Changelog.com - 🚨 The ONE thing every dev should know

Nikita Sobolev:

Your sync and async code can be identical, but still, can work differently. It is a matter of right abstractions. In this article, I will show how one can write sync code to create async programs in Python.

Jessica Xie:

I’m not implying that one shouldn’t write tests. The benefits of quality assurance, performance monitoring, and speeding up development by catching bugs early instead of in production outweigh its downsides. However, improvements can be made… Test selection sparks joy in my life. I wish that I can bring the same joy to you.

How’s the saying go? Choose well-understood, “boring technologies”…we often reach for the new and shiny just for the joy of tinkering with something.

Psst, I have invented the time machine (don’t tell anyone)! Let us quickly travel back in time to 2016. SWOOSH! We are there. JavaScript landscape looks like this:

If you are using a JavaScript framework or want to use a framework, Angular.js is probably something you would choose. But, the news about Angular 2 that will make you rewrite almost everything is just around the corner. Also, this new kid on the block - React.js is coming up and getting ripe. Of course, Vanilla JS and no-framework-folks are there. Not using a framework is still a popular opinion in 2016, but is slowly fading.

Knowing all this, what would you do? Which path would you choose and why?

How you think has everything to do with the quality of your thinking. Great writing Jose 👏

If being a good software engineer means being a good thinker, then becoming a better one should mean improving the way we think… right? Well, no little shame in saying that it’s taken me more than a decade of coding to get this. To finally focus my attention on improving the way I think instead of learning yet another library, framework or programming language.

At a certain point, the things that got in the way of my growth had nothing to do with problem solving and everything to do with what was actually happening in my mind when I was engaged should have been engaging with a problem.

Expose is a beautiful, open source, tunnel application that allows you to share your local websites with others via the internet.

Since you can host the server yourself, you have full control over the domains that your shared sites will be available at. You can extend expose with additional features and middleware classes on the server and client side, to make it suit your specific needs.

Alan Shreve closed ngrok’s source code years ago, and every now-and-again an open source alternative pops on the scene. Add Expose to the list. It’s written in PHP and has a nice shine on it. But which of these SSH tunneling tools is best in class?

This program was a joy to put together. Its purpose was fun and education, and in no way to create a modern or even realistic Lisp implementation. The goal was to turn that marvelous page 13 into a working interpreter using clean, direct Go code.

If you’re interested in what one of Go’s creators believes is “clean, direct Go code”, then you’re interested in this repo.

Jared Palmer:

At first I thought it was just me getting older and more experienced. But after several conversations about it with colleagues and other open source maintainers, I’m not the only one who feels this way.

After a lot of reflection, I believe the turning point was when they changed how the ranking system on the Trending page worked.

I don’t know if I ever considered GitHub fun, but I agree the trending section has lost value over the years. You know what is fun, though? Getting the day’s hottest new & trending repos delivered directly to your inbox. That’s what. 😉

Alexander Sulim:

A short story that suggests to challenge your initial ideas. Because sometimes it’s possible to achieve more by actually doing less :)

I used to be the guy with dozens of Chrome extensions. These days I limit my use of both (Google Chrome and browser plugins). Performance and reliability are features I desire more than what most plugins have on offer.

That being said, if you have a lot of extensions and you’re curious which ones might be bogging down your machine’s resources, this is a great analysis of the top 1000.

Cryptomator works with Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, ownCloud, Nextcloud and any other cloud storage service which synchronizes with a local directory. Since it’s open source, you can check for backdoors. Since it’s entirely client-side, you don’t have to trust anybody else’s machines.

No matter how many of these WFH articles I read (or podcasts I listen to), there’s usually still one or two tips and/or perspectives I glean from each one. This is a nice piece on the Taskade Blog that starts by unpacking these three common tips:

1️⃣ Become a (Master) Communicator 📣
2️⃣ Find Your Work Sanctum 🏡
3️⃣ Make Time for Work (And Play) ⏰

Lars Wikman:

A bit of writing on what potential we leave on the table when we use tools that trade technical merit for other factors. And why Elixir just might have higher potential for web services than many other popular languages and runtimes.

This seems like a natural counter-weight to the go-big-or-go-home strategy of many venture capitalists:

Over five years, Indie.vc has backed 34 companies — half of which are women-led companies and 20% are Black. And while there haven’t been any big exits yet, the companies that receive Indie.vc funding seem to be much more robust than their peers, especially in a challenging economic climate. On average, they’re growing 100% in the first year, and 300% the second year, says Roberts. Plus, the fund’s mortality rate is 10% — compared to about 44% with traditional VC-backed companies.

Indie.vc’s next application window is “Fall 2020.”

Use this GitHub Action to select a combination of linters you want to run on your code base automatically. It currently supports 15 linters and there are a bunch more in the request queue.

Stephanie Morillo

In my own observations and conversations with developers and marketers, UX design is often conflated with visual design or user interface design, when in fact both of these are sub-disciplines within the field of UX design and are not representative of the totality of UX. I’ve been involved in conversations where talk of updating a “page’s UX” has meant adding visual design elements to a page. Anecdotally, I’ve seen calls for “UX designers” in open source when the need was for brand assets like a logo. (In this case, you would look for a visual designer.)

In this short post, I’ll cover some basics of UX design for developers who are interested in understanding what UX is and how it differs from other forms of design.