Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web: "The web is open by design and built to empower people. This is the web we're breaking and replacing with one that subverts, manipulates and creates new needs and addiction." If you can only read one article, let it be this one. This essay enumerates reasons why I don’t migrate my blog to Medium and keep serving with those "old school" RSS/Atom formats, don’t have a Facebook account and absolutely no third party javascript on the web (my own crappy analytics with anonymized IP’s last octet and javascript-less "share buttons", but you can check for yourself). Also contains another explanation I give to friends and colleages: "Using an ad/content-blocker isn't cheating the system; it's taking very basic precautions".
Uncle Bob and silver bullets: While I think the best tool against radicals is simply not following them, this is a good example of why this person might say or write good things, but also unrealistic ones (and sometimes, even a bit of bs).
Visualizing Garbage Collection Algorithms: Really awesome way of learning the basics of mark-and-sweep, reference counting and even generational garbage collection systems.
The Cost Of JavaScript Very interesting, as not only is the amount of code itself, but the parsing cost, processing/execution cost, etc. Nice also because provides not only a list of problems but also hints or directly solutions.
Firefox Quantum 57 for developers: The browser itself comes with lots of new stuff for devs, but it also runs blazing fast and consumes less memory. Combined with an opensource project that doesn't sends data back like Google Chrome, I've switched back to it (and updated my list of addons I use at Firefox).
Move Slowly and Fix Things: Despite the name, a really interesting and almost mandatory read to think about what your daily job does, if you feel you're doing ethical work and improving people's lives, or just trying to generate more money.
Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow: Long but interesting interview with the guy. Best summary of his thinking: "An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it".
JWTs Suck (and Are Stupid) -> No need to agree with the whole talk (I do strongly disagree with some points and some "cookie advantages") but some concepts are interesting and it's true that JWT is not the holy grial of web sessions.
Why Python is Slow: Looking Under the Hood: Great for learning something about Python internals, and I also learned about Ctypes and uses of NumPy thanks to the article!
Voxel Space: Great explanation of how to draw pseudo-3D maps with voxels,based on an old MS-DOS game, Commanche. Includes javascript-based web demo
El taxi de Madrid reclama precios más flexibles para competir con Uber y Cabify [ES]: Perfect example of why competition is healthy: cab system has been a terrible monopoly at Spain since ages, full of bad experiences (myself included) and probably among the most frequent traffic infractions most are made by cab drivers. Now that Cabify and others are penetrating the market and restrictions about licenses have been lowered, they panic and start to ask things that people asked since long and they rejected. Everything is such a chaos that there are multiple mobile apps and still many cabs don't even allow you to pay with credit card (and a few don't have the GPS on even being now mandatory by law), so any change can only be for better.
Facebook is asking users to upload a selfie to prove who they are: An apparently innocent or even fun "request", until you remember how they are being so aggressive into facial recognition (Facebook Is Using an “NRA Approach” to Defend Its Creepy Facial Recognition Programs), so with this they can potentially teach the platform to detect you on any photo anybody uploads to Facebook. So glad to have deleted my account years ago.
Google Kubernetes Engine becomes free of charge: As competitors add Kubernetes support, Google fights back offering their platform (and up to a point, their support). Competition is so good :)
Preview of Amazon Aurora Multi-Master: AWS' implementation of MySQL (and PostgreSQL comapatible) in "beta" with support for multi-masters. If you could avoid failovers and their associated small but present downtimes, would be an amazing win-win.
AWS Fargate: Finally stepping up on the poor container management solutions, either with the new Fargate "super-simple" mode or using ECS or Kubernetes.
Free Python Games: Apache2 licensed collection of free Python games intended for education and fun, including some classics like Snake, Pacman or Pong, using the Turtle module to ease teaching coding to kids. I do remember using the equivalent Turtle graphics and library for Pascal before university...
Leonardo da Vinci's Notebook: 'The Codex Arundel'. A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left), including diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes. An amazing historial document made now fully public by the British Library.
"stop paying the ransoms. We’re creating a billion dollar criminal industry instead of, well, setting up backups. We are monetising low skill crime."" -@gossithedog: Bitcoin might change the world, but the initial great de-centralized idea has been corrupted into an elecriticy-sink balck hole where people invest because price seems to only grow higher and higher while as of late seems to be the perfect place to by illegal drugs or pay ransomware :(
MacOS Update Accidentally Undoes Apple's "Root" Bug Patch: Need more signs that Apple has become so mainstream regarding their OS? I only miss more MacOS-targeted malware and it will be exactly like Windows back in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Use a .dev domain? Not anymore: This actualy bit us few days ago at work... google made .dev domain mandatory to be under HTTPS, so no more www.mywebsite.dev for testing purposes. From the only ones that should never get this kind of surprises (RFC) seems the almost only alternative is to use .test. Gets me mad that a company can make this decisions and break everything but... again is Google and as a company they have a history of changing things as they please.
Evolution of img: Gif without the GIF: Very interesting history of animated gifs and why for example Twitter replaceds any animated gif with an MP3 (spoiler: compression is a lot better).
PGExercises: Awesome resource to practice SQL in a very interactive way, with nice visual diagrams, etc.
HP keylogger: HP had a keylogger in the keyboard driver, disabled by default but very easily activated.
Learn Pandas: Another learning resource, a Github repository to learn how to use Python data analysis.
Stardust rebuilt + Z80 Emu Evolution: Spanish Spectrum game reverse engineered by their authors (lots of emulation tools also!) and a long but highly detailed article of the creation and evolution of a Z80 emulator.
How Email Open Tracking Quietly Took Over the Web: Thankfully most decent email providers allow not loading by default any image, but still outgoing links will track you, and the other darker approaches too (like remote font loading).
WebXR is going to bring VR and AR to the masses. Here’s why: It is really good that technology is being pushed forward to have VR and AR everywhere, because as still the hardware is in its early stages, when it becomes powerful and enough everything will be ready for it.
1000 different people, the same words: Really interesting results, makes you worry about the internal culture of some companies if the external wording is so aggressive.