Mike Babb @mikebabb@mastodon.technology
Husband, father, and software developer. Open Web advocate and supporter of Free, Open Source Software projects. Working mostly with React, TypeScript, and GraphQL 👨💻
Joined Apr 2017
Dan Abramov recommends rethinking the pursuit of “clean code” above all other concerns in this thoughtful post: https://overreacted.io/goodbye-clean-code/
Immersive Labs had a fun little segment that aired on BBC News recently; a couple of our people showing Bristol shoppers how weak their passwords are: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-bristol-50926624/app-reveals-weak-password-woes
Mike Babb
boosted
Software developers love helping people. Their instinct is to build that hotly anticipated feature as fast as possible. So how can you be pragmatic about being pragmatic?
https://www.mikeveerman.be/2019/11/29/pragmatic-software-development/
Mike Babb
boosted
"Good Code Reviews, Better Code Reviews" by Gergely Orosz is a good read that offers practical tips for improving the code review process in your organisation. Empathy and flexibility go a long way!
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/good-code-reviews-better-code-reviews/
Mike Babb
boosted
"An HTML Element Potentially Worth $18M to Indiegogo Campaigns"
Adrian Roselli follows up Jason Grigsby's recent "An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M" with another simple fix that could've saved $millions, this time <label> for form accessibility:
http://adrianroselli.com/2019/09/an-html-element-potentially-worth-18m-to-indiegogo-campaigns.html
How does machine learning actually work? Google has produced a fun comic intro to its concepts: “Learning Machine Learning” https://cloud.google.com/products/ai/ml-comic-1/
Mike Babb
boosted
About a quarter of the page visible on load and four clicks to clear out the banners. What is this nonsense.
Mike Babb
boosted
This post resonates strongly. I, for one, have a low motivation for replacing Google Calendar as my main calendar app but I've given up using their search in favor of DuckDuckGo. I still use Facebook and Instagram a little but I've quit Twitter. Small things help.
You don't have to quit cold turkey on every "Big Bad Tech" today to help the Internet. Just like you don't have to go full vegan diet to help the environment. Explore the alternatives and do as much as you can.
Mike Babb
boosted
programmers conventionally use loop variables named "i" and "j" which stand for "index" and "jndex"
@kev I'm dabbling with RSS now myself but I'm having trouble adding your blog to my feed - any idea why my reader might not like it?
I had a couple of requests recently to add an RSS feed for my blog and I’ve finally gotten round to doing it: https://mikebabb.com/feed.xml. More posts on the way!
Mike Babb
boosted
Little Bobby Tables is back!
Someone chose the very cursed NULL for their license plate, and the DMV has been sending him traffic fines that are meant for other people.
Also linked from there: the legend of Christopher Null
Mike Babb
boosted
holy shit. I did it. It actually works.
I have spun up a Pleroma instance on... my fucking Nintendo Switch. I don't think the Switch was ever intended to be a **webserver**, but hey, it's 2019 and there are lightbulbs with CPUs built into them soooo
It can be accessed at cursed.frinkel.tech. don't sign up if you want a reliable instance, since it'll probably be down 90% of the time, since I'd actually like to use my switch to do what it was intended to do and play games. :P
My Nintendo Switch displaying a…
I have spun up a Pleroma instance on... my fucking Nintendo Switch. I don't think the Switch was ever intended to be a **webserver**, but hey, it's 2019 and there are lightbulbs with CPUs built into them soooo
It can be accessed at cursed.frinkel.tech. don't sign up if you want a reliable instance, since it'll probably be down 90% of the time, since I'd actually like to use my switch to do what it was intended to do and play games. :P
My Nintendo Switch displaying a…
JavaScript developers know the pain of guarding against undefined nodes in nested objects well, with repetitive checks like:
`const street = user.address && user.address.street;`
The Optional Chaining ECMAScript proposal offers an elegant solution in the form of a new operator, like so:
`const street = user.address?.street // won't break if address is undefined`
Google's "Be Internet Legends" online safety initiative looks like a great idea. I like that it covers social concepts like over-sharing, bullying, scams and phishing, as well as technical ones like securing accounts and devices. It's aimed at children but I'm sure a lot of adults could learn from it too:
Every so often I find another nifty little feature in Visual Studio Code that I get excited about. Today, that feature is markdown editing with synced preview pane scrolling 😍
Mike Babb
boosted
The Register isn't pulling any punches: "Internet imbeciles, aka British ISP lobbyists, backtrack on dubbing Mozilla a villain for DNS-over-HTTPS support"
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/10/ispa_clears_mozilla/
Mike Babb
boosted
So we started shipping WebRender in Firefox a few weeks ago. Completely new rendering engine written in rust, big departure from how we approached rendering before. We are gradually enabling it for different hardware/OS configurations and a couple of million users have it now.
What's kind of blowing my mind, having worked on 3 large-ish rewrites, is that since WebRender shipped, telemetry has reported less crashes per user with WebRender than without.
This is *not* how big rewrites usually go.
Husband, father, and software developer. Open Web advocate and supporter of Free, Open Source Software projects. Working mostly with React, TypeScript, and GraphQL 👨💻
Joined Apr 2017
