Items in Sep, 2018
Filters: Year: 2018 × Month: Sep × Sorted by date
How we rolled out one of the largest Python 3 migrations ever. “If you’re using Dropbox today, the application is powered by a Dropbox-customized variant of Python 3.5” # 25th September 2018, 11:02 pm
Build impossible programs. Delightful talk by Julia Evans describing how she went about building a Ruby profiler in Rust despite having no knowledge of Ruby internals and only beginner’s knowledge of Rust. # 19th September 2018, 6:38 pm
Sqorn (via) JavaScript library for building SQL queries that makes really smart usage of ES6 tagged template literals. The magic of tagged template literals is that they let you intercept and process interpolated values, making them ideally suited to escaping parameters in SQL queries. Sqorn takes that basic ability and layers on some really interesting API design to allow you to further compose queries. # 19th September 2018, 6:34 pm
Letterboxing on Lundy
Last week Natalie and I spent a delightful two days with our friends Hannah and Adam on the beautiful island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel, 12 miles off the coast of North Devon.
[... 1461 words]Extended Validation Certificates are Dead. Troy Hunt has been writing about the flaws of Extended Validation certificates for a while. Now iOS 12 is out and Mobile Safari no longer displays their visual indicator in the URL bar (and desktop Safari will stop doing so next week when Mac OS Mojave ships). EV certificates are being dropped by many of the larger companies that were using them. “This turned out to be a long blog post because every time I sat down to write, more and more evidence on the absolute pointlessness of EV presented itself”. # 18th September 2018, 1:41 pm
Tech Notes: TypeScript at Google (via) In which Evan Martin provides some fascinating colour on the state of JavaScript tooling within Google, which has some unique challenges given that Gmail is 14 years old now and Google have evolved their own internal JavaScript stack which differs widely from the rest of the industry (mainly because it predates most of the successful open source tools). “Which leads me to the middle path, which my little team has been pursuing: incrementally adopt some external tooling where it makes sense, by figuring out how to make it interoperate with our existing code base.” # 2nd September 2018, 7:08 pm
A tour of JavaScript timers on the web (via) Do you understand the differences between setTimeout, setInterval, setImmediate, requestAnimationFrame and requestIdleCallback? I didn’t. # 2nd September 2018, 10:10 am
The (broken) economics of OSS (via) This is worth reading: a very well thought-out summary of the challenges of financially supporting open source infrastructure projects in a world of cloud providers. Matt Klein is the creator of the Envoy proxy at Lyft. One of his conclusions is that the open source fellowship model (where foundations provide a full time salary to key maintainers) deserves more attention. # 2nd September 2018, 9:10 am
When you’re pumping messages around the Internet between heterogeneous codebases built by people who don’t know each other, shit is gonna happen. That’s the whole basis of the Web: You can safely ignore an HTTP header or HTML tag you don’t understand, and nothing breaks. It’s great because it allows people to just try stuff out, and the useful stuff catches on while the bad ideas don’t break anything.
— Tim Bray # 1st September 2018, 1:41 am