The goal of this project is to add support for the Rust language to the Linux kernel. This repository contains the work that will be eventually submitted for review to the LKML.

Probably the most exciting fork of torvalds/linux in the ’Verse, but what are the odds that this effort eventually makes it back upstream?

Stefan Buck:

In this post I share my learnings of doing code reviews for 10 years. I have received positive feedback from my peers in the blog post and since code review is becoming more and more the standard of development I think sharing my learnings here will may help someone.

Number 10 introduced a new term for me. The “gangsta merge”?! 🤣

The main purpose of security.txt is to help make things easier for companies and security researchers when trying to secure platforms. Thanks to security.txt, security researchers can easily get in touch with companies about security issues.

It’s currently an Internet draft that has been submitted for RFC review, which means they’re taking contributions from the public. Seems like a good idea to me.

We take up a listener request this week and have an honest conversation about jQuery. Then, it’s time for something new! Our friends at Hot New Tech review tone.js for us. After that, it’s Pro Tip Time!

Maintaining a GitHub project with other people creates “many email notifications about various things.” But they don’t all hold the same importance. Maxime Vaillancourt shows us how to use Gmail filters and labels to better manage all the emails coming from GitHub issues, etc.

I receive many email notifications about various things that happen on there: direct requests to review a particular piece of code, feedback on pull requests I’ve opened, pull requests merged by their authors, people directly mentioning our username in a comment, issues closed by their authors, etc. I receive hundreds of emails every single week.

…using Gmail filters, we can automatically add labels to GitHub notification emails based on their content. This solution takes less than 10 minutes to implement, and the long-term return on investment is quite appreciable.

Adam and Jerod take a moment to review the soft launch of Changelog++ and feedback received from members and the community. We talk through some of the feedback we’ve received, how some folks still want the ads, updated thoughts on extended and bonus content, hiccups and lessons learned, the “Working in Public” winners, and where we go from here.

Tightly integrated with GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket, Gitpod automatically and continuously prebuilds dev environments for all your branches. As a result, team members can instantly start coding with fresh, ephemeral and fully-compiled dev environments - no matter if you are building a new feature, want to fix a bug or do a code review.

There’s a SaaS offering that’s free for open source or you can self-host it if you prefer.

Code review is critical to being a software engineer yet there aren’t many resources on how to build up the skill. That’s why Shubheksha wrote what she learned when she first started making the mental shift from writing code to reviewing it.

Remember to be kind and empathetic — Code reviews are very ripe for misunderstanding and lack of empathy on either side. At the heart of code reviews is collaboration. It is as important to remind yourself as a reviewer that you’re reviewing someone’s code and not passing judgments on them as a person and it is equally important to remember that whatever your reviewer tells you is not meant as a personal attack.

Jerod assembles a team of WebRTC experts (Suz, Feross, Mikeal) for a deep, deep dive on this practically-ubiquitous yet still-complicated web API.

We review its history, share really cool applications using the tech, provide an excellent primer on what you need to know about it, and details some production gotchas. ALSO we celebrate how Feross single-handedly “upgraded the internet”! 🙌

Erik Dietrich:

I believe that there is a unique group dynamic that forms and causes the rot of software groups in a way that can’t be explained by bad external decisions causing the talented developers to evaporate … In this post, I’m going to set the stage by describing how individuals opt into permanent mediocrity and reap rewards for doing so.

A must-read piece for anyone in danger of getting stuck in the “Expert Beginner” loop.

… during these years, the software developers are job-hopping and earning promotions, especially these days. As they breeze through rapid acquisition, so too do they breeze through titles like Software Engineer I and II and then maybe “Associate” and “Senior,” and perhaps eventually on up to “Lead” and “Architect” and “Principal.” So while in the throes of Dunning-Kruger and Advanced Beginnerism, they’re being given expert-sounding titles and told that they’re “rock stars” and “ninjas” and whatever by recruiters–especially in today’s economy. The only thing stopping them from taking the natural step into the Expert Beginner stage is a combination of peer review and interaction with the development community at large.

Speaking of WWDC and possibly-overlooked announcements… Dan Moren has a great round-up on Six Colors of some small-yet-significant things like iOS Back Tap, App Store review process modifications, improvements to Shortcut, and more.

Rough Notation uses RoughJS to create a hand-drawn look and feel. Elements can be annotated in a number of different styles. Animation duration and delay can be configured, or just turned off.

Follow the headline link to see it in action on the project’s website. This would be great for product or feature walk-throughs. What would be super cool is some way to use this on any website and send the annotated version to someone for review. Then it could be used for bug reporting, etc.

I hate to let the cat out of the bag, but it’s not a huge surprise to me that the underlying economics of the business would be the strongest predictor of interest for VCs. Still though, you should at least skim this…

We analyzed the results of our first 500 reviews and calculated the correlations between high marks in categories like team, problem area and business economics with the number of requested intros from our reviewing VCs. Overall, high scores on the review were a strong predictor of VC interest, but the results of the scores of the individual categories might surprise you.

Mount RedisWebManager to a path in your Rails router and you’re off to the races. You can view memory and CPU usage, review and edit your keys, and check up on connected clients. There’s also some low-hanging fruit for contributions.

Extending from topics around open source licensing in this recent conversation with Adam Jacob and this recent conversation with David Cramer, we’re now at a point where Bruce Perens (OSI co-founder) has quit the OSI saying “we’ve gone the wrong way with licensing” regarding the recently drafted Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL).

The debate over whether or not to approve the license, now in its fourth draft, has proven contentious enough to prompt OSI co-founder Bruce Perens to resign from the organization, for a second time, based on concern that OSI members have already made up their minds.

“Well, it seems to me that the organization is rather enthusiastically headed toward accepting a license that isn’t freedom respecting,” Perens wrote in a missive to the OSI’s license review mailing list on Thursday. “Fine, do it without me, please.”

Over 500 organizations and 18,000 individuals have signed a letter urging the Internet Society to stop the private equity takeover of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain. It’s rare that EFF, Greenpeace, Consumer Reports, Oxfam, the YMCA of the USA, and Human Rights Watch all speak out about a single issue, but the sale of .ORG affects every corner of the NGO sector.

Sounds like ICAAN can stop the sale and has already taken some action by requesting additional information for review.

Liran Tal:

In this report, we investigate the state of security for both the Angular and React ecosystems, looking at best practices, secure coding, and security vulnerabilities in React, Angular, and other frontend projects such as Bootstrap, Vue.js, and jQuery. Inside you will find the report in it’s digital format as a PDF to download and review offline.

I love data-driven analyses like this one Harvard Business Review did on logos. The top-level takeaway:

our research demonstrates (albeit with certain qualifications and under certain conditions), descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions than nondescriptive ones, and are more likely to improve brand performance.

Read the whole thing to understand exactly what they mean by “descriptive logos” and why they’re more effective. If you’re into this stuff, they’ve done similar surveys on simplicity vs complexity and symmetry vs asymmetry.

Most people are modest about their contributions in the workplace. We also forget how important our contributions are. Then, when it comes time for recognition, you’ve forgotten, others didn’t notice because they don’t understand all the details and moving parts, and work just moves on. What do you do if/when your work goes unnoticed? Here’s what Julia Evans suggests…

Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season! This is a pretty common tactic – when I started doing this I mentioned it to more experienced people and they were like “oh yeah, I’ve been doing that for a long time, it really helps”.

Where I work we call this a “brag document” but I’ve heard other names for the same concept like “hype document” or “list of stuff I did” :).

BONUS — Julia included a basic template for a brag document at the end of the post.

A fascinating review of Dat and the Beaker Browser after building a decentralized Muxtape clone called Duxtape. Here’s a taste:

The roots of ‘view source’ live on, in an incredibly realized form. (In Beaker, you can right-click on Duxtape and ‘view source’ for the entire app. You can do this for your mixtapes, too. Question: When was the last time you inspected the code hosting your Webmail, your blog, your photo storage? Related question: When was the first time?)

It’s hard to see a world where apps like this get mainstream adoption. On the other hand, what other choices do we have? 🤔

Mozilla has officially released Firefox Monitor, which gives us a glossy front-end to review the many breaches out there.

I signed into my Firefox account, registered a few emails, and got the news (see image). Give it a try while I go delete some old accounts…

We’re talking with Mehan Jayasuriya program officer at Mozilla about MOSS — the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program which recognizes, celebrates, and supports open source projects. Earlier this year we caught the “MOSS 2018 Year in Review” blog post — this post highlighted many of their efforts in 2018 so we reached out to talk through the history, goals, and impact of this very generous project.

Eventually Artificial Intelligence will take over the human powered content moderation jobs for Facebook. Until then, this small population of humans employed by Cognizant (on behalf of Facebook) in Phoenix, Arizona accept the job of subjecting themselves to the worst of humankind to provide “a better Facebook experience.”

Casey Newton writes for The Verge:

The video depicts a man being murdered. Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life. Chloe’s job is to tell the room whether this post should be removed. She knows that section 13 of the Facebook community standards prohibits videos that depict the murder of one or more people. When Chloe explains this to the class, she hears her voice shaking.

Returning to her seat, Chloe feels an overpowering urge to sob. Another trainee has gone up to review the next post, but Chloe cannot concentrate. She leaves the room, and begins to cry so hard that she has trouble breathing.

No one tries to comfort her. This is the job she was hired to do…

From the GitHub blog:

With draft pull requests, you can clearly tag when you’re coding a work in progress. Now when you open a pull request, a dropdown arrow appears next to the “Create pull request” button. Toggle the dropdown arrow whenever you want to create a draft instead.

Finally. No more titling “[WIP]” and co-workers still asking you whether your pull request is ready to review. GitHub is killing it right now.

Federico Viticci on MacStories didn’t understand why Apple Music doesn’t offer a “Year in Review” feature, so he built his own:

But Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding this feature to Apple Music, so I decided to build my own using Shortcuts. The result is the most complex shortcut I’ve ever created comprising over 540 actions.

I just tried out the shortcut last night, and it’s incredible. But as Federico himself points out, doing something this complex pushes the boundaries of Shortcuts and iOS:

Apple Music Wrapped pushes the limits of what is possible to achieve with the ‘Find Music Where…’ and ‘Open URLs’ actions of the Shortcuts app. In the past few weeks, I (and other testers) have run into limitations and inconsistencies worth pointing out both for MacStories readers and Shortcuts engineers at Apple.

It’s nothing short of a programmatic feat, and if you use Apple Music, I recommend you give it a shot.

CV Compiler is an online resume analysis tool designed exclusively for software engineers.

The review technology scans for keywords from the world of programming and how they are used in the resume, relative to the best practices in the industry.

CV Compiler was built using Python with libraries NLTK and spaCy for tokenization, lemmatization, and POS-tagging.

The internal analysis engine for large datasets (resumes, job descriptions) was built upon a Seq2Seq model in TensorFlow.

Eran Hammer makes the case for hapi as your Node web framework of choice. We’ve been talking about dependencies a lot lately due to recent events. In light of that, think about this:

hapi was the first (and still the only) framework without any external code dependencies… I personally (and manually) review every single line of code that goes into hapi (excluding node itself). I review every pull request on every dependency regardless if I am the lead maintainer.

That’s quite the selling point! He has a lot of great reasons why hapi is worthy of your consideration. Click through for the hard pitch.

Several major browsers you and I use everyday are capable of leaking our browsing history, and they all know about it. Caroline Haskins at Motherboard writes:

Most modern browsers—such as Chrome, Firefox, and Edge … have vulnerabilities that allow hosts of malicious websites to extract hundreds to thousands of URLs in a user’s web history, per new research from the University of California San Diego.

In a statement provided to Motherboard via email, senior engineering manager of Firefox security Wennie Leung said that Firefox will “prioritize our review of these bugs based on the threat assessment.” Google spokesperson Ivy Choi told Motherboard in an email that they are aware of the issue and are “evaluating possible solutions.”

Ben Adida shared this on Twitter:

When first web history sniffing attacks came out, I suggested we had to change the notion of a visited link: a link would be marked visited by origin (edges, not nodes.) That was considered too dramatic a change. Maybe it’s necessary after all.

Who’s ready to dig into this research and share how vulnerable we really are and what types of malicious websites could/would extract our browsing history? If you do, let us know so we can link it up.

Kenneth Reitz, well known in the Python community, creator of Requests, and a former Changelogger has been using VS Code for Python development for several months and is giving it the “should use” status.

Kenneth writes on his personal blog:

I’ve been using Visual Studio Code daily now (for Python development) for about six months — long enough to give it a thorough review. Before, I was using Sublime Text with a few plugins, which worked very well— but, I am continually shocked at just how good VS Code is, in comparison, and I’d like to share with you my observations / opinions…

Big week! KBall, Nick, and JBall (nooch) dive deep in to the 2018 Node.js user survey results. What does it all mean?! They also review Ryan Dahl’s “10” regrets about Node and sound off on Microsoft’s assimilatio… err… acquisition of GitHub.