July 2018
July 2, 2018
Digg’s v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity. Riveting behind-the-scenes story of the disastrous Digg V4 launch by former Digg engineer Will Larson.
Our provisioning tools for developer environments broke and no one knew how to fix them, so we reassigned new hires the zombie VMs of recently departed coworkers.
July 3, 2018
react-from-zero (via) Interesting approach to teaching and understanding React: unlike most other tutorials this skips Webpack and ES6 entirely an focuses on things you can get running just using a browser and loading code via script tags. It does eventually load Babel to enable client-side JSX transforms, but before that it shows how React can be used by loading react.js and react-dom.js and then calling React.createElement() manually (or by using the 0xeac7 magic symbol and constructing JavaScript objects manually with $$typeof: magicValue).
July 6, 2018
Over the last twenty years, publishing systems for content on [BBC] News pages have come and gone, having been replaced or made obsolete. Although newer content is published through dynamic web applications that can be readily modified, what lies beneath this sometimes resembles layers of sedimentary rock.
July 10, 2018
scrapely. Neat twist on a screen scraping library: this one lets you “train it” by feeding it examples of URLs paired with a dictionary of the data you would like to have extracted from that URL, then uses an instance based learning earning algorithm to run against new URLs. Slightly confusing name since it’s maintained by the scrapy team but is a totally independent project from the scrapy web crawling framework.
July 12, 2018
Usage of ARIA attributes via HTTP Archive. A neat example of a Google BigQuery query you can run against the HTTP Archive public dataset (a crawl of the “top” websites run periodically by the Internet Archive, which captures the full details of every resource fetched) to see which ARIA attributes are used the most often. Linking to this because I used it successfully today as the basis for my own custom query—I love that it’s possible to analyze a huge representative sample of the modern web in this way.
The Now CDN (via) Huge announcement from Zeit Now today: all .now.sh deployments are now served through the Cloudflare CDN, which means they benefit from 150 worldwide CDN locations that obey HTTP caching headers. This is particularly relevant for Datasette, since it serves far-future cache headers by default and uses Cloudflare-compatible HTTP/2 push hints to accelerate 302 redirects. This means that both the “datasette publish now” CLI command and the Datasette Publish web app will now result in Cloudflare-accelerated deployments.
July 13, 2018
future-fstrings (via) Clever module that backports fstrings to versions of Python earlier than 3.6, by registering itself as a codec and abusing Python’s # -*- coding: future_fstrings -*- feature. Via a conversation on Twitter that pointed out that the JavaScript community have been using transpilation to successfully experiment with new language features for years now.
XARs: An efficient system for self-contained executables (via) Really interesting new open source project from Facebook: a XAR is a new way of packaging up a Python executable complete with its dependencies and resources such that it can be distributed and executed elsewhere as a single file. It’s kind of like a Docker container without Docker—it uses the SquashFS compressed read-only filesystem. I can’t wait to try this out with Datasette.
July 16, 2018
Bowiebranchia. I spent the weekend learning about Nudibranchs, which are beautiful sea slugs (common on the coast of California) which are definitely best explained by their resemblance to different eras of David Bowie.
July 17, 2018
hyperHTML (via) I’ve been playing around with multiline backtick template literals in JavaScript recently, and Claudio Cicali on Twitter pointed me to hyperHTML. It’s a fascinating project: it implements an alternative to React’s virtual DOM in just 4.6KB of code, taking advantage of the way tagged template literals can call a custom function which gets to affect how the interpolated values from the template are treated. The documentation does a great job of describing the various clever tricks that are used under the hood, in particular the way it takes advantage of the way tagged literals “freeze” the incoming array of literal chunks allowing hyperHTML to compile each template once and reuse the complied version for different interpolations.
Feature comparison between hyperHTML and lit-html. Compiled by hyperHTML author Andrea Giammarchi. lit-html is a similar project maintained by Google’s Polymer team.
ES6 In Depth: Template strings. Useful guide to the advanced features of backtick template strings in ES6.
Interviewing a developer for whom English wasn’t his first language and he kept calling legacy code “legendary code” and now that’s all I want to write.
Teaching Tech Together (via) A new free book compiled by Greg Wilson about teaching programming, based on the instructor training program developed for the Software Carpentry course over the past six years. This is fantastic—it’s filling in a whole load of holes in my understanding of effective teaching theory.
July 25, 2018
The Free Stack—Running your application for free on AWS (via) Parikshit Agnihotry provides a useful rundown of quite how much you can get done using the first 12 month free tier of AWS API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 and CloudFront.
July 26, 2018
Datasette: publish_subcommand hook + default plugins mechanism, used for publish heroku/now (via) I just landed a new plugin hook to Datasette master: publish_subcommand, which lets you define new publisher subcommands for the “datasette publish” CLI tool in addition to Heroku and Zeit Now. As part of this I’ve refactored the heroku/now publisher implementations into two default plugins that ship as part of Datasette—I hope to use this pattern for other core functionality in the future.
July 28, 2018
Big tech warns of ’Japan’s millennium bug’ ahead of Akihito’s abdication (via) Emperor Akihito’s abdication in April 2019 triggers a new era, and the Japanese calendar counts years from the coronation of the current emperor. The era hasn’t changed since 1989 and a great deal of software is unable to handle a change. To make things more complicated... the name of the new era will be announced in late February, but it needs to be represented in unicode as a single new character... and the next version of Unicode (v12) is due out in early March. There may have to be a Unicode 12.1 released shortly afterwards that includes the new codepoint.
The death of a TLD. Sony have terminated their .xperia TLD. Ben Cox used Certificate Transparency logs to evaluate the 11 total TLDs that have been abandoned since the gTLD gold rush started—since HTTPS is becoming the default now these logs of issued certificates are a great indicator of which domains (or TLDs) are being actively used. The only deleted TLD with legitimate looking certificates (apparently for a mail server) was .mcdonalds