🤔 What's next for José Valim and Elixir?

the eDEX-UI project was originally meant to be ”DEX-UI with less « art » and more « distributable software »”. While keeping a futuristic look and feel, it strives to maintain a certain level of functionality and to be usable in real-life scenarios, with the larger goal of bringing science-fiction UXs to the mainstream.

It might or might not be a joke taken too seriously.

Confession: I’ve shared this before. Sorry not sorry. It’s too cool!

We had an excellent interview with Beth Dakin and Ronak Shah from the Safari team about what’s new and interesting for developers in Safari 14. There were so many good moments that I figured a round-up post was warranted. ICYMI (or don’t have time for the full convo), here’s the highlights from my POV.

This Smashing article is a nice introduction to Tauri, which was news to me as well. It tells you why you might want to use Tauri instead of Electron, how to get set up for Tauri development, and how to build a Vue-based desktop app with the framework.

In the process of moving to our ideal logging system, we constantly discussed the pros and cons of different solutions, and each of us defended the requirement close to them or changed the configuration parameters they needed, asked intriguing questions or sent us back to the original set of requirements.

I love write-ups like this one from the trenches where people share their journey to deciding on a particular solution. Every decision has a context and many blog posts gloss over that, resulting in silver bullet-y hand waving. That’s not super useful when trying to make your own decisions. What is super-useful is being able to understand the circumstances in which others made a choice. That way you can decide if your situation is close enough to theirs to make a similar decision… or not.

Is it time to migrate away from cron?

Like cron jobs, systemd timers can trigger events—shell scripts and programs—at specified time intervals, such as once a day, on a specific day of the month (perhaps only if it is a Monday), or every 15 minutes during business hours from 8am to 6pm. Timers can also do some things that cron jobs cannot. For example, a timer can trigger a script or program to run a specific amount of time after an event such as boot, startup, completion of a previous task, or even the previous completion of the service unit called by the timer.

Use it in your site by importing the CSS from unpkg and adding the placeholdify class somewhere. Also comes as a Chrome extension.

Cezar Augusto:

It took me just 3 minutes to fully understand the concepts of React Hooks thanks to this great post.

That’s a ringing endorsement, if I’ve ever seen one. If React Hooks are new (or confusing) to you, give this 3 minutes of your time. 😀

// In controllers/user.go
if err := database.CreateUser(); err != nil {
    log.Errorf("Could not create user: %v", err)
}
// In database/user.go
func CreateUser() error {
    if err := db.SQLQuery(userExistsQuery); err != nil {
        return fmt.Errorf("could not check if user already exists in db: %v", err)
    }
    ...
}
// In database/sql.go
func SQLQuery() error {
    if err := sql.Connected(); err != nil {
        return fmt.Errorf("could not establish db connection: %v", err)
    }
    ...
}
// in sql/sql.go
func Connected() error {
    if noInternet {
        return errors.New("no internet connection")
    }
    ...
}

The beauty of the code above is that each of these errors are completely namespaced by their respective function, are informative, and only handle responsibility for what they are aware of. This sort of error chaining using fmt.Errorf("something went wrong: %v", err) makes it trivial to build awesome error messages that can tell you exactly what went wrong based on how you defined it.

Marko Saric, who you may remember as the only content marketer we’ve met who runs Linux:

Most GDPR consent banner implementations are deliberately engineered to be difficult to use and are full of dark patterns that are illegal according to the law.

I wanted to find out how many visitors would engage with a GDPR banner if it were implemented properly (not obtrusive, easy way to say “no” etc) and how many would grant consent to their information being collected and shared.

This is part 3 of a three part series from Sheshbabu Chinnakonda introducing the Rust language to JavaScript developers — this one is focused on functions and control flow.

When Shesh kicked off this series he said, “I find it easier to understand something new if it was explained in terms of something I already know. I thought there might be others like me.”

BTW, here are links to the others from this series:

• Tooling Ecosystem Overview
• Variables and Data Types

A neat idea:

turven is a tiny widget that shows how many people are currently on the same page as you, for “warm fuzzy feelings” purposes. There’s something cool about seeing that there’s another soul out there, somewhere on our little blue planet, who’s reading the same thing at the same moment ✨

In practice, I’m not sure if it’ll make us feel less lonely or more lonely:

You’re the only person in the whole world on this web page right now. Why not invite a friend?

I guess it depends on which web pages you frequent…

gitqlite is a tool for running SQL queries on git repositories. It implements SQLite virtual tables and uses go-git. It’s meant for ad-hoc querying of git repositories on disk through a common interface (SQL), as an alternative to patching together various shell commands.

Mine your repo’s history for goodies. Here’s how to get commit count by author email:

SELECT author_email, count(*) FROM commits GROUP BY author_email ORDER BY count(*) DESC

While I like the acronym so, this tool would actually be better described as se: an interface to the StackExchange network. In particular one thing that differentiates it from similar tools is that you can simultaneously search any number of sites in the StackExchange network