💚 VisiData is like duct tape for your data

lite is a lightweight text editor written mostly in Lua — it aims to provide something practical, pretty, small and fast, implemented as simply as possible; easy to modify and extend, or to use without doing either.

This list is deep and (of course) the UX is well-considered. The author provides definitions of the biases as well as real-world examples of them in action.

Every time users interact with your product, they:

🙈 Filter the information
🔮 Seek the meaning of it
⏰ Act within a given time
💾 Store bits of the interaction in their memories

So to improve your user experience, you need to understand the biases & heuristics affecting those four decision-cycle steps.

Recoil provides several capabilities that are difficult to achieve with React alone, while being compatible with the newest features of React.

Straight outta Facebook. See also the conference talk where it was announced at React Europe 2020.

Are you striving to create a culture of written comms? Maarten Claes writes…

More and more people are being exposed to working remotely. One of the key factors for success in a remote workplace is a culture of written communication. It’s not always obvious how to create such a culture, and it takes at least some level of discipline from the people involved to make it a habit.

I’ve worked with mostly remote teams over the past three years. Here are a few of my observations on what helped cultivate such a culture.

This looks pretty rad.

Google recently announced their Web Vitals initiative which seeks to condense and simplify what devs need to know to optimize our sites.

Linked is an accompanying (alpha-grade) Chrome extension that measures the 3 Core Web Vitals and displays your scores at the click of a button.

Dan Shipper shared an interview with Nir Eyal (behavioral design expert who taught at Stanford and author of Hooked and Indistractable) — Nir explains how to cope even when work is hard.

“When most people talk about habits, what they’re saying is, ‘I want something that’s difficult to become effortless. I want the benefits but I don’t want it to be hard,” Nir said to me in an interview a few weeks ago. “Well, I have news for you: some things are just hard. There’s no way of getting around it.”

The problem is, when we expect work to be effortless and it ends up being difficult, we often blame ourselves. So the very tools we’re using to make work easier, can instead make it easier for us to give up.

A general rule, but as with most things in software, there are exceptions:

Is Manual Modification of the Data Directory Ever Justified?

Sadly, I can’t answer “no” to this question. There are circumstances under which there is no reasonable alternative.

I’m definitely guilty of this and have mucked things up in the past (in dev, not prod!).

I still manually delete postmaster.pid a few times a month as Postgres doesn’t shut down completely sometimes when I reboot my computer. That file doesn’t get cleaned up, which results in Postgres not launching after the reboot.

May 7th, 2020: A discussion appears on Atom’s forum…

I use Atom for a few years now and was worried back then about the acquisition of Github from Microsoft. And now I read about Github Codespaces, which is powered by Visual Studio Code.

I’m a little concerned about this. Do you still support Atom? And do you support Atom in the future? If there are other opportunities of embedding a Editor or innovating would you also choose VS Code over Atom?

What is the future of Atom? Will you slowly move to VS Code and Atom will be on the support line?

All good questions. There’s been no official (or unofficial, that I’ve seen) response from GitHub just yet.

We’ve been following Atom for years now. Many great developers have put their efforts into the editor. But it’s hard to withstand the gravitational pull of VS Code. Even more so now that Microsoft owns GitHub? 🤔

I’ve had my eye on esbuild for awhile now (because I’m impatient), but there didn’t seem to be an easy way to use the Go-based JS bundler with our current webpack setup. (I want speed, after all, but I don’t want to have to work for it!)

I’m pretty excited by esbuild-loader, because its README says:

It makes sense to use [esbuild] over Babel/TSC with webpack to take advantage of both worlds (Speed and the webpack ecosystem).

That’s music to my ears, right there. I’ll report back how it works for us. ✊

Members of the Opensource.com team stress-test five open source video-conferencing apps so you don’t have to.

The apps they tried are: Jitsi, Signal, P2p.chat, Nextcloud Talk, and BigBlueButton.

Jitsi looks pretty good. Anyone using it? What’s your experience?

Behind the scenes we heard about Sid’s idea of “family and friends first,” so we asked him to share the idea with our audience and how it’s being embraced at GitLab. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode of Founders Talk with Sid. I’m sure we’ll touch on this idea and more._

Even at GitLab, we’ve seen increased productivity as the number of merge requests for both March and April exceeded February’s numbers. But as company leader, I don’t see this as something to tout. This new normal is anything but normal, and we shouldn’t treat it as such. Even though GitLab has always been remote and experienced less of a transition than most other companies, our team members are not immune to the stressors of quarantine. Overworking or maintaining the status quo during a crisis is not a badge of honor. In fact, I would be prouder if more employees were taking time off to reset and refresh or spend time adjusting to this “new normal” with their families.

Wondering why your Phoenix application is recompiling dozens or hundreds of files every time you make a small change? Cross-module compilation dependencies are often to blame.

Nick does a great job with these videos. If you’ve never given Turbolinks a serious look, this would be 20 minutes well spent. We’ve been using Turbolinks for 4+ years now with great success.