I just started reading this (estimated read time: 34 minutes) and I have to say there are some really great tips inside. This one on code comments is pure gold: If you have no idea how to start, describe the flow of the application in high level, pure English/your language first. Then fill the spaces between comments with the code. Better yet: think of every comment as a function, then write the function that does exactly that. Julio warns that many of his learnings are cynical, but it’s gotta be hard to not be cynical after 30 years in this industry…

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Rich kicked the proverbial hornet’s nest yesterday. After you read his 10-point post, stick around for the comments, many of which rebut one or more of those points. I’ll weigh in on #3: Platform Fatigue Every time we add a new feature to the platform, we increase that complexity — creating new surface area for bugs, and making it less and less likely that a new competitor to Chromium could ever emerge. Co-sign! 💯

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readme-md-generator is able to read your environment (package.json, git config…) to suggest you default answers during the README.md creation process Nice to see it using All Contributors.

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Phoenix 1.3 introduced the idea of Contexts, which I’m generally very much in favor of. However, I wish there was a little bit more structure to the idea. It’s so open ended that I’ve found deciding where best to put a function kind of tricky, and then I frequently end up with duplicate behavior across contexts or have a hard time finding functions later on because the module they’re in made sense at the time, but it doesn’t make as much sense now. So, I’m proposing the idea of a Primary Context and a Secondary Context. I’ve also struggled to determine just how to use Contexts to my benefit. It seems that Devon is trying an add more structure approach whereas I have (so far) gone with a YAGNI approach.

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Facebook, VISA, Uber, and A16Z (amongst others) have officially announced their cryptocurrency: Reinvent money. Transform the global economy. So people everywhere can live better lives. Color me skeptical. Not of the value of cryptocurrencies writ large, but in the actors and entities behind this particular coin. One thing I believe to be true, though: ten years from now our idea of (and interaction with) money will be dramatically different than it is today.

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It’s hard to believe it’s already been 9 years since Rust was first announced to the world. The New Stack has a nice interview with Graydon Hoare… sharing his thoughts on everything from the state of systems programming, to the difficulty of defining safety on ever-more complex systems — and whether we’re truly more secure today, or confronting an inherited software mess that will take decades to clean up.

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Serverless doesn’t mean “less” security, instead we should fine-tune our focus area to security implications that accompany a serverless architecture. If you’re developing serveless functions on Azure, Google or AWS you probably want to make sure you follow these security best practices.

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José Valim, announcing the just-released Elixir v1.9: … releases was the last planned feature for Elixir. We don’t have any major user-facing feature in the works nor planned. I know for certain some will consider this fact the most excing part of this announcement! This doesn’t mean the language will stop moving forward, but you’ll have to read the full announcement to get the full picture. The Releases feature looks shiny, for sure. Congrats to all involved for yet another awesome milestone!

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First off, everything happens in your CSS file. You can layer this into your websites as you see fit. You can use this to layer on just a little bit more functionality in your CSS here and there or construct an entire page. It’s up to you! If you think this sounds crazy… just wait until you have a look at it: .item { cursor: pointer; --js:( function toggle() { this.classList.toggle('active'); } this.addEventListener('click', toggle ); ); } Play around with CJSS on Codepen, but that’s all I’d advise you to do with it (as would the author).

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Native lazy loading is coming to the web. Since it doesn’t depend on JavaScript, it will revolutionize the way we lazy load content today, making it easier for developers to lazy load images and iframes. I’m excited about native lazy loading! We’ve been using lozad.js for lazy loading with some success. There are times when it seems that IntersectionObserver fails to its job and an image won’t load. (If you scroll the element out and back in to the viewport, it will usually work the second time.) But it’s not a feature we can polyfill, and it will take some time before it becomes usable across all browsers. n this article, you’ll learn how it works and how you can progressively replace your JavaScript-driven lazy loading with its native alternative, thanks to hybrid lazy loading. I might try this hybrid approach and see what happens…

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Translate Shell (formerly Google Translate CLI) is a command-line translator powered by Google Translate (default), Bing Translator, Yandex.Translate, and Apertium $ trans -shell -brief > Rien ne réussit comme le succès. Nothing succeeds like success.

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In upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, the new Find My feature will broadcast Bluetooth signals from Apple devices even when they’re offline, allowing nearby Apple devices to relay their location to the cloud… it turns out that Apple’s elaborate encryption scheme is also designed not only to prevent interlopers from identifying or tracking an iDevice from its Bluetooth signal, but also to keep Apple itself from learning device locations, even as it allows you to pinpoint yours. WIRED with a fascinating explanation of an utterly fascinating scheme.

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This looks great for quickly seeing the structure of a JSON object without all the scrolling. Pretty cool that the output is valid JS so you can copy/paste it to other places as well.

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Kick Olivia’s tires (mixed metaphor alert!) by chatting with her online or start with the docs if you’d like to set up and host your own instance.

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Joel Ambass with some good thoughts (and a tiny gem) on monkey patching in Ruby Applied correctly and with care, monkey patching becomes a powerful tool that every ruby programmer can benefit from. I really dig his idea and implementation of a version guard as my main source of trepidation when monkey patching around a bug is not knowing if/when I can remove my patch.

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The npm team is collaborating with GitHub on a new service that will automatically check for tokens that might have been accidentally pushed up to a repository and then automatically revoke them if they are valid. This will help to quickly mitigate attack vectors that might arise from the accidental oversharing of credentials for projects. From the post: Whenever you commit or push a change to GitHub in a public repository and an npm token is found in the change, it is sent to npm for validation. If it’s valid, we will revoke it and notify the maintainer of this action via email.

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It astounds me how much bang you can get for 35 bucks today.

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Never heard of algorithmic differentiation? It’s the tool that “underlies modern machine learning”. I learned that from reading the intro to this handbook, btw. It begins with a calculus-101 style understanding and gradually extends this to build toy implementations of systems similar to PyTorch and TensorFlow.

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