn’t wake you up, try deleting a table in a production database instead.
Peopleware
Neuroscience Explains Why We Get Hacked So Easily TL;DR our attention is limited, and we easily get habituated, but look: colorful MRI scans you haven't seen before!
Testing showed that people using the interruption-sensitive version of Chrome ignored the message only about a third of the time, compared to about 80 percent of the time without it.
…
By breaking the usual rules of software design and having the security-related messages change in appearance slightly each time—for example, with different colors—it was possible to reduce the habituation effect.
Lazy Susan "The last things I'll scream from my death bed"
Locked Doors
Hackers Say They've Broken Face ID a Week After iPhone X Release The threat model here is somewhat different than a 10 year old unlocking their parent's phone:
"Potential targets shall not be regular users, but billionaires, leaders of major corporations, nation leaders, and agents like FBI need to understand the Face ID's issue," the Bkav researchers write.
Tech Topia
She Warned of ‘Peer-to-Peer Misinformation.’ Congress Listened. What if you were placed in an echo chamber and couldn't escape?
Through one account she created to monitor anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, she quickly realized she was being pushed toward other anti-vaccine accounts, creating an echo chamber in which it appeared that viewpoints like “vaccines cause autism” were the majority.
Ashamed to work in Silicon Valley: how techies became the new bankers I'm old enough to remember when people in SV complained "family/friends don't understand what I do for a living!" Now we'd rather they never find out:
“I would never say I worked at Facebook,” said one 30-year-old software engineer who left the company last year to pursue an alternative career. Instead, at dinner parties he would give purposefully vague responses and change the subject. “There’s this song and dance you learn to play because people are quick to judge.”
jennschiffer Turns out, it is about ethics in software development, after all!
i gotta say - if you're teaching coding workshops at conferences and not working ethics and the like into your curriculum, you're not using your platform correctly in this the year 2017. and if it "has nothing to do" with the code you're not designing curriculum correctly!
None of the Above
Mikko Hypponen "Forbes cover 10 years ago."
Matt Brian When we need to adjust to machines that can learn:
If you own an iPhone X and get your fair share of passcode prompts after a negative Face ID, make sure you enter your code instead of reframing. It’ll help your iPhone learn what you look like at different periods during the day.
Michael Newman "Could not have predicted 20 years ago that browsing in a bookstore in 2017, I’d see a vinyl LP soundtrack to a TV show about cassette tapes you can only watch using the internet."
Two Stars Slammed Into Each Other And Solved Half Of Astronomy’s Problems. What Comes Next? "The neutron-star merger event was like seeing and hearing at the same time, and with a dictionary to make sense of it all."
Yulie [NSFL] 🐳 "IT'S CALLED ROOMMATES YOU INVENTED ROOMMATES"
Colin J Carlson Thread:
in the face of insomnia i will attempt to assign letter grades to the weird foxes. please stand by and watch this space for weird fox letter grades,, thank you
Existential Comics "we must imagine Sisyphus happy and also as an otter"