Hey,
How can we improve—at work, in life, as persons? When we look at modern software development strategies, we can see some interesting methods how we could do it. Team Retrospectives, for example, are a great way to identify problems in a human, non-invasive way in order to find solutions. And what works well in agile teams in the work environment can work as well in your private life. If we reframe a retrospective, we could see meditation and Tai-Chi practices as similar strategies. All have the goal to make your mind clear, to identify and resolve issues. But it’s not about you. Regardless of how calm, reflected you are—if your team, your boss, your clients, or your partner, friends aren’t on the same line there will be tense. So it’s you who needs to find ways to make other people aware of how important reflection, problem identification and finding sustainable solutions is. Only if we all want it, we can succeed in life, at work.
News
- This week’s Google Chrome 61 release brings ECMAScript Modules,
navigator.share
, the WebUSB API, 8-digit alphatransparency hex-color codes, the CSSscroll-behavior
property, and the Visual Viewport API to the browser.
Tooling
- Subfont is a command line tool to statically analyse your page in order to generate the most optimal web font subsets, then inject them into your page. It’s also part of assetgraph 3.8.
- Martin Tapia explains how you can use headless Chrome to scrape websites and why it’s so much cooler than using curl.
Security
- Some researchers found a way to control voice assistants from Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, and Huawei. It not only affects the smart home boxes but also every iPhone, MacBook, Windows 10 PC, or Samsung Galaxy phone. By using ultrasonic frequencies they could control the devices and call people, open websites, and re-routed a navigation system of an Audi Q3 car.
- Stéphane Bortzmeyer shares the observations made during a technical attack to the WikiLeaks platform last week. This is a good example of how DNS attacks work.
- Benjamin Caudill introduces CFire, a script to evade Cloudflare’s “Cloud Security Protections”. But not only that, in the article he shares some very interesting details on how Cloudflare’s security system works.
Privacy
- If your site embeds tweets, you can add
<meta name="twitter:dnt" content="on">
so that Twitter doesn't track your visitors.
JavaScript
- Diogo Spínola wrote a transition guide for everyone using callbacks to move their code to async/await functions in the future.
Work & Life
- Victor Yocco shares why project retrospectives are so important to a team and how to do them so that they’re useful. This is an essential read for everyone not doing retrospectives yet.
Go beyond…
- With Tesla announcing an electric truck soon, expectations are high—and now there’s a first view on what such truck could mean: It will be much cheaper to operate than a traditional truck and depending on the software features and autonomous driving capabilities might ease the job of truckers a lot.
Have a great weekend, y’all. Do something for yourself these days, for someone else. And reflect on it. Read you next week, thanks for your support!
Anselm