Hey,
even though we think everything is real-time today, we often need patience. The “bottleneck” are human beings, while technology is capable to do real-time for long now. Whether it’s a pull request that’s waiting for review since days or weeks, or waiting for an email response, we need to keep in mind that this might be delayed for a good reason. Different people have different priorities, need to focus on something else at the moment or they just do a break right now. Training patience is an important part of our lives for mental health. And in the end, a well-thought-out, not instantly written feedback is better. Take your time, and let others do the same.
To my readers in or near Germany: Some of you might be aware that I organize a small event, and this week I have one ticket to give away for the NightlyBuild conference 2016 in Cologne, Germany on September, 2nd to give away. If you want to attend, just send me an email, and I’ll raffle the ticket on Tuesday.
News
- WebKit now supports
<script>and<style>hashes so you don’t need to set your Content Security Policy to allow'unsafe-inline'.
Privacy
- While researching a bit on user tracking, I found out about header enrichment, a technique used by mobile network providers to set unique identifiers. But more interestingly, while it’s advised by the IETF to not expose any of these headers to public servers, many ISPs do it anyway and leak the private IP addresses of devices, the IMEI/IMSI or even the phone number to any server. This research paper by the ICSI analyzed the worldwide spread and impact on users’ privacy.
- Many of you might be aware that we can’t style
:visitedstates and similar browser-history-based features in CSS very well. With CSS’ newmix-blend-mode-feature there seems to be a leak again that lets rogue sites inspect your browsing history. Michal Zalweski explains how it works. - Netflix engineers now share insights into how they protect the viewing privacy of their users by adding TLS to their video streams, which at that scale is a pretty challenging and interesting problem.
JavaScript
- Damon Bauer shares how you can build an image uploader in React.js and use it to manipulate the image for later usage.
- Peter van der Zee outlines how to reduce complexity in your code by thinking outside the box.
- Peter, the guy from js1k, also reflected on if we need JavaScript for all the things. The outcome of this little anecdote is nothing ground-breaking, but something we all should remind ourselves of from time to time.
CSS
- Erik Jung explores new ways to add dynamic themes in CSS with CSS variables and CSS Colors Level 4 features like the new
color()function. - Meanwhile, Abbey Fitzgerald wrote a great tutorial on how to use CSS and SVG clipping and masking techniques to create new types of layouts on websites.
- Harry Roberts now shares the slides to his talk “Refactoring CSS Without Losing Your Mind” and put its slides online. Having experienced many of the mentioned problems already in the past, I think there are a lot of great tricks in there that can be really helpful.
Work & Life
- Today I read an interesting statement about constant learning:
“In today’s highly competitive business environment, we all need to be in constant learning mode. No one can afford to take a vacation from developing new skills, especially as economic and political uncertainty threaten businesses and job stability and make future career prospects unclear”
I fundamentally disagree with this and encourage you to take a break from constant learning every few days. There are reasons why you should rest on a week-end and recover from constant learning that we do anyways over the whole week at work. By taking a break, you’ll eagerly await to learn new things afterwards. - Rose Marcario, CEO of Patagonia, has published an essay on why it’s important that employers support families. It’s not just about saying this but about taking meaningful, real action to make employees feel comfortable, have a good life, and enjoy working for their employer.
Go beyond…
- The NASA started a new blog called “Science WOW!” which shares educational articles on science each week. If you’re interested in learning how hurricanes form or about space exploration stuff, this might be for you.
Anselm