Changelog.com - Big updates in Safari 14

Organize your daily tasks at one place while making time tracking a lot less annoying. Super Productivity is a ToDo List / Time Tracker / Personal Jira Task Manager for Linux, MacOS and Windows aimed at reducing the time you spend with repetitive tasks and to provide you with a place to collect all the information you need to do your job.

This is a bit too much engineering for me, but perhaps you’ll like it.

Part mind mapping tool, part wiki, and entirely written in Markdown. Manage your knowledge inside VS Code and publish to the world via GitHub pages (or your favorite static website host).

A nice history of Vim and what it got right:

To better understand why and how Vim got (and is) so popular, it is best to look into the roots of how it all started. Before vim, there was vi, before vi there was ed. What are all these two or three letter words, and what is the story behind it? Let us dive in and figure out.

The most common setup for SSH keys is just keeping them on disk, guarded by proper permissions. This is fine in most cases, but it’s not super hard for malicious users or malware to copy your private key. If you store your keys in the Secure Enclave, it’s impossible to export them, by design.

This code:

from guietta import _, Gui, Quit
gui = Gui(
    
  [  'Enter numbers:', '__a__'  , '+' , '__b__',  ['Calculate'] ],
  [  'Result:  -->'  , 'result' ,  _  ,    _   ,       _        ],
  [  _               ,    _     ,  _  ,    _   ,      Quit      ]
)
with gui.Calculate:
    gui.result = float(gui.a) + float(gui.b)
    
gui.run()

Produces this UI:

An analysis by Marco Otte-Witte of the typical problems that arise when scoping and planning software projects as well as some techniques to address and overcome them, reducing uncertainty, risk and frustration.

Zach Leatherman:

Instantaneous measurement is a good first step. But how do we ensure that the site maintains good performance and best practices when deploys are happening every day? How do we keep the web site fast? The second step is continuous measurement. This is where Speedlify comes in. It’s an Eleventy-generated web site published as an open source repository to help automate continuous performance measurements.

Demo here.

This lengthly post from Tim O’Reilly is a must read in my opinion. His perspective is that the 21st hadn’t really begun until this year, 2020, “when the COVID19 pandemic took hold.”

…when we look back, we will understand that the 21st century truly began this year, when the COVID19 pandemic took hold. We are entering the century of being blindsided by things that we have been warned about for decades but never took seriously enough to prepare for, the century of lurching from crisis to crisis until, at last, we shake ourselves from the illusion that our world will go back to the comfortable way it was and begin the process of rebuilding our society from the ground up.

Tim goes on to ask and answer questions like: “What might be gone, never to return? What might come, now completely unexpected?” He also shares insight as “news from the future” regarding the direction of trend lines.

…to understand whether a trend like work-from-home is becoming the start of a new normal, sometimes the trend just hits you in the face. First Twitter, then Facebook announcing a commitment to new work from home policies even after the crisis is an obvious sign.

Sam Bleckley:

The npm ecosystem seems unwell. If you are concerned with security, reliability, or long-term maintenance, it is almost impossible to pick a suitable package to use — both because there are 1.3 million packages available, and even if you find one that is well documented and maintained, it might depend on hundreds of other packages, with dependency trees stretching ten or more levels deep — as one developer, it’s impossible to validate them all.

He then spends some time measuring the extent of the problem.

This article isn’t about software development, per se, though there is a section on learning programming. Instead, it’s about YouTube itself and how it’s become an amazing platform for knowledge transfer.

In this piece, we’re going to walk through a number of ways you may use YouTube for tacit knowledge acquisition, on a domain-by-domain basis. I’m afraid the anecdotes here are necessarily domain-specific, but the purpose of this piece is to give you certain patterns that you may adapt to whatever skillset you want to acquire in whatever domain you’re interested in.

It’s a shame that a thing as valuable to humanity as YouTube is owned by a single corporate entity. This makes me appreciate Wikipedia even more…

Brett Cannon, writing for his personal blog:

It’s no secret that I want a Python implementation for WebAssembly. It would not only get Python into the browser, but with the fact that both iOS and Android support running JavaScript as part of an app it would also get Python on to mobile. That all excites me.

But when thinking about the daunting task of creating a new implementation of Python, my brain also began asking the question of what exactly is Python?

What follows from this point in Brett’s post is a stream of consciousness writing style of question and answer, back and forth, iteration over all the points of what makes Python be Python in an attempt to consider what it might take to “compile Python down to WebAssembly.”

Jon Bodner shared a deep dive into why the world depends on simple, reliable, well-understood technologies like Go.

The one exciting thing that Go has is built-in concurrency support via goroutines, channels, and select. However, it is based on ideas from CSP, communicating sequential processes, which was first described in 1978.

This doesn’t sound like a programming language from the 21st century, does it?

And yet, Go is the 3rd most wanted and (maybe not coincidentally) the 3rd highest paying language, according to Stack Overflow. Every startup in Silicon Valley is using Go to build their infrastructure. Docker, Kubernetes, etcd, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Traefik and lots of other cutting-edge projects are written in Go. So what’s going on? Why is everyone interested in this boring language?

As a fun aside, I searched the Go Time transcripts for the word “boring” and found this gem from Kelsey Hightower on Go Time #114…

When infrastructure gets boring, something else will become exciting above it.

…which makes sense why Go being boring is fantastic, because there’s so many exciting things being built with it.