Published
Weekend Reading — @NSAGov has a new follower!
@joaomdmoura gives us the best door sign.
This week we learn how to compare fonts; we send IPv6 packets on the scenic route; we watch a competitive coding event (warning: nail biter!); we learn how to do privacy right; we follow Snowden but he won't follow us back; we learn 9 Great Nodding Strategies for our next meeting; and we plan to land a human on Mars by December.
Design Objective
“By designing for someone with a permanent disability, someone with a situational disability can also benefit.”
Introducing: U.S. Web Design Standards 18F and the U.S. Digital Service created a design standard for government agencies. Hopefully we can get better government websites out of this.
@kupfers Indra Kupferschmid shows us the one true way to evaluate fonts:
Tools of the Trade
stylelint "Modern CSS linter." Influenced by ESLint, based on PostCSS, helps you write better stylesheets.
Showing line numbers disables sub-pixel AA on tabs, status-bar etc The state of web development in 2015 (the issue is in Atom, but it uses webtech, so same same):
Or I randomly tried some stuff and adding
z-index: 0;to the gutter seems to fix it.
OS X 10.11 El Capitan: The Ars Technica Review I recommend this upgrade.
The Greatest Regex Trick Ever From which you can learn a thing or two about regular expressions.
RFC 7511 - Scenic Routing for IPv6 If I were a TCP/IP packet, I'd love this:
A routing engine implementing Scenic Routing should therefore choose paths based on Avian IP Carriers [RFC1149] and/or wireless technologies so the packets will get out of the miles/kilometers of dark fibers that are in the ground and get as much fresh-air time and sunlight as possible.
Lingua Scripta
Customizing ES6 via well-known symbols Symbol.iterator, Symbol.hasInstance and friends.
Surprises in GopherJS Performance
The V8 JavaScript engine is incredible. It's able to take Go code that is compiled to JavaScript code, and just-in-time compile to it to machine instructions that are as efficient as the native Go compiler.
ESLint: The Next-Generation JavaScript Linter The story of ESLint, how it came to be, and why it's the one JavaScript linter to use.
The State of JavaScript on Android in 2015 is… poor Unfortunately, for Javascript on mobile:
It seems the Android manufacturers are more interested in slapping n slow CPU cores on a die than they are in producing very fast CPU cores. And this is quite punishing when it comes to JavaScript.
The First JavaScript Misdirection Contest And we have a winner!
Lines of Code
The Jocks of Computer Code Do It for the Job Offers All about competitive coding events.
Anyone can learn to code, but very few people can explain why they wrote a line of code, what that code does/convince other people to use it
Coffee beans waiting to be roasted and turned into software.
Architectural
Lessons learned writing highly available code
- Put limits on everything.
- Retry, but with exponential back-off.
- Use supervisors and watchdog processes.
- Add health checks, and use them to re-route requests or automate rollbacks.
- Redundancy is more than just nice-to-have, it’s a requirement.
- Prefer battle-tested tools over the “new hotness”.
Introducing Elastic DevNull
Techtopia
Apple’s commitment to your privacy Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they're all competing with this now. It's plain speak, it's detailed, and it goes to lengths to protect your privacy. Just one example:
This information is linked to an anonymous, News-specific identifier. You can reset your News identifier at any time by clearing your history. As a convenience, Apple News uses iCloud to keep aspects of your experience up to date on all your devices. Recommendations are created locally on your device and are not sent to Apple.
While News is ad supported — ads are served based on the articles you read — this information cannot be used to target ads to you outside the News app. We never provide publishers with information to track you. And you can turn on Limit Ad Tracking to stop receiving targeted ads.
Locked Doors
@jessysaurusrex This is your friendly reminder to store your backup codes in a safe place:
Two factor auth is a great defense against phishing + weak passwords, but the biggest risk/threat for the average user is data/account loss.
@Snowden Edward Snowden joins twitter. Only follows one account: @NSAGov.
I forgot to turn off notifications. Twitter sent me an email for each:
Follow
Favorite
Retweet
DM47 gigs of notifications. #lessonlearned
Liam Neeson is the single most protection that any organization can take to protect their Linux passwords hashes.
Peopleware
9 Nodding Strategies for Your Next Meeting Fantastically funny and maybe even useful to some:
1. The Slow Nod
The slow nod is great for when someone is explaining something that makes no sense. Hopefully they’ll see you nodding slowly and realize how ridiculous they sound.
When a software engineer tells you something will take 3 months, they're actually saying MAX_INT
None of the Above
@Rvervuurt If O'Reilly made books about animals:
@manwhohasitall Followed!
Welcome to all my new followers! I offer intelligent lifestyle advice for the thinking man, struggling to juggle kids, housework & career.
I met you in the rain on the last day of 1972 - m4w (Old State House) The best of Craigslist.
What evidence would convince me skinny jeans are bad for health? This is how science works.
budget.js @brooklyn_js shares their budget (tickets, sponsors, costs, etc) in the form of a single JavaScript expression.
A Conversation with the Guy Who Just Epically Trolled Cable News Cable news … they're not even trying anymore:
Hendren, a "DevOps thought leader" in the Bay Area … was asked to come on the program this morning to talk about the emergence of Edward Snowden on Twitter.
…
Of course, Hendren was talking about Edward Scissorhands the whole time. "I think to cast him out, to make him invalid in society, simply because he has scissors for hands, I mean that's strange," Hendren said. "I mean people didn't get scared until he started sculpting shrubs into dinosaur shapes and what not."
@DrummerHead Typical project manager
