The commercial VPN industry is a minefield to navigate and many open source solutions are a pain to use or ill-suited for the task. Algo VPN, on the other hand, is a self-hosted personal VPN designed for ease of deployment and security. It uses the securest industry standards, builds on rock-solid solutions like WireGuard and Ansible, and runs on an ever-growing list of cloud hosting providers.

On this episode Dan Guido –CEO of security firm Trail of Bits and Algo’s creator– joins Jerod to discuss the project in depth.

Mike McDerment is the founder and CEO of FreshBooks. Believe it or not, Mike became a founder by accident. Like many of us, Mike had an itch that he just had to scratch. One thing led to another and soon enough FreshBooks became a key tool in the belt of many freelancers and agencies looking for an easy way to send invoices and get paid quickly online. We talk through the early days of FreshBooks and how things came to be, why they created a secret competitor to iterate on a bold idea for the future of FreshBooks, and we also cover what keeps Mike excited.

From late 2012 to the present I have been writing backends (server-side code) for web applications. This document summarizes many aspects of how I write these pieces of code.

I’m writing this lore down for three purposes:

1. Share it with you.
2. Systematize it for future reference and improvement.
3. Learn from your feedback.

Did you know you can make a device vibrate via a webpage? Neither did we until we popped open Luigi De Rosa’s super cool repo that collects many of the lesser known things browsers can do in 2020.

On this episode we hang out on his list and discuss which APIs were surprises to us, which we think are the most useful, which we wish would die in a fire (sorta), and what you might get if you mash up a few of these APIs.

Playwright is focused on enabling cross-browser web automation platform that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast. Our primary goal with Playwright is to improve automated UI testing by eliminating flakiness, improving the speed of execution and offering insights into the browser operation.

From the Microsoft Edge team.

Mihai on the value of automating as many of your project’s Quality Gates as possible.

For instance, in my projects, I have rules ranging from cosmetic matters like naming or indentation to architectural rules such as “Classes are either abstract or final” or “All variables, of any kind, should be final”.

Here’s a new acronym for you: Generative Teaching Networks (GTN)

GTNs are deep neural networks that generate data and/or training environments on which a learner (e.g., a freshly initialized neural network) trains before being tested on a target task (e.g., recognizing objects in images). One advantage of this approach is that GTNs can produce synthetic data that enables other neural networks to learn faster than when training on real data. That allowed us to search for new neural network architectures nine times faster than when using real data.

Fake data, real results? Sounds pretty slick.

Chris Coyier:

The “official website” changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It’s nothing to be overly concerned about, but I care as someone who has to write the word in a professional context quite often. If we’re going to “Jamstack,” so be it.

I prefer JAMstack, myself, but I think the Ajax analogy he quotes is an apt one. Aside: if this trend continues, Chris and the team might need to rename the site to “Jamstack-Tricks” soon.

Oh, and while we’re here: It’s Changelog not ChangeLog 😄

Mireille and Adam dig deeper into empathy as a construct. What key brain structures are involved? How can we better understand empathy to be able to better navigate ourselves and our relationships with others both at home and in the workplace?

I love how much is squeezed into this truly tiny library.

import calendarize from 'calendarize';

// Week = [Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat]
const view = calendarize(new Date('2019-12-20'));
//=> [
//=>   [ 1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7],
//=>   [ 8,  9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14],
//=>   [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21],
//=>   [22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28],
//=>   [29, 30, 31,  0,  0,  0,  0],
//=> ]

Check out the demo to see it in action.

Side note: the demo “reimplements” jQuery in one line:

const $ = document.querySelector.bind(document);

This reminds me of how I answered a question in our Slack recently about whether or not I’d use Umbrella JS again if starting a new project today.

if I were merely doing JS sprinkles I’d probably just write a few ‘ergonomics’ functions around querySelector and friends.

The web really has come a long way in a short time.

If you’ve been following along in the open source news cycle lately, you’ve probably heard that Red Hat has dropped the docker container runtime engine from both its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS Linux distributions.

I must not be following along, because that’s news to me.

That being the case, what do you do when you need to deploy containers? Fortunately, they’ve created a near drop-in replacement for docker, called Podman.

Podman is a rename from kpod, sorta. The new thing is actually called libpod, and Podman exists as the CLI for that library. It’s all a bit confusing, but what’s cool is none of this requires a daemon like the Docker Engine.

If you’d like to give it a go, this walk-through by The New Stack will get you started.

We’ve logged enough awesome lists by now that you know exactly what to expect from this repo. So instead of describing what’s inside, I will say that Emma and I will be talking Fullstack D3 with Amelia Wattenberger on January 30th. Join us for the live show or subscribe to JS Party to listen when the episode ships.

If Chris Fox had it his way:

• the keyword would be removed from all languages that use it
• only the language runtime and operating system would be allowed to raise exceptions

Click through to find out why he has this beef and what he thinks we should do about it.

A failed docking attempt, a dramatic reentry, and a first genuine fender-bender in orbit—what does it all have to do with modern web development? Andrey Sitnik is about to tell you…

Liran Tal:

A severe security vulnerability impacted all popular npm package managers: npm, yarn and pnpm and even triggered a release for Node.js 12.4.0. What is behind this vulnerability and why is it so important for us to understand? I wrote about it in a post that also explains how npm handles executables.

What exactly is a software architect, anyhow?

A software architect is a software expert who makes high-level design choices and dictates technical standards, including software coding standards, tools, and platforms. (Source: Wikipedia: Software Architect)

If that’s something you’d like to do (or are doing, but want to do it better), then this is a great resource for you. It covers the levels of architecture, important skills to obtain, books to read, and a technology roadmap.

In this episode, we’re joined by Kelsey Hightower to discuss the evolution of cloud infrastructure management, the role Kubernetes and its API play in it, and how we, as developers and operators, should be adapting to these changes.

The goal of svelvet is to make svelte play nicely with snowpack and web_modules.

As of today, svelte depends on a loader for webpack or rollup which compiles your svelte components into individual js files. Since snowpack’s goal is to avoid the need for a bundler, we can’t use those loaders, but we can use svelte’s internal compiler api to do 95% of the work for us. On top of that, svelvet adds automatic file watching to recompile your svelte files just like a loader would, but much faster!

I’m not gonna lie, any green field that offers a super light build process is looking pretty stinkin’ green these days. That being said, there’s a reason we call it the bleeding edge.

One of the things people most associate with AI is automation, but how is AI actually shaping automation in manufacturing? Costas Boulis from Bright Machines joins us to talk about how they are using AI in various manufacturing processes and in their “microfactories.” He also discusses the unique challenges of developing AI models based on manufacturing data.

This isn’t the most practical item in our feed this week, but it’s definitely neat and the how is it made section of the README (and related code) shows how you might accomplish something similar.

Show us humans a picture of someone in uniform on a mound of dirt throwing a ball and we will quickly tell you we’re looking at baseball. But how do you make a computer come to the same conclusion?

Visual Question Answering

In this post, we’ll explore basic methods for performing VQA and build our own simple implementation in Python