Bookmarks

Shortery

Utility Mac app that adds various Shortcuts automations, so it could run a Shortcut on a time schedule or when connecting to wifi or when folder contents change etc.

5 days ago
Uncut.wtf

Open source font chooser/display with no cruft.

29 days ago
Obsidian Google Calendar Plugin

Create views into the your Google Calendar from Obsidian. Looks like it also supports creation of notes that are linked to calendar events. Possibly also useful for a "Dashboard" note showing some top level info.

yesterday
The Next Larger Context

Article from Camille Fournier, giving advice to senior engineers about how they can get to the next level by considering the "next larger context". This seems like a really good framing of the problem, so useful to keep in mind for career progression conversations.

yesterday
Introducing Baseline

New Google initiative to easily show if a feature is well supported.

yesterday
Temporal API is Awesome

Good primer on the Temporal API, with a really nice explanation of some of the nuances of the API that I'd struggled with before. There's also some really great info on the state of the spec and what's blocked on.

20 days ago
[PDF] Detecting Code Quality Issues in Pre-written Templates of Programming Tasks in Online Courses

Interesting study describing an algorithm they created to identify issues in pre-written code snippets used as the basis for learning exercises (they called them templates). The idea being that teacher may introduce issues in these code snippets, meaning that students may be confused or unable to complete the exercise tasks. Detection relies on a dataset of completed exercise tasks, diff-ing the output of code quality tools against the output from the original code.

September 2023
What the top 10% of dev teams look like in 2023

This is fairly transparently an ad for Linear, and most of the actual numbers seem pretty suspect, however it is a concise list of potential team metrics to measure.

September 2023
RSC From Scratch. Part 1: Server Components

Dan Abramov walks through creation of a React Server Component server & client, explaining how each piece and what it's needed for.

September 2023
Type vs Interface: Which Should You Use In 2023?

Well reasoned argument for using type over interface for types for objects in TypeScript.

September 2023
Power consumption of JPEG, WebP, and AVIF

Really interesting comparison of power usage when loading images, using Firefox's dev tools (it's built into the performance capture tool now). tl;dr: WebP comes out on top.

September 2023
Type safe CSS design systems with @property

Explainer of new ish @property in CSS, which allows variables to be declared with a "type" as well as a fallback if an override doesn't match the type. This is really useful for design systems, as you can provide more guarantees that your variables are being used correctly.

September 2023
Maximizing your impact when moving into a leadership role

The title doesn't do a good job of describing this, but it's really a decent article on how Senior/Staff can influence organisations to solve bigger, structural problems with a pretty good specific example (improving a11y).

August 2023
Core Web Vitals for Search Engine Optimisation: What Do We Need to Know?

Really in-depth look - with lots of citations - at the ways in which Google's Core Web Vitals affect search ranking. I'm sure this will be useful reference material for when SEO comes up.

August 2023
Standardizing Focus Styles With CSS Custom Properties

Controlling the outline styles via CSS variables is a really clever idea: it allows customisation of elements (either on a one-off basis, or as part of the design system).

July 2023
You might not need Jest — the Node.js native test runner is great

Looks like Node 18 has a drop-in replacement for Mocha/Jest. Looking at the docs it even supports it.only which isn't mentioned in the article.

July 2023
TIL — Node.js 18.3 comes with command-line arguments parser

We can replace minimist and friends with a built-in Node util now.

July 2023
CSS clip-path can go outside of an element

Handy little tip from Stefan, I can see this being useful in a number of ways.

July 2023
Stepping Stones not Milestones

Sets out an argument for project planning via "stepping stones" over "milestones". The argument is that avoiding a big plan-up-front (a series of milestones) in favour of stepping stones at each you can stop and chose the next stone allows for demonstrating progress but with flexibility. Each stepping stone has some kind of deliverable and moves towards the overall strategic goal. This sounds a lot like how I approached our migration to React, but frames it a bit better than "flying by the seat of my pants" :D

July 2023
Standardizing Focus Styles With CSS Custom Properties

Explains a neat CSS snippet that gives flexibility to focus outline styles using CSS variables. This allows the focus ring to be restyled based on different contexts (like buttons/form elements etc).

June 2023