2020 was rough. If you wanna play through it again though, there’s https://2020game.io/ 🎮
As someone who spends a lot of time working with JavaScript and web apps, I take great satisfaction in maintaining a minimalist, JS-free personal website. I've added it to the 512KB Club, a sort of webring for similarly tiny sites ⚡
Reflective ramblings of a Tech Lead after a year in the job ✍️
https://mikebabb.com/blog/what-ive-learned-as-a-new-tech-lead/
At the weekend I listened to a podcast about GitHub's arctic code vault - such a cool idea! And it turns out I have code in it through my Nextcloud contributions 🏔
https://changelog.com/podcast/411
https://archiveprogram.github.com/
I like @Fairphone's approach to smartphones - modular, user-repairable phones you can get replacement parts and upgraded components for instead of replacing the whole thing. Much less waste and an ethical supply chain! I'll check out what they're offering next time I'm due an upgrade 📱
https://www.fairphone.com/it/2020/08/27/introducing-fairphone-3-plus/
New blog post: Automatic Dark Mode with CSS Variables https://mikebabb.com/blog/automatic-dark-mode-with-css-variables/ ✍️
Firefox for Android has gotten its big new release following a complete rebuild, with the GeckoView rendering engine and browser extension support. I've been using the beta for a while and it's a lot faster than old Firefox ⚡
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/25/introducing-a-new-firefox-for-android-experience/
Dan Abramov has started a concise and entertaining glossary of JavaScript terms - https://whatthefork.is. A good addition to your RSS feed
Web developers, what's your build tool of choice these days? Might update my ageing Gulp 3 setup soon. I compile Sass, inject an SVG spritesheet, and run the standard CSS minification etc. No JavaScript in use on the site.
If there's a better way than Gulp for running these tasks I'm open to changing it. I've used webpack a lot but it feels like overkill for this. NPM scripts maybe?
Today I learned that the New Zealand postal system sends physical ping packets to test their network.
I received a "tracked letter" which says "we send 2,500 of these letters every week to random addresses all around New Zealand to help us check the performance of our network."
I am the lucky winner of a functioning national postal system, which considering the alternative in other countries, makes me feel pretty darn lucky.
Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 was quite straightforward, and the new release is great. I scribbled a few thoughts on it here: https://mikebabb.com/blog/ubuntu-20.04/
A brilliant comic explaining how smartphone contact-tracing can alert people to potential exposure to Covid-19 without location tracking or other data collection: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ #privacy #COVID19 #technology
Ubuntu 20.04 is now available, and it's looking like a great release! https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/04/feature-spotting-in-focal-fossa
As many of us make the switch to remote working for the forseeable future, Martin Fowler shares some thoughts on getting the most out of video calls: https://martinfowler.com/articles/effective-video-calls.html
There's some great stuff coming to the JavaScript Internationalisation API in ECMAScript 2020: https://diary.braniecki.net/2020/02/14/js-intl-in-2020/
Intl.RelativeTimeFormat and Intl.ListFormat look particularly useful 👏
"Google is planning to move its British users’ accounts out of the control of European Union privacy regulators, placing them under U.S. jurisdiction instead"
An excellent and timely post by @danny: "Shaving off a single kilobyte in a file that is being loaded on 2 million websites reduces CO2 emissions by an estimated 2950kg per month." https://dannyvankooten.com/website-carbon-emissions/
I recently started using Joplin for note-taking and it's so good I reckon you should use it too. I wrote a few quick words about it: https://mikebabb.com/blog/work-and-life-management-with-joplin/ #opensource
Husband, father, and software developer. Open Web advocate and supporter of Free, Open Source Software projects. Working mostly with React, TypeScript, and GraphQL 👨💻