Hey,
This week AOL announced that it’ll shut down AIM, one of the most used messengers in the past is going to shut down this year. It’s amazing to see that this product has been existing for 20 years and has made a huge impact for many people on the internet. Which product nowadays survives that long? But my hope is that we’re starting to build more long-term products and sustainable services again. After all, why should we switch a chat service every year? Even if there are backups of the data, who’ll be able to read it once the app doesn’t exist anymore? In the end, it’s sad to see that a product on which countless hours were spent by many people disappears shortly after its launch. I know that this is business life in the context of a short-living highly technologized civilization but it’s also something we can improve. By building long-term solutions is a healthier way for ourselves to not work ourselves into exhaustion.
News
- npm now allows authors of npm packages to use two-factor authentification which is great to secure down the publishing supply chain a bit more.
- This week Microsoft announced Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android to complete the experience for Windows users. While this is pretty big news, we developers can stay calm as the apps will use the OS’ default rendering engines—WebKit for iOS and Chrome for Android.
- Firefox 56 is out and brings a new, handy screenshot feature, is 64-bit by default on all operating systems. It also brings
<link rel="preload">, and the browser can now be run in headless mode with the-headlessflag on the command line during startup. - Keybase just launched encrypted git this week. It can be used with their Keybase app, has end-to-end encryption for the complete repository and works with e.g. the Github Desktop app. The only downside to it is that there’s no web interface to it, so there are no pull requests, no wiki, no issue tracking. But for those who don’t need that, it’s great to see a fully encrypted, safe git repository remote storage.
- Postgres 10 was released and brings quite some big news: It brings significant improvements for the “divide and conquer” strategy, logical replication, declarative table partitioning, and better support for parallelized queries.
- Safari Technology Preview Release 41 is out and brings support for
min()andmax()incalc(), and noticeably, removes CSS Regions support. - With Cloud Firestore by Firebase we now have a fully-managed NoSQL document database for mobile and web app development. It offers offline data access, real-time data synchronization, and automatic, multi-region data replication with strong consistency which is pretty neat.
Security
- For security researchers or people who found a security issue on a website, it can be hard to find a way to communicate about it appropriately. As a result, a lot of issues aren’t reported and others are disclosed without the team knowing about it before. To improve that situation, security.txt defines a standard to help organizations define the process for security researchers to securely disclose security vulnerabilities.
Web Performance
- Essential Image Optimization by Addy Osmani is a free ebook that explains nearly everything you can and should know about image optimization for the web. Something you should definitevely have a look at when you find some time for it.
- News from Cloudflare: You'll soon be able to deploy JavaScript to Cloudflare's edge, written against an API similar to Service Workers which sounds pretty amazing.
JavaScript
- The Intl.PluralRules API is an extension to the Internationalization API that will be soon available in Firefox 58 and Chrome 63. It solves a quite tricky issue with plurals in internationalized contexts.
CSS
- Balloon.css lets you add tooltips easily without JavaScript and even brings quite some options and different tooltip positions with it.
Go beyond…
- Jens Oliver Meiert emailed the companies that are responsible for 71% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Here’s what he got as reply. Anyways, the most important point about it is what the author concludes with:
Perhaps I didn’t get to email the people who’re truly responsible here; and what they do with my requests, I don’t know, either.
But the point is that reaching out is one of the few options we have at our disposal; and if even one small thing changes and improves, it may be a success. And as such I believe more people should reach out. Instead of waiting for politicians or law enforcement to act, let’s act ourselves, let’s make ourselves heard. Constructive action always helps.
I’ll leave you now with some event recommendations. First of all, Sustainable UX is back in February 2018, again as free online conference so I highly recommend to attend it. Then there’s Reactive Conf happening this month in Bratislava for all the React.js interested people, and finally, in January 2018 there will be a beyond tellerrand event in Munich, Germany for the first time.
If you want to find more events, let me tease you with something I’ve been building for the past year and that will launch soon.
Anselm