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January 2020 dev links

Software disenchantment

I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently, our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and IT in general.

https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/

A Recap of Frontend Development in 2019

A look back at the top events, news, and trends for frontend and web development

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/a-recap-of-frontend-development-in-2019-1e7d07966d6c

Loading web pages fast on a $20 feature phone

Building a fast, core foundation for your site gives everyone a good experience; whether they’re on a low-cost feature phone or the latest high-end smart phone.

https://dev.to/addyosmani/loading-web-pages-fast-on-a-20-feature-phone-8h6

[GIF] Timelapse of the most popular web browser by country since 2008

[GIF] Timelapse of the most popular web browser by country since 2008 [OS][2002×2000] from MapPorn

Fit on a Floppy

Webpages are getting bigger and bigger. The internet is getting faster and faster but not everywhere at the same pace. A floppy is a physical reminder of filesize.

Will your website fit on a floppy?

https://fitonafloppy.website/

My Bathroom Mirror Is Smarter Than Yours

Sometime late last year I realized that I wanted my ordinary bathroom mirror to be more like the future we were promised in the movies.

https://medium.com/@maxbraun/my-bathroom-mirror-is-smarter-than-yours-94b21c6671ba#.aug7t8ypf

PostgREST – PostgreSQL database directly into a RESTful API

PostgREST is a standalone web server that turns your PostgreSQL database directly into a RESTful API. The structural constraints and permissions in the database determine the API endpoints and operations.

https://postgrest.org

SQL, Java Top List of Most In-Demand Tech Skills

But Python, now at number three, and AWS, at number six, are coming on fast, says job search firm Indeed

https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/sql-java-top-list-of-most-indemand-tech-skills

What broke the bank

A disastrous IT migration corrupted 1.3 billion customer records. The culprit was insufficient testing.

https://increment.com/testing/what-broke-the-bank/

Linux exists only because of a happy accident

How Linus Torvalds accidentally created Linux

https://augustl.com/blog/2019/linus_and_linux_happy_accident/

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December 2019 dev links

[…]The power went out and with it, internet connectivity. Wind storms and even a hard rain can knock the power out where I live and in the winter it’s a somewhat common occurrence. For the most part, power is restored within an hour or two, but there have been a few severe wind storms and one was so severe last February that the wind woke me up at 2:30 AM.

While I ran upstairs to try and assess what was happening outside with branches snapping and loud booms of trees falling in the distance, I attempted to reach the Puget Sound Energy website on my mobile browser to report the outage.

I refreshed the page multiple times while my phone said I had data coverage and was on the network (one, maybe two bars at times), but the PSE page came up as offline. I finally managed to get the page to load to report the outage after about 5 minutes.

https://blog.stephaniestimac.com/posts/10-30-2019-performance/

SweetAlert2 – a beautiful, responsive, highly customizable and accessible (WAI-ARIA) replacement for JavaScript’s popup boxes (alert, prompt, dialog, toast, side panel, etc.)

https://sweetalert2.github.io/

The mission of the Web Almanac is to take the treasure trove of insights that would otherwise be accessible only to intrepid data miners, and package it up in a way that’s easy to understand. This is made possible with the help of industry experts who can make sense of the data and tell us what it means. Each of the 20 chapters in the Web Almanac focuses on a specific aspect of the web, and each one has been authored and peer reviewed by experts in their field. The strength of the Web Almanac flows directly from the expertise of the people who write it.

https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/table-of-contents

What goes into building a drag and drop component in 2019?

https://baseweb.design/blog/drag-and-drop-list/

I am a hypochondriac. In the back of my head I rationalize this as an evolutionary advantage. And in fact, it may have just saved my life.

https://medium.com/swlh/dead-men-write-no-code-e9a7c5daf5d#.8c6j682j6

For many developers their office is their home away from home — hell, some developers are at that office more often than they’re at home.  For that reason most of us take great pride in our offices, keeping them as tidy (…or not) as we’d like and injecting as much personality and comfort in said office as possible. Whether it’s a home office, cube, or coworking space, we need it to be pleasing to us for the sake of good work environment and sanity.

Welcome to My Office

JavaScript is one of the most popular languages you can learn.

https://medium.com/better-programming/127-helpful-javascript-snippets-you-can-learn-in-30-seconds-or-less-part-1-of-6-bc2bc890dfe5

The default SSH port is 22. It is not a coincidence. This is a story of how it got that port.

https://www.ssh.com/ssh/port

The most popular programming languages from 1965-2019 from programming

Majestic Admin is a simple yet powerful free Bootstrap admin template that is built with the Bootstrap framework, SAAS, jQuery, HTML5, and CSS. The spectacular design, user friendliness, and easy to customizability of Majestic Admin makes it suitable for building different types of websites. This well documented template has high responsiveness to make websites look great on both desktop and mobile devices.

Free Template
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November 2019 dev links

Developers and Open Source authors now have a massive amount of services offering free tiers, but it can be hard to find them all in order to make informed decisions.

This is a list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.

https://free-for.dev/#/

What interface component would you use for selecting from a large set of options? For most designers, checkboxes come to mind. But a long list of checkboxes is intimidating to users and can cause them to abandon your form. Not only that, but checkboxes are not efficient or easy to use because they take up space, increase the number of visual elements, and offer small tap targets.

Why Toggle Tokens Are a Better Alternative to Checkboxes
https://twitter.com/JimMcKeeth/status/692596120464150528

I use the Chrome Developer tools pretty much daily, but there are a few things I wish I knew earlier

https://dev.to/lpellis/things-you-may-not-know-about-chrome-devtools-53k6

Here’s one of the best essays I’ve ever read about why progressive web apps are important, how they work, and what impact they have on a business: PWAs are powerful, effective, fast and app-like. It’s hard to imagine a mobile web property that could not be significantly improved via PWA implementation. They can also potentially eliminate the need for many “vanity” native apps that exist today.

https://ymedialabs.com/progressive-web-apps

I think about and enjoy very boring CSS stuff—probably much more than I should do, to be honest. One thing that I’ve probably spent too much time thinking about over the years, is CSS resets.

https://hankchizljaw.com/wrote/a-modern-css-reset/

https://arnaud.at/emoji

Large file size results in larger download times and parsing times. It’s simple as that.

https://dev.to/adrianbdesigns/improving-css-performance-and-file-size-an-in-depth-guide-4mb5

We migrated 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/

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October 2019 dev links

Easy-To-Use CSS Gradients

Creating a CSS gradient from scratch can be intimidating. But, luckily, there’s a little helper out there that takes away the trouble and makes using gradients a simple act of copying and pasting. Say hello to Gradient Magic, a gallery of unique CSS gradients with everything ranging from standard gradients to angular, striped, checkered, and burst gradients. To find your favorite, you can browse the gallery by style and color. A great addition to any toolkit! 

https://www.gradientmagic.com/

How to do a code review

The pages in this section contain recommendations on the best way to do code reviews, based on long experience. All together they represent one complete document, broken up into many separate sections. You don’t have to read them all, but many people have found it very helpful to themselves and their team to read the entire set.

https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/reviewer/

My favorite CSS hack

There is one CSS snippet that I have been copy-pasting for 5 years. It is meant to be used when you are working with layout. Different depth of nodes will use different colour allowing you to see the size of each element on the page, their margin and their padding. Now you can easily identify inconsistencies.

https://dev.to/gajus/my-favorite-css-hack-32g3

The cost of JavaScript in 2019

One large change to the cost of JavaScript over the last few years has been an improvement in how fast browsers can parse and compile script. In 2019, the dominant costs of processing scripts are now download and CPU execution time.

https://v8.dev/blog/cost-of-javascript-2019

Moving beyond console.log() — 8 Console Methods You Should Use When Debugging JavaScript and Node

Moving beyond console.log and learn the console functions you have never used for debugging!

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/moving-beyond-console-log-8-console-methods-you-should-use-when-debugging-javascript-and-node-25f6ac840ada

Usage Share of Internet Browsers 1996 – 2019

Usage Share of Internet Browsers 1996 – 2019 [OC] from dataisbeautiful

Can I email

A new place to check email clients support for HTML and CSS features.

https://www.caniemail.com/news/2019-09-09-introducing-caniemail/

How did MS-DOS decide that two seconds was the amount of time to keep the floppy disk cache valid?

MS-DOS 2.0 contained a disk read cache, but not a disk write cache. Disk read caches are important because they avoid having to re-read data from the disk. And you can invalidate the read cache when the volume is unmounted.

But wait, you don’t unmount floppy drives. You just take them out.

How did MS-DOS decide that two seconds was the amount of time to keep the floppy disk cache valid?

The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company

Listen Notes is a podcast search engine and database. The technology behind Listen Notes is actually very very boring. 

https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-behind-listen-notes-56697c2e347b

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September 2019 dev links

Cache-Control for Civilians

One of the most common and effective ways to manage the caching of your assets is via the Cache-Control HTTP header. This header applies to individual assets, meaning everything on our pages can have a very bespoke and granular cache policy. The amount of control we’re granted makes for very intricate and powerful caching strategies.

https://csswizardry.com/2019/03/cache-control-for-civilians/

Cheat sheet for moving from jQuery to vanilla JavaScript

jQuery is still a useful and pragmatic library, but chances are increasingly that you’re not dependent on using it in your projects to accomplish basic tasks like selecting elements, styling them, animating them, and fetching data—things that jQuery was great at. With broad browser support of ES6 (over 96% at the time of writing), now is probably a good time to move away from jQuery.

https://tobiasahlin.com/blog/move-from-jquery-to-vanilla-javascript/

Simplify pop-ups and modals using the HTML dialog element.

The HTML dialog element <dialog> is a native browser element for creating pop-ups and modals.

https://www.viget.com/articles/the-dialog-element/

Front-End Performance Checklist 2019

An annual front-end performance checklist (PDF/Apple Pages/MS Word), with everything you need to know to create fast experiences today.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/front-end-performance-checklist-2019-pdf-pages/

Long time no write 😀