Hey,
This morning I was surprised when I scrolled through my RSS reader and read this little note titled “Ten years ago”. It’s a hommage to all the people and things we take for granted, we don’t usually appreciate but need every day. It’s easy to say “let’s look at the future” but as important to appreciate the current and the past. Today is a day where many people buy the hottest deals just because it’s cheap, not necessarily because they need it. By appreciating what we have, we think about what’s really important to us. These items now carry emotions and personal notes.
Ten years ago I haven’t even been thinking of writing a newsletter for many people—in fact the WDRL is just a little over four years now. Ten years ago I was happy to land a new client that had a big name and reputation or a high economic asset value. Ten years ago I attended my first meetup ever in my life. Since then, a lot in my life changed and while I didn’t know what is important to me in life I know a lot more about my pursued values, my people around me and the things that are important to me. Today I buy less stuff that I don’t need, I value friendship and people in my life more, and my approach of work has fundamentally changed.
This is the reason why I’m working nearly full-time on Colloq now despite not being able to live from it yet. It’s why I don’t want to raise investments or Venture Capital for it. It’s why I care about proper markup, lean code, web performance, creating progressively enhanced JavaScript experiences. It’s why I care about project management, creating more equality between people in the world and about education. I tried myself as a speaker a couple of times but it’s not my thing. My thing is to write a newsletter that countless people out there appreciate a lot, can learn from, start or change their careers due to the take-aways and learnings I serve them in a compact way nearly each week since 2013.
Thanks for everything, to all the people who make the resources I share, to all the people who receive this letter and to all of the people who support me every day and am part of my life.
News
- Late to the party and actually launched already a week ago, here’s what’s new in Firefox 57: It now has switched the engine and is super fast due to the new Quantum engine. With it, web extensions are a reality and a lot more bugfixes for old issues and performance improvements can be expected in future. But what about us developers? Firefox 57 brings support for
<input type="[date|time]">, lots of CSS bugfixes that weren’t possible with the old Gecko engine, the Performance Observer API is now enabled, the Storage API, and the Abort API (e.g. for fetch-requests). The headless mode now supports the--screenshotflag which is incredibly useful and the Quantum engine is coming to Firefox on Android 59 soon as well.
Generic
- Amazon is amazing, right? Their cloud is fast, big, and cheap. Their shop offers everything and delivers it quite fast to you. This week, Amazon Web Services announced something very interesting: “AWS now provides the U.S. Intelligence Community a commercial cloud capability across all classification levels: Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.” Yes, you read right — it seems like Amazon will be the responsible company for hosting U.S. Intelligence service’s Top Secret data. I’m pretty sure it’s not a good idea that government services start to fully rely on a company’s exclusive Cloud service with no option to easily switch to a competitor or their own alternative back again. Put it in relation to what Amazon is: Up to 70% of the internet traffic goes through the AWS Virginia datacenter, Amazon wants a camera and microphone in your bedroom, your living room and also a smart key of your flat or house, and it’s already impossible to not use AWS if you use the internet. What happens to the U.S. Intelligence community if this AWS secure cloud suffers from an outage as it happened this year? Can they still operate? What if it happens during an active investigation?
Tooling
- Who of us doesn’t know the big challenges of releases and how time-consuming they can be. Raymond Rutjes now suggests that making a release should be possible for everyone on the team. Making a release should be easy, worry-less and—maybe most importantly—fast.
Security
- This week’s revelations about Uber’s data breach in 2016 shows prominently how companies with enough money in the backyard don’t care about their users, about laws and why they rather try to solve all their issues with money in order to succeed. If you read that they preferred paying 100k USD to hackers and risk another fine of about 20k for the violation of not reporting the data breach to authorities it’s easy to see the reason why: The amount of money to get the chance that probably none of their customers or media will know about the security issue which would be negative PR for Uber is neglectable. It’s the same amount of money they pay some of their engineers a year and a cheap way to keep the company’s reputation. Even now that it came out, they already made much more money since the breach from the people who didn’t leave the service as they might have done if they had known about the exposure of their data to hackers. It’s the issue of public reputation and making money, growing the asset value of the company being more important than any customer.
Web Performance
- Michael Scharnagl explains how we can use Service Workers (which are basically a web proxy) to load images based on the Network Information API
- Harry Roberts often finds the right words to uncover issues that aren’t obvious to a lot of people. The Fallacies of Distributed Computing (Applied to Front-End Performance) is about as developer making assumptions for users, about actively neglecting or overthinking problems such as network performance.
Accessibility
- What’s the best approach of designing and coding a table that works for everyone? Adrian Roselli shares how to create responsive, accessible tables.
JavaScript
- Safari has dynamic JavaScript
import()support already in the preview builds, and Chrome 63 will support it as well. Mathias Bynens explains what this means and how we can use it.import()basically isimporton fire and lets you load entire JavaScript modules on the fly only when you really need them. - If you know Moment.js, there’s now a new library that can be seen as alternative to Moment: Luxon is based on modern code structures, written in modern ECMAScript, and fixes the structural issues of Moment.js and include all the learnings from the older library.
Work & Life
- “There was a time when you could write a few poems, die of TB, and call it a life well lived”. Quinn Norton published a thought “Against Productivity” about the weird strive in all of us for more productivity in life.
- According to The Guardian, a lot of employers are already using a range of technologies to monitor their employees’s web-browsing patterns, keystrokes, social media posts and even private messaging apps. It’s work surveillance that shows absolute mistrust of the company towards their staff. What can you do apart from ending your work contract if this is true for you? Best is probably to talk to your boss that you think they don’t value your work and it feels like they mistrust you if they monitor you.
- Ryan Singer shares why just doing Agile doesn’t work and why it’s not about speed, faster waterfall cycles. The problems are doing the wrong things, building to specs, and getting distracted. Finding the right things to work on, doing it carefully and in cycles is real agile working. Don’t let you distract by numbers, by terms and focus on the important things.
- Alida Miranda-Wolff broaches the issue of why “move fast and break things” is a bad idea when it comes to people because then the “thing” being broken is a person. The issue of working hours, happiness at work, growing talent and why it’s tempting to follow hurtful patterns for our lives at work.
Go beyond…
- We want more and more products. Black Friday, Cyber Monday leads us to buy countless things we probably don’t need. Here’s how we fill our planet with trash.
- Jason Fried’s “The Intimidating Zero” is an important reminder to all of you that numbers don’t matter if you have an idea for something to publish. Follow your ideas and don’t let your thoughts be dictated by statistics.
I know today’s newsletter was quite long so thanks for your attention.
Anselm