Bookmarks

Flipping the bozo bit on flips the learning off – Surfing Complexity

Our tendency to focus on differences between us and them when the incident happens to them leads us to miss aspects of the system that we actually have in common with them. By focusing on the differences, we miss the opportunity to learn from their experiences, because it seduces us into believing there’s nothing for us to learn here.

enclose.horse

Found via https://lobste.rs/s/ncngka/what_fun_websites_do_you_know

Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu - The Prime Number Shitting Bear

Found via https://lobste.rs/s/ncngka/what_fun_websites_do_you_know

Radio Garden – Explore live radio by rotating the globe

Found via https://lobste.rs/s/ncngka/what_fun_websites_do_you_know

Seconds Since the Epoch

Best explanation of POSIX leap seconds I’ve come across.

Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes

This is me every time 37signals announces new features in kamal.

Help tech employees secure collective agreements

Love this advocacy network initiative from Unionen. The very clear “union organiser” tone of voice in the text is cool as hell.

One of the ways the Californian Ideology won in tech is to make everyone a US Republican in their relationship with governance

So obsessed with decentralization (we’ll get it right this time!) that when centralization inevitably builds up no one knows how to manage it healthily, or even that it needs to be managed. And then a Matt Mullenweg happens and everyone is like “oh no, I have learned nothing from this other than that centralization is bad, we’ll get it right this time!”. Rinse, repeat.

Rearchitecting: Redis to SQLite

The SQLite hype train continues. Love to be Excited About Benchmarks.

Always use an enum for your status field

Damn right.

Getting price-gouged by private equity in the UK's happiest resort

Quite a weird experience to read something that’s primarily about EBITDA and yet find it as engaging as this.

The Occult Technology of the Rollercoaster

Find most rollercoasters terrifying to even look at personally, but this writing makes the author’s passion for them contagious.

Greppability is an underrated code metric

This article focuses on back end development but the same principle also applies to front end. It’s why I recommend avoiding Sass’s parent selector in many cases.

Why Playwright is less flaky than Selenium

Playwright is so fast that it forces you to write UI tests correctly on day one. Selenium isn’t.

The Balkanized Internet: Role of Big Cloud Providers

I am disabling AWS access to my on-prem servers (at least mostly). This is partly an experiment and partly an expediency, as I will explain. (As a technical side note, I’m mostly concerned with TCP traffic and it is possible to distinguish which is the client and which is the server from the initial handshake. I’m blocking connection attempts to my services from clients in AWS. Clients on my network can still establish connections to services hosted in AWS.)

Varför är techbolagen så rädda för facken?

Kim Öberg said something that stuck with me during Arbetsvärlden’s panel discussion on the Swedish tech industry’s anti-union stance at this year’s Almedalsveckan.

Ethicswishing

The amazing feeling when someone puts words to something and you immediately recognise it a dozen times over in your own memories.

Get the screen width & height without JavaScript

Wholeheartedly obsessed with this.

The Most Important Decisions are Non-Technical

While it’s fun to discuss whether an application should be implemented in Ruby or Clojure, to write beautiful and succinct code, to see how far purely functional programming can be taken, these are all secondary to defining the user experience, to designing a comfortable interface, to keeping things simple and understandable, to making sure you’re building something that’s actually usable by the people you’re designing it for. Those are more important decisions.

Manifesto for a Humane Web

Especially liked this bit from the intro.

A Guide To Designing For Older Adults

One of those things where I’m chucking this on here as a bookmark so I’ll remember it exists and find it easier when I need it. Unlabeled icons and disappearing text continuing their winning streak in the league of inaccessible designs.

Opinions for Writing Good CSS

Agree with about most of these. Especially the part about formulating a complete understanding of a responsive layout before trying to code it. Would add that coding it is a valid way of building that understanding. Just gotta be a little bit present in the creative process, notice when it’s time to cut your losses on that first draft, and try again from scratch.

The Network State as An Investment Product

This line in particular caught my eye.

Being a dick

In this post Johan has touched on something very powerful. In allowing reactionaries to frame the debate about inclusive language, we’ve empowered them to portray themselves as the committed realists and us as the sheltered crybabies.

Generative AI is for the idea guys

Love the feeling of stumbling on a new blog and finding out it’s someone with a vast back catalogue of interesting writing. Got that with this one.

Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence

Stuff like this is why I still think there’s some magic left in tech.

The End Of The Free Tier

How I Read Rails Source Code

Worth bookmarking just for the bundle open gem tip. But also full of other little bits of wisdom.

The UX of UUIDs

Love anything about UUIDs and ULIDs. The base58 stuff here was a new one on me.

Learning to code with and without AI

This paragraph really jumped out at me here.

You Have Power: Making Truth Social Comply With The AGPL

The AGPL is so goddamn great. The commit log on GitHub is an interesting read too.

Old CSS, new CSS

Quite a comprehensive historical perspective. I remember this!

Building a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pi

This is another Raspberry Pi cluster writeup that I sometimes read mournfully and wish I had the time & resources to do this myself.

Let's Build a 28-core Raspberry Pi Cluster!

Raspberry Pi clusters are one of my weird little obsessions. Want to start gathering up some of the examples I’ve seen, so here’s the one.

On Developer Fetishes

We use tmux. Mainly so we can see a big clock. We have a custom prompt. It tells us how many minutes until our JavaScript framework becomes obsolete.

FREE FOR ALL: Looking back on Jane McAlevey's career of organizing

The Ink have published an excerpt from an archived interview with Jane McAlevey as a mark of respect for everything’s she’s achieved. I hadn’t read this before.

Latest News

Heartbroken about this. Been expecting it for a while, but it makes no difference. Jane’s work has had a profound influence on me. The world will be a darker place without her.

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models rep..

Very compelling LLM critique based on a comparison with how psychics operate.

Stacking Triangles for Fun and Profit

Will definitely be referring back to the diagram in this with the two triangles stacked on top of each other and the rectangle around them. Amazing.

ohmyzsh/plugins/git/git.plugin.zsh at master · ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh

These are great. For most of my career I’ve used a bunch of personal git aliases like git a for add and git s for status. Only took a couple of weeks to unlearn them in favour of these.

Engineer Showboating

There’s more of me in this post than I’d prefer.

Demystifying the Shadow DOM

It’s time I looked into this again. Wonder if they made any progress on the accessibility problems yet.

Copying files to a volume on Fly.io

Nice one Richard, really useful write-up. Helped me do my first restore-from-backup practice run for 666a.

I am not a supplier

Compelling argument!

Fuck trees, use tags | Garrit's Notes

As a certified trees-disliker I loved to stumble on this. I don’t even bother with tags though. Chronological order is plenty. My ~/Documents folder is 5GB and contains zero folders. Sort by date. It’s plenty.

Tracking SQLite Database Changes in Git

Think I’m gonna use this for something.

10 Years of Hacker News "Ask HN: Who is hiring" Trends

Surprised by some of this. The location stuff in particular.

Optimizing SQLite for servers

Will always bookmark a SQLite in production post. Learned something I didn’t love in this one!

CSS Analytics - Project Wallace

Static analysis for CSS.

Planet B

Enjoyed this a lot. Very fun mix of different media.

Moving Abroad (Pt.2)

Nice sentence here that perfectly captures early days immigrant alienation.

Dead air on the incident call

Love anything about incident response. Fun post.

Organizing Against Genocide - Collective Action in Tech

The Collective Action In Tech folks are brilliant and this post is bursting with inspiration and wisdom.

Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing

Rest in peace Bram lad. This article stuck with me from early on and had a big impact on my approch to the everyday labour of coding.

Fidinpamp

Love a good conspiracy theory. This one feels mundane enough to be credible.

The one about the web developer job market

Very interesting perspective. Some of the pessimism is a little bit undermined by the software quality crisis stuff in my opinion (I simply don’t buy that premise at all), but I found this an insightful piece all the same.

Ruby's Switch Statement is More Flexible Than You Thought

Back in 2012 when I hadn’t discovered Ruby yet I was already basically trying to make the languages I did know work like Ruby.

Why We're Dropping Basecamp

Enjoyed reading a critique like this from outside the software industry.

DB Indexes Do Not Magically Compose

Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

Fascinating discussion initiated by an engineer preparing for vision loss resulting from an Usher syndrome diagnosis. This reply has stuck with me:

WebAIM: History of the browser user-agent string

In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.

What if everybody did everything right?

Follow-ups on incidents are one of my fav topics and this is a very cool alternative perspective to bring to them.

Picotron by Lexaloffle

Ridiculously excited about this. From a quick glance at the Picotron BBS, the community is already in full flow porting coreutils etc to this.

Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half

Absolute classic piece of data journalism.

timelines:protect_and_survive [alternatehistory.com wiki]

Haunting alternative history fiction about a nuclear war in the 1980s.

Sensible Firefox Setup

There’s a few things in here I’m installing right away and a few I’m bookmarking this so that I can revisit it later to try them out when I’m less busy. Embarassed I didn’t already know about the I still don’t care about cookies extension.

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code

Interesting old story about the Oracle source code.

lua-users wiki: Lua Power Patches

These patches are kind of my fav thing about Lua. Like the fact that this thing exists in this form where it can have these little patches in this way.

LinuxCzar: My Philosophy On Alerting

Fantastic post. Alerting is such a delicate balance. You start to involuntarily develop Opinions about it once you’ve been paged in the night a few times due to some bullshit like Googlebot indexing the site and tipping CPU usage just above the alerting threshold. Or for downtime on an unimportant page that could realistically have stayed down until morning without consequence.

They're Made out of Meat

I’m always sending people this. Permanently stuck in my head since whenever I first read it.

The End Of My Gatsby Journey

Gatsby’s decline makes me sad because I have so many happy memories of working with it. I hope they figure out a way forward.

Churn

A surprising statistic about Hotwire’s bundle size, a fun what-if scenario about React, a refreshing sociotechnical perspective on why the frontend JS ecosystem looks the way it does, and some good old fashioned cautious optimism about web components. Lovely post.

The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend

Goodbye, Clean Code

I read Clean Code myself sometime in the early 2010s. It kicked off a years-long phase of obsessing over things like DRY and refactoring methods into shorter and shorter pieces.

I Love Ruby

I love Ruby, and I love this post. Very happy 666a returned this language and its community to my everyday life.

Skit in ger skit ut, också med AI och polariseringen förstärks

Martin’s been doing some excellent writing since stepping down as president of Unionen. Lately he’s been focusing on AI and it’s warmed my heart to see someone with his level of influence digging so deep into this issue. He’s correct to describe the discourse around the topic within Sweden as naive and I’m glad someone like him is going deeper than the listicle clickbait angle.

Git Notes: git's coolest, most unloved­ feature

What the hell? I had no idea this was in there all this time. Very cool.

SQLite & Rails in Production

One of the articles that helped me get 666a up and running using SQLite.

Baruco 2013: Here Be Dragons, by Katrina Owen

Saw this talk live and it had a profound influence on me. Grateful I was exposed to this message so early in my career.

On "owning" software

Thoughtfully written piece by Avdi exploring the trade-offs of various software licensing models.

Former developer at software company deletes his code to protest its ties to ICE

The controversy around the Chef ICE contract was a watershed moment in tech and Shanley doesn’t get the credit she deserves for breaking the story.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

An absolute classic.

No, Utility Classes Aren't the Same As Inline Styles

The controversy around Tailwind in the front-end community is a personal fixation of mine. Personally I have a foot in both camps and I’m not realy rooting for either side to win. It’s just a super interesting debate to follow.

A One Handed Accessible Keyboard, Inspired by FrogPad

I’ve often daydreamed about how typing would work for me if I lost mobility in one of my arms. This article is a fun exploration of a variant of that scenario where the author had several months of advance warning and was able to prepare.

enshittification is what happens when a disney adult learns about captialism

Love this post from tef. Instant classic.

100 things you can do on your personal website | James' Coffee Blog

Love this list. So inspiring.

You can't parse [X]HTML with regex

The infamous Zalgo answer about parsing HTML with regex on Stack Overflow. I’m decently sure this answer was how I first discovered Zalgo.

WebAIM: Contrast Checker

One of the easiest contrast accessibility checker tools out there. This is a great option if you can’t or don’t want to install something on your computer. My favourite thing about this one is how pedagogical it is. If you spot a problematic use of colour and then stick the hex values into this thing and take a screenshot of it, that screenshot contains everything you need to make your point to whatever colleagues and stakeholders need convincing.

Abuse as DDoS

A post from nearly 10 years ago about abuse and harassment in the tech industry. 2014 was more or less when started learning about things like capitalism and misogyny. This post is a good representative example of the kind of stuff I was reading at the time.

Flexbox Froggy

An old favourite and still a valuable learning resource nearly a decade later. Learned some of my first ever flexbox skills here and still find myself sharing this link frequently today.

The Layoff

Fun short science fiction story about a tech company layoff 1:1 meeting conducted by an AI. Xe also wrote a fascinating follow-up post about the story that’s worth a read.

Accessibility Support

An accessibility-oriented reimagining of caniuse.com providing information about which browser semantics are supported by which assistive technologies.

An Introduction to LiteStack for Ruby on Rails

Part of the SQLite in production hype train of summer 2023, this article helped motivate me to give the stack a serious try.

How I setup a Mac, with lots of productivity tools, step-by-step guide

Some interesting ideas in this. This is a lot more config than I do for my own computers and I’m mainly bookmarking this so that I can remember to revisit it someday and see if there’s anything I should borrow.

Routing: Parallel Routes | Next.js

Came across this Next.js functionality while trying to get something else working. I’d never heard of it before but could immediately think of a bunch of different examples where it would’ve been useful. Bookmarking so that I remember to come back and try it out.

Kampen för kollektivavtal på Spotify blev ett trauma

Enhancing your Rails app with SQLite

The blog post that inspired me and showed me how to use ULIDs with SQLite in a Rails app. I shipped ULID primary keys in 666a because of this post.

Spotify sells its music-creation tool Soundtrap back to its founders

I was in Soundtrap so this was the end of the Spotify campaign for me. I exercised my right under Section 6b of the Employment Protection Act to oppose the transfer of my employment, but a transfer of business like this one doesn’t leave much legal scope after that to avoid redundancy under Swedish employment law.

Spotify kör kampanj mot kollektivavtal

Faily standard American-style anti-union tactics really.

“Spotify is going to find that a union deal is a competitive advantage”

“Fair play to them on this, they stayed out of it. They left it to us, which I think is the right thing to do,” Catalini Smith recalls. “They haven’t tried to stop us. You hear about in America, these meetings they have, these consultants they bring in. They play these silly games. And it’s not really the way things are done in Sweden. They’ve become a bit of an American company in some ways over the years, but they’ve held on to some core Swedish values.”

Unionen begär förhandling om kollektivavtal på Spotify

Ingen förstår arbetstagarna bättre än vi själva och vi vill ta plats vid bordet där beslut som påverkar vår arbetsvardag fattas. Vi ser en enorm möjlighet både för oss själva och för arbetsgivaren. Facket gör företag bättre, säger Henry Catalini Smith.

Spotify och Klarna vill bana väg för fler klubbar

Det är otroligt skrämmande att få erbjudande om att bli utköpt. Men Sen Kanner, klubbordföranden på Klarna tackade nej till sitt erbjudande och därför gör jag det också. Jag vill inte vara sämre.

Police called on video game developer over 'Global Thermonuclear War' plans

When they said they’d told the police I absolutely bricked it. I ran home to check if the police had raided the house or something.

Protected Attributes Make No Sense

Should I Use A Carousel?

CMS Trap

More falsehoods programmers believe about time

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Geograph

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Gender

Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

The Twelve-Factor App

Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s

A useful perspective that had an important influence on me early in my career.

"careless" employees

Devil's Dictionary of Programming

How to be a Programmer

The myth of maintainability

No Deadlines For You! Software Dev Without Estimates, Specs or Other Lies

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM v Sanity

How much should global variables cost?

Accidentally Turing-Complete

Stop Doing Internet Wrong

Little Big Details

Falsehoods programmers believe about time

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

Why Software Projects are Terrible and How Not To Fix Them

The Pitfalls of Boolean Trap · ariya.io