Published
Weekend Reading — The hardest problem in computer science
Design Objective
When to Use a Switch or Checkbox What I love about this post is, once you spend a few minutes thinking about it, it's pretty obvious and easy to remember:
You should only use switches on settings that need to take effect instantaneously. If a setting requires a button press before it can take effect, you should use a checkbox instead.
What I’ve learnt interviewing 10 badass product managers Drops of wisdom.
Jeffrey Veen Truth:
Every product team ever: "Love the style guide. Big fans of consistency. We need to make these 17 exceptions."
Reginald Braithwaite "When people suggest that bolting on new features makes your product better, not worse"
Tools of the Trade
Imposter Handbook A book to help you catch up on Computer Science. We need something like this, hope this is it:
That book is The Imposter's Handbook: a compendium of my year-long quest to fill the holes in my CS knowledge. Not a replacement for a degree, not an authoritative source for any of the concepts presented. Just a concise summary of the things you should know.
One of the most effective productivity/performance enhancers is pausing, even if only for a second, to ask "why?" before doing something.
RafalWilinski/express-status-monitor Realtime monitoring for Express.js apps, inspired by status.github.com.
🎶
And in the master branch, they gathered for the release
They test it with their CI suite, but they just can't deploy the beast
🎶
Lingua Scripta
Test262 is a JavaScript Sideshow You think you know JavaScript? I bet JavaScript has a few surprise tricks up its sleeve. Check out some of these edge cases.
"fs" unpublished and restored You've got to be kidding me.
@wesbos TIL you can use ES6 spread to see what an emoji is made up of:
Lines of Code
The hardest problem in computer science This week's top link and for a good reason. Whenever you're stuck trying to name something, take comfort: our industry couldn't even agree on naming the most basic concepts:
Someone who got started with JavaScript would have a very different idea of what a “class” is than someone who got started with Ruby. People come to Python or JavaScript and exclaim that they “don’t have real closures” because of a quirk of name binding.
Rubies are red,
Some threads are green,
But only Java has AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean
You can tell a lot about a car company that thinks having 100 million lines of code is something to brag about...
Architectural
30K Page Views for $0.21: A Serverless Story Using AWS Lambda to batch update web content. This is what microservices (Lambda functions) are good for, a simple and effective architecture. And because Lambda pricing is so low, the whole thing costs practically nothing.
Paul Borrill on Time clocks and the reordering of events Let that be your Computer Science/Physics lecture of the week. (YouTube, starts at 33:50)
Closed Doors
Sophisticated, persistent mobile attack against high-value targets on iOS Upgrade your iOS device to 9.3.5 immediately. This exploit is too damn easy and you wouldn't even know your phone has been hacked.
Hackers Could Make a Killing After Finding Vulnerability in Medical Device Tech Maybe this is the shakeup we need, so businesses start taking security seriously:
After finding serious security vulnerabilities in St. Jude Medical’s pacemakers and defibrillators, cybersecurity and research company MedSec decided to take that information to a short-seller (Carson Block of the investment firm Muddy Waters) which then bet against the company in the stock market.
MedSec’s CEO Justine Bone says that her company didn’t disclose to St. Jude because it was unconvinced the medical device maker would actually fix the problem. Rather than have the problem ignored (and potentially put patient’s lives at risk), MedSec decided to not just shame St. Jude, but make it pay.
None of the Above
Shen Ye "an oddly specific number"
How the Clinton campaign is foiling the Kremlin I'll save you a click. Staffers are now required to use Signal whenever the conversation involves Trump. It wouldn't surprise me if the business sector follows soon.
Reducing Racial Profiling on Nextdoor Kudos Nextdoor for taking the issue seriously, and designing for it:
We are proud to report that the most effective combination of forms reduced posts containing racial profiling by 75% in our test markets.
Me, on Twitter Whenever I drive behind a truck, that's exactly what goes through my mind:
