Changelog

Brent Simmons: I’ve been asked a few times about using algorithms in NetNewsWire to bring articles you wouldn’t otherwise have seen — from outside your feeds list — to your attention. I’ve also been asked a similar question about using algorithms to bring articles — from inside your feeds list — to the top based on the likelihood that they’ll interest you. I’m not going to do either. Good for him. This is what Twitter and Facebook are about — but it’s not right for NetNewsWire. The app puts you in control. This is what I love about the spirit of RSS readers. More like this, please!

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E.W. Dijkstra, in an ACM lecture he delivered almost 50 years ago: … the computer, by virtue of its fantastic speed, seems to be the first to provide us with an environment where highly hierarchical artifacts are both possible and necessary. This challenge, viz. the confrontation with the programming task, is so unique that this novel experience can teach us a lot about ourselves. It should deepen our understanding of the processes of design and creation, it should give us better control over the task of organizing our thoughts. If it did not do so, to my taste we should not deserve the computer at all! A fantastic read that was recommended to me by Andy Hunt during a conversation that you’ll be hearing on The Changelog real soon. I took his recommendation and now I’m passing it on.

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I know I’m not the only one who gets super annoyed by content jumping around while I’m reading it - and I’d never intentionally create that experience for my users. But sometimes you just don’t know how your code behaves “in the wild”, and you can’t exactly ride-along with every user. The Layout Instability API aims to address this issue: How a site functions in development is often quite different from how users experience it in production: personalized or third-party content often doesn’t behave the same in development as it does in production, test images are often already in the developer’s browser cache, and API calls that run locally are often so fast that the delay isn’t noticeable. The first step toward properly solving this problem is to give developers the tools to measure it and understand how often it’s occurring for real users. The Layout Instability API, currently being incubated in the WICG, aims to address this.

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Built in Rust, Vector places high-value on performance, correctness, and operator friendliness. It compiles to a single static binary and is designed to be deployed across your entire infrastructure, serving both as a light-weight agent and a highly efficient service, making the process of getting data from A to B simple and unified.

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We’re talking about the tools we use every day help us to be productive! This show will be a great introduction for those new to Go tooling, with some discussion around what we think of them after using some of them for many years.

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Woo hoo! As we celebrate reaching episode 50, we come full circle to discuss the basics of neural networks. If you are just jumping into AI, then this is a great primer discussion with which to take that leap. Our commitment to making artificial intelligence practical, productive, and accessible to everyone has never been stronger, so we invite you to join us for the next 50 episodes!

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With the settlement behind it, NPM Inc can now turn its attention toward repairing relationships with the JavaScript community and generating enough revenue to sustain itself. I’d like to know what the current sentiment is towards npm after this settlement. Can they mend these community fences? Or, are you more hopeful of the “development of alternative technologies” as mentioned in this post?

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At WWDC 2019 Apple announced SwiftUI. A single “cross platform”, “declarative” framework used to build tvOS, macOS, watchOS and iOS UIs. SwiftWebUI is bringing that to the Web ✔️ Disclaimer: Do not use this in production. Use it to learn more about SwiftUI and its inner workings.

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“Higher-order function” is one of those phrases people throw around a lot. But it’s rare for anyone to stop to explain what that means. Perhaps you already know what a higher-order function is. But how do we use them in the real world? What are some practical examples of when and how they’re useful? Can we use them for manipulating the DOM? Or, are people who use higher-order functions showing off? Are they over-complicating code for no good reason?

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JS Party listeners will find a familiar guest voice on this episode from the Google Webmasters channel.

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KBall MC’d a live show at NodeConf Colombia with a panel of 4 experts from the Node community — Kat Marchán, Anna Henningsen, Ruben Bridgewater, and James Snell. It was a great discussion about the future of Node.js and the Node.js ecosystem.

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Even though there’s a promise of native lazy loading with the launch of Chrome 75, between now, then, and the time period for the other browsers to adopt it as well, we have to continue developing our own lazy loading implementations using JavaScript. From Phil Hawksworth on CSS Tricks: In this post, we’ll look at an implementation that’s already been covered in brief detail in this post by Preerhi. We’re going to expand on that so you can add your own implementation of lazy loading to your site site as I’ve done on this little demo site. Phil covers these topics… The HTML markup for lazy loading Spotting when to load images with Intersection Observer Adding support for responsive images with picture and source elements Creating an attractive initial state with small images and CSS Mass-producing image assets Creating helpers to generate the required HTML

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10 cool things you can achieve with nothing but HTML. They don’t all work well (and they don’t all work in all browsers), but the big takeaway here is that you should know the capabilities of the tools you’re using before you layer another tool on top.

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Memorising docker commands is hard. Memorising aliases is slightly less hard. Keeping track of your containers across multiple terminal windows is near impossible. What if you had all the information you needed in one terminal window with every common command living one keypress away (and the ability to add custom commands as well). Lazydocker’s goal is to make that dream a reality.

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An update from Addy Osmani about the impact of JavaScript on the web and performance in 2019, and things you can do to impact it. Interesting because the number one items to pay attention to have changed from the conventional wisdom of a couple years back. Osmani: 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.

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In this episode we’re shinning our maintainer spotlight on Ned Batchelder. Ned is one of the luck ones out there that gets to double-dip — his day job is working on open source at edX, working on the Open edX community team. Ned is also a “single maintainer” of coverage.py - a tool for measuring code coverage of Python programs. This episode with Ned kicks off the first of many in our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

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Those sneaky Mozillians are up to no good with their new tool to confound advertisers: Let us open 100 tabs of pure madness to fool trackers into thinking you’re someone else.

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My big concern is at the bottom of that technology pyramid. The lowest common denominator of the Web. The foundation. The rhythm section. The ladyfingers in the Web trifle. It’s the HTML. And it is becoming increasingly clear to me that there’s a whole swathe of Frontend Engineers who don’t know or understand the frontend-est of frontend technologies. Solid rant with a nice list of resources at the end. 👌

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I’ve been tinkering with different startup ideas and needed a good checklist to think through them. There are great templates for this already: The YC application, Amazon’s internal press release, and Sequoia’s Writing a Business Plan. I found myself mixing and tweaking these templates because they don’t exactly match my model of the world, so I wrote up my own list. These are great questions to ask yourself when you’re dreaming up an open source project as well.

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Great description of how the Hooks API leads us from an imperative style of implementing side effects (“Do thing x on mount, do thing y on unmount”) to a declarative style of implementing side effects. Author Sebastian De Deyne puts it this way: Instead of thinking about when we should apply the side effect, we declare the side effect’s dependencies. This way React knows when it needs to run, update, or clean up.

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