Bookmarks

Great post outlining the concept of a "rhetorical situation", a specific structure that can be used to break down and analyse individual pieces of communication - in the context of software engineering, many of the examples revolve around code review. It could be a useful tool for making communication more effective by ensuring all pieces of the structure have been considered.

One of those tools to generate a range of colours based on starting and ending input colours. Seems like it has quite a lot of pre-written curves to generate the colours.

Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Possibly useful if for some reason an icon isn't viable.

Nice & lightweight icon search across a large number of icon collections.

Good article on increasing touch target sizes, particularly for mobile. There's a big grab bag of potential problems and solutions. The first section in particular is more general UX principles, then going onto looking in detail at CSS implementation details.

Interesting API to provide robots.txt output to block (known) various web scrapers, including those from AI bots.

Clear description of the behaviours of the new popover attribute, particularly focused on the "accessibility guardrails" that it automatically applies. Will be useful reference for what precisely the behaviours are.

Adam Argyle has written the CSS for animating one of the elements with the new popover attribute so that we don't have to. It's pretty clean too!

Interesting new technique to use the mask property to link to an SVG to create icons. I think I'd want to test this without the pseudo element though.

Nice practical description of composition and comparison of the different ways it can be implemented.

Useful and practical uses for the new :has() selector

Brief (and unfortunately cut off for non-subscribers) description of a format of a technical (IC or leadership) interview they call "Career History". The summary is that you find 3 - 4 roles in their history then ask the same rough set of questions about those roles with a view to discovering what the trajectory of their career is. There's also a description of red flags to watch out for (mostly lack of improvement and lack of empathy). The structure intentionally doesn't follow questions that the interviewee may have polished, prepared answers for, which I can see the value of but worry isn't the best for neurodivergent candidates.

Thorough explanation of how different physical and virtual keyboards (such as French AZERTY and German QWERTZ keyboards) can affect the KeyboardEvent events.

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.

Open source font chooser/display with no cruft.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.