Published
Weekend Reading — Painters and Hackers
“Sprint planning” George Caleb Bingham, 1846
Design Objective
I'm a web developer. I don't click the back button. That's like asking for a random problem.
@DesignUXUI "When you think your design works perfect but then you do user testing…"
Tools of the Trade
𝚫 now: realtime node.js deployments One-step deploy Node.js web apps in the cloud. Fantastic for demos, tests, hackdays.
Chrome is finally getting native push notifications on Mac You can turn it on today with chrome://flags/#enable-native-notifications.
React v15.0 Is here. Better support for SVG, and createElement replaces innerHTML — read the notes to learn why it matters.
VersionPress Git-backed WordPress! Tracks changes to database, uploads, themes and plugins, so you can undo any change. It can even git merge database changes.
Don’t feel bad. No one really knows how to use git beside add commit push pull tag and clone. We all fake it
AWS Lambda Supports Node.js 4.3 Finally!
Building a Dynamic DNS for Route 53 using CloudWatch Events and Lambda Still not sure what AWS Lambda is for? Here’s one project using Lambda to respond to infrastructure changes in real-time.
groupon/ndu: node disk usage Visualize how much space your Node dependencies are taking.
DylanPiercey/auto-sni Let’s Encrypt no-fuss TLS certificates for Node.js webapp.
Spectacle CodeSlide: Present code with style This is a fantastic way to present source code when making a presentation.
Lingua Scripta
joakimbeng/middl A generic middleware library, inspired by Express and suitable for anything. Supports promises and generators.
Exploiting Buffer The lesson I learned from this: when you implement it, argument overloading feels like it’s simplifying the API, but over time it has the opposite effect, and the resulting complexity could lead to bugs and security defects.
ES6 module loading: More complicated than you think JavaScript, why you so complicated?
Lines of Code
How to Avoid Brittle Code My favorite practice is “Upgrade everything, all the time”. Because it works. If you keep exercising the code base, the code base stays in great shape. Leave it alone for a while, and good luck when you do need to make a change.
Writing good code: how to reduce the cognitive load of your code
- Keep your personal quirks out of it
- Divide and conquer it
- Make it discrete and processable
- Make it readable
- Make it easy to digest
How Many People Does It Take To Ship Software? “I miss the days when the team was small but the results were big.”
this is why to have a good test suite: so when you do something stupid, you look at the tests and say to yourself, “Oh, that was stupid”
Devoops
Contaminate AWS instances on ssh login Immutable infrastructure to the max: tag an AWS as contaminated the moment anyone SSH into it. (Or use a platform that doesn’t allow you to SSH into a running instance)
If Dr House did DevOps I like Differential Diagnosis as a framework to formalize the investigation process, to help make decisions in a stressful situation, and to train less-experienced engineers in incident response.
Developer looking at production logs after a regression w/ downtime - oil canvas,circa1580
Peopleware
Hanlon’s Razor and the Infuriating H-1B Visa System
All human systems will be gamed and designing easily game-able systems is a moral betrayal.… Hanlon’s Razor (the excuse of stupidity) does not morally exonerate
What Do Millennials Really Want at Work?
So why in the face of such overwhelming evidence do the myths about Millennials persist? Part of the reason is the proliferation of poor “research,” or overreaching and invalid conclusions based on otherwise valid facts.
Locked Doors
Assume that every web-password you use is stored in plaintext, and that a crontask emails it around daily. (I see how the sausage is made.)
'Devastating' bug pops secure doors at airports, hospitals All it takes Lawshae says is ‘a few simple UDP packets’ for the 'potentially devastating bug’ to be exploited. Authentication is not required.
@troyhunt: How to identify a vehicle at risk of collisions
Techtopia
Welcome to S.F., the premier assisted living community for Millennials
Even when you’re not sick, household chores aren’t a blast. In San Francisco, you don’t have to do any of them — if you can afford it.
Innovation is overvalued. Maintenance often matters more Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance, and for most lives it is maintenance that matters more
I doomed mankind with a free text editor Will long and complex words make you look smarter? Meet the people who think that short words will make us dumb
Startup Life
Frog and Toad are Cofounders The characters you loved as a child, all grown up and working in San Francisco.
A startup accelerator is where you smash startups into each other at high speed, in the hopes of capturing the emitted business model.
None of the Above
Karl Kovacs: How a career in technical writing ruined me as a letter writer
We will lowercase internet effective June 1, when the 2016 Stylebook launches.
Also, we will lowercase web in all instances – web page, the web, web browser.
OMATA One: Analog GPS Speedometer Bicycle GPS computer with a minimalist, modern, analog UI. (KickStarter)
A Hacker’s Guide to Bending the Universe If you’re going to conquer the world, you can’t let a broken CRT monitor stand in your way.
RUN and RUN / lyrical school Open your iPhone, click this link, and watch this music video.