Labnotes - Weekend Reading — 🐶 Learn to fetch

Rotating Target Neutron Source (RTNS-II) Door The incredible thing about this door is that it’s 97,000 pounds and yet “special bearing in the hinge allowed a single person to move the door.”

🪑 Design Objective

A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar

Edward Tufte has this visual rule that 1+1=3. With a single line on the screen, you have just that single object, but adding a second line does something interesting, it adds a third ‘object’ on the screen, the negative space between the two. All good visual designers deeply understand this effect.

In UX design we have a cognitive equivalent. If you have two buttons, there is a third ‘object’ created, the decision a user must make on which button to tap. This cognitive load is invisible and rarely discussed but it can be a real source of confusion.

Google Slides is Actually Hilarious This takedown is funny:

Perhaps like you, I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable foundational decisions made ages ago that worshipped at the shrine of PowerPoint and which have never since been revisited, but now, after having had to use it so much in the past year, I believe that Google Slides is actually just trolling me.

🧰 Tools of the Trade

fetch() In Node.js Core: Why You Should Care This is fantastic news. Fetch is easy enough that you don’t need another HTTP request library, and works in the server and the browser.

I should point out QueueRun already supports that. Not only do you use Fetch to make requests, but also to handle incoming HTTP requests. And it works like a charm!

It looks something like this:

export async function({ request }) {
  // Get JSON document from request
  const item = await request.json();
  const updated = await db.items.update(item);
  if (updated) {
    const headers = { "content-type": "application/json" };
    return new Response(JSON.stringify(updated), { headers });
  } else
    // Throwing Response is just a shortcut, useful in middleware, eg authentication
    throw new Response("Not Found", { status: 404 });
}

(This is for illustration, QueueRun will parse the JSON request for you, and if you return an object, serialize it to a JSON document, so in practice, it would talk half as much code)

soheilpro/mailwind Use Tailwind CSS to design HTML emails.

Magistrate What if Docusign, but simple POST API and plain text files?

If contracts were written in plain text files and managed more like software, from version control to IDEs, lawyers would work more quickly and intelligently for their clients, saving them money.

But the entire practice of transactional law is stuck on Microsoft Word. My clients are mostly technology companies with an appetite for innovation. With their encouragement, I am moving my own legal practice away from formats like Microsoft Word and into plain text.

smeijer/unimported Looks useful. Couldn’t test it since it doesn’t work with TypeScript/ESM, if you know a solution for that, drop me a line.

The Swyx.io 2022 Rewrite Love the simplicity of using GitHub issues as the CMS. Open an issue to create a draft post, close the issue to publish it on the blog?

Yes, I can connect to a DB in CSS TIL if you’re motivated enough you can use Houdini to query the database from CSS.

~/mike 🍌

If you've ever been told, "a tensor is something that transforms like a tensor", you may be entitled to financial compensation

TJ “I thought these were drawn exclusively for O’Reilly. My whole life is a lie.” ← we need more tech-book and wine pairings

The Story Behind all the Animals on O’Reilly’s Book Covers

📓 Lines of Code

Luca Casonato

Today in "Weird JS language 'features'"

What do you see in a JS REPL when you execute the following code?

ryan.aud Shot:

Excited to announce that I am now working for @shopify inasmuch as 95% of the PRs I review on i18n are from Shopify developers.

Chaser:

Lots of likes on this tweet, from a lot of @shopify devs. Ironically, a Shopify recruiter reached out yesterday.

We had a brief chat, up until the point where he found out I don't do coding tests. Apparently those are still required?

A Wordle clone in less than 50 lines of bash Didn’t know bash could do that, and the code is straightforward.

Ólafur Waage

They call me the 007 of programming.

0 tests
0 documentation
7 abandoned side projects last year

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

Wes Kao 👇

Most people suck at giving feedback.

Here’s a framework for feedback that creates behavior change:

Josh W. Comeau This is a pretty good heuristic:

In my career, there's been a pretty strong correlation between how stressful the interview process was, and how stressful the job turned out to be.

Good companies put effort and resources into their interview process.

the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed 🤯

A reader writes:

This is a situation currently unfolding at my husband’s office so I’m a very amused bystander and thought I’d get your opinion on this craziness.

📈 Business Side

nap

2006: Google launches free email services for custom domains, driving thousands of boutique email hosting providers out of business.

2022: Google retires “G Suite legacy edition” and forces all users to upgrade to paid services.

Took a bit longer than I expected.

^ That is what really bothers me about Google’s bait and switch. Not that they decided to charge for a previously free service.

That they sucked the air out of this market for 15 years. That's how you eliminate viable competition. And we lose better and cheaper alternatives.

🔒 Locked Doors

bitrot

You think you have it bad? My wife's in infosec. I'm in software. I have to constantly pretend that I don't make apps poorly. One day she's gonna find out that the stuff she's bragging about hacking is the same stuff I make on a daily basis. I'm on borrowed time.

Using Google Fonts Breaches GDPR GDPR you drunk?

in this case resulting in discomfort for plaintiff such that the website owner as defendant is ordered to

• stop sending visitor’s IP addresses to Google for their fonts, or face up to 250.000 Euro or 6 months imprisonment for each visit to defendant’s websites by the plaintiff,
• pay plaintiff 100 Euro compensation plus interest since the filing of the case.

Jon “Tell me your PIN is 9932 without telling me your PIN is 9932”

⭐ None of the Above

Beth Katz “Frosting soap film in cookie cutter. I'm done freezing my fingers. 34 second video. I have a higher quality version, but this one posts.”

weedchainsaw

when someone is looking for something i help by saying "it's gotta be around here somewhere"

Armand Domalewski The “Acceptable To Italians Index” is my new favorite set of metrics

Abby Heugel

I'm just a girl, standing in front of a self-checkout, screaming that there's no unexpected item in the bagging area.

AI ‘Photos’ of What Cartoon Characters Would Look Like in Real Life This pretty Instagram is fascinating.

Brad

I was told today and I s**t you not: there use to be a phone number you could call just to find out what time it was. 😳

That number was listed in a search engine that would be delivered to your front door … crazy times

max saltman

I love finding New Yorker cartoons so dated that the joke is lost entirely and the cartoons become just descriptions of people doing normal things.

Consumption of 85% cocoa dark chocolate improves mood in association with gut microbial changes in healthy adults As an adult, I don’t need to justify my daily chocolate consumption, but if research says I'm on to something … even if that means admitting bacteria has a say in my mood:

Collectively, given the role of the gut microbiota in polyphenol bioavailability and metabolism as well as brain function, our findings suggest that daily intake of polyphenol-rich chocolate gradually alters gut microbial diversity, resulting in beneficial impacts on the host's mood.

jonathan slater “Once you figure out that you can make your own happiness, you do”