Last week I was talking about avoiding working all day and night. But Erik actually added a valid point to it: For you as an employee, it’s not always easy to turn off devices and not respond to requests of your manager. And many companies still have the thinking of “we pay you salary, so we pretty much own you”. This is not true and we all need to educate people, including our managers, to respect that. Because work without joy is not efficient work. And we need some downtime to deliver good work and enjoy our work.
News
A new Microsoft Edge Release is out, now supporting <picture>, CSS initial and unset values, extended srcset, the [download] attribute, SVG external content (wohoo, you can use use now with external resources), and WebRTC.
Generic
If you ever open sourced code that was used by other companies, you probably know this: Corporations and Open Source Software do not mix well. While you provide your work for free, most corporations using your code want bugs fixed immediately but don’t want to pay for it. A dilemma we should try to get rid of. As a company, give money to open source projects you use to keep them maintained.
From Pages to Patterns: An Exercise for Everyone by Charlotte Jackson does explain why it’s a much better idea to think in small components than a whole page when designing and building websites.
Tooling
cloc is a tool that counts blank lines, comment lines, and physical lines of source code in many programming languages. Very helpful to create statistics for your project.
It didn’t take long until someone brought a browser on the new Apple TV. Actually, it’s a very simplistic browser for tvOS using private API (aka UIWebView) and you need to build it manually with some tricks to get it running but it’s amazing how smooth it works.
This series of articles covers a lot of cool things you can do with PostCSS: The PostCSS Deep Dive.
Julia Powles recognized an interesting thing at one of the biggest tech events. Companies want to have more and more personal data to serve personalized products and services. The prevailing, unquestioned view was that our cities, homes and bodies will automatically be better, smarter and faster if they’re connected. But no one could actually tell why, how and what this will mean, in real, practical, day-to-day terms to people’s lives.
I bet no other rule has set the tech industry so much into trouble recently than the fall of the Safe Harbour law. As a consequence, Microsoft will open data centers in Europe to follow the guidelines.
Web Performance
Paul Lewis built Big Rig, a performance measurement tool that you can either use in the CLI or as a browser dashboard.
JavaScript
With this online book you can Learn Regular Expressions with a free online book in depth. It’s a great resource with lots of useful insight and can help you as a beginner or as an expert.
It’s not that difficult to add a value to an array in JavaScript. But many people don’t know how to remove a value from an array. This article tells you how to do it properly.
You’re not one of these cool, young developers out there? Here’s the thing: James Victore shares the secret of how to stay relevant in one of his famous Burning Questions videos.
Go beyond…
Now local businesses in Crickhowell are turning the tables on the likes of Google and Starbucks by employing the same accountancy practices used by the world’s biggest companies, to move their entire town “offshore”. What first might sound a bit weird, actually puts again some light on how broken our tax model currently is, and how unethical so many big companies are, avoiding taxes wherever they can. I can only hope that so many small companies follow this example so that countries need to change laws.
