Hey,
Admitted, we live and learn from people who share their knowledge. We profit from people who share their open-source projects. There are people writing blog posts, talking at conferences or building video courses and a lot of discussions on various media channels. But there are also a lot of “quiet developers” who just don’t commit themselves to do public community work and prioritize other things. And we should respect them as much as we respect those who do public work.
News
- Just today, I read that the WebKit team is now working on implementing Service Workers for Safari, that Firefox got UI improvements, and tests Servo for the CSS engine which means massive performance improvements coming up. And Chrome got a new page where you can easily see what’s coming up in the next releases, for example that JavaScript modules, the smooth scrolling API, and the Web Share API are coming in Chrome 61.
- This week a new big incident happened with several npm packages. An unknown author re-published a lot of common packages with very similar names and injected malware into the code, stealing all environment variables of the machine where the package gets installed. They’re pulled from the registry now but if you ever installed them somewhere by accident, it’s not easy to spot it and you should consider your data to be stolen.
Tooling
- With Chain you can create dynamic color relations in Sketch. The handy plugin is great to apply gradient transformations to objects in a matter of seconds.
- Microsoft has published a new online guide to learn git. It contains three major sections: learn git, work with git, and switch to git. It’s thought for entry-level but always links to further readings if you want to know even more.
Security
- Troy Hunt, known for his service haveibeenpowned now released another cool thing: To match the latest NIST Digital Identity Guidelines, you should not allow users to use a password that previously appeared in a data breach. To do that, Troy released the data of his service in an anonymous way and you can now check online or get the data dump to implement the NIST guidelines. Note that there’s no requirement to implement this for non-federal agencies.
Web Performance
- Harry Roberts dives into the world of using third parties on a website and analyzes the performance and resilience. The article has great notes and insights into common issues with modern web projects and shows how request blocking through ad blockers or other techniques can be tested by developers and how you can avoid the most common pitfalls with third parties easily.
JavaScript
- Zell Liew wrote an entire article explaining
thisin JavaScript. As it depends on certain conditions and in which environment it’s used,thiscan sometimes be confusing. Zell shares his knowledge with us so we can learn more about the keyword. - Tomasz Netczuk explains how we can easily transform code to match a team’s coding standard format with ESLint and Prettier.
CSS
- Greg Whitworth shows how we can use
-ms-high-contrastto improve the user experience on our websites. Note that this is not only a feature that helps people with eyesight problems but all people who are outside when it’s a bright day.
Work & Life
- Hans Christian Reinl wrote a fine piece about why communication is key for productiveness.
- Seán Hanson shares a great insight post on why not all people are extroverts, share their stories, their findings or contribute to open source. But this doesn’t mean they’re not good or aren’t interested in their job, it just means they focus on other things than sharing.
Anselm