Blogmarks
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Elaborate Halloween Costume Tips from a 19th-Century Guide to Fancy Dress (via) The gilded age had some ridiculous parties. Here are highlights of the most popular costume guide of the era, now available on the Internet Archive.
arxiv-vanity (via) Beautiful new project from Ben Firshman and Andreas Jansson: “Arxiv Vanity renders academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages so you don’t have to squint at a PDF”. It works by pulling the raw LaTeX source code from Arxiv and rendering it to HTML using a heavily customized Pandoc workflow. The real fun is in the architecture: it’s a Django app running on Heroku which fires up on-demand Hyper.sh Docker containers for each individual rendering job.
Introducing Faktory. A brand new worker queue system from Mike Perham, the author of Sidekiq for Ruby. It’s written in Go on top of RocksDB and is explicitly designed to support clients and workers in multiple different languages.
Saying Goodbye to Firebug. Firebug has reached end-of-life as a separate extension, replaced by the built-in Firefox Developer Tools. It’s hard to overstate how influential Firebug has been in helping to turn front-end web development into a respected and productive engineering discipline.
Getting Your First 10 Customers (via) There is so much good advice embedded in this article by Patrick McKenzie, and it constantly comes back to the theme of doing whatever it takes to get to your first ten paying customers.
Can You Afford It?: Real-world Web Performance Budgets. Alex Russell’s magnum opus on web performance budgets in 2017. He proposes a baseline testing device equivalent to a $200 Android phone on a slow 3G network emulated at 400ms RTT/400Kbps transfer and encourages a goal of 5s time-to-interactive on first load and 2s TTI for subsequent views. This means around 130kb of gzipped JavaScript—challenging but not impossible with modern JavaScript frameworks.
hupper (via) Handy Python module for adding “live reload” development support to just about anything. I’m using it with Sanic—I run “hupper -m app” and it starts up my code in app.py and automatically reloads it any time any of the corresponding files changes on disk.
System Requirements For SQLite. Document describing the high level goals and objectives of SQLite. Like everything to do with SQLite this exhibits some incredibly well thought out software engineering. I particularly like “S80000: SQLite shall exhibit ductile failure characteristics“ where ductile is described in opposition to brittle: a ductile system begins showing signs of trouble well in advance of failure.
Parse shell one-liners with pyparsing. Neat introduction to the pyparsing library, both for parsing tokens into labeled sections and constructing an AST from them.
SurviveJS—Webpack (via) Free online book about Webpack. I’ve read the first couple of chapters and it looks like a concise, well constructed guide to a key component of the modern JavaScript stack.
It’s Not a Feature Problem—Avoiding Startup Tarpits (via) “When we turned on paid advertising for the first time the increase we had a sizable increase in signups. We always feared that a new user would just churn because of what we perceived as deficiencies in the product. While there were users who churned for that reason, it was never the nightmare scenario that we imagined.”
Getting the Most out of Sqlite3 with Python. A couple of neat tricks I didn’t know: you can skip cursors entirely by calling .execute and .executemany directly on the connection object, and you can use the connection object as a context manager to execute transactions using a “with” block.
Crossdressing, Compression, and Colliders: ’The First Photo on the Web’. TIL the first photo shared on the web was of Les Horribles Cernettes, an all-female comedy musical group at CERN who performed songs about particle physics. And Sir Tim Berners-Lee first met them when he played the dame in the CERN panto.
github-dashboard (via) Nice little self-contained example of a React app with no build step by Shing Lyu.
Minimal React.js Without A Build Step.
React is pretty dependent on a build phase, to handle things like JSX compilation. This is fine for most projects, but sometimes I just want to hot-link react and react-dom from a CDN and knock out a quick self-contained mini-application. Shing Lyu points out that this is much easier if you ditch JSX in favour of direct calls to React.createElement().
Hey Siri: An On-device DNN-powered Voice Trigger for Apple’s Personal Assistant (via) “The “Hey Siri” detector uses a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to convert the acoustic pattern of your voice at each instant into a probability distribution over speech sounds. It then uses a temporal integration process to compute a confidence score that the phrase you uttered was “Hey Siri”. If the score is high enough, Siri wakes up.”
React is the new Dojo. In which Mikeal Rogers provides his perspective on the history of Dojo, the earliest break-out JavaScript framework, how jQuery eclipsed it and contemplates the same thing eventually happening to React.
Carbon (via) Beautiful little tool that you can paste source code into to generate an image of that code with syntax highlighting applied, ready to be tweeted or shared anywhere that lets you share an image. Built in Node and next.js, with image generation handled client-side by the dom-to-image JavaScript library which loads HTML into a SVG foreignObject (sadly not yet supported by Safari) and uses that to populate a canvas and produce a PNG.
Streaming Dataframes. This is some deep and brilliant magic: Matthew Rocklin’s Streamz Python library provides some elegant abstractions for consuming infinite streams of data and calculating cumulative averages and rolling reductions... and now he’s added an integration with jupyter that lets you embed bokeh graphs and pandas dataframe tables that continue to update in realtime as the stream continues! Check out the animated screenshots, this really is a phenomenal piece of work.
A Brief Intro to Docker for Djangonauts (via) This is great—a really clear introduction to both Docker and Docker Compose, aimed at Django developers. Includes line-by-line annotations of an example Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml.
SRI Hash Generator. Handy utility for generating SRI hashes—just give it a URL and it will show you the script or link href block you need to use to safely embed that URL in your page with the correct SRI hash.
Subresource Integrity. Now supported in Firefox 55, Chrome 49+ and Safari 11+. This makes me much more comfortable about hot-linking to JavaScript and CSS hosted by the various CDN providers, since it means that should they get breached any evil new scripts hosted at the same URL will be denied by modern browsers.
Select Transform: JSON Template over JSON (via) A barrage of interesting ideas here. Having clients transmit up a JSON template which is then executed against data on the server and used to return exactly the data the client needs is just one of them (significant overlap with GraphQL there).
An interactive explanation of quadtrees (via) Neat explorable explanation of quadtrees, using interactives built on top of D3.
Explorable Explanations. I’m fascinated by web articles and essays that embed interactive visualizations—taking advantage of the unique capabilities of the medium to help explain complex concepts. Explorable Explanations collects exactly these, under the banner of “learning through play”. They also gather tools and tutorials to help build more of them.
What’s New In DevTools (Chrome 62). Some really neat stuff. Highlights include top-level “await” support in the console, the ability to take screenshots of specific HTML nodes, CSS grid highlighting and the ability to drop a .HAR file onto the network panel in order to view it as a waterfall.
The Xi Text Engine CRDT (via) Xi is “a modern editor with a backend written in Rust”—an open-source text editor project from Google built on some very interesting computer science (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types). It’s a native editor with server-backed synchronization as a first-class concept.
How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human. Some very well thought out advice on giving constructive reviews, including simple but effective language tricks for keeping suggestions positive and helpful.
Exploding Git Repositories. Kate Murphy describes how git is vulnerable to a similar attack to the XML “billion laughs” recursive entity expansion attack—you can create a tiny git repository that acts as a “git bomb”, expanding 12 root objects to over a billion files using recursive blob references.
Dead End Thrills. Duncan Harris Is a photographer who works in the medium of video game screen captures.