Reading list, 6

4th-10th May 2015

Note: there wasn't reading list for the past week(s) because I was traveling and conferencing and urgh.

  • Jason Orendorff is writing a series of articles introducing ES6 for the Mozilla Hacks blog, and they are truly great and enjoyable! I can't wait to use ES6 features in every browser without transpiling, but it will have to wait I'll guess. Time to set up some Babel into my toolchains!
  • Professional Web Typography by Donny Truong - a book, via Adactio
  • The WWW is in the public domain - i.e. the software, architecture, etc initially used to build the WWW. I didn't know this! Again, from Adactio
  • User agents of change, by Allen Pike: "Microsoft Edge claims to be every computing platform ever conceived - except for Internet Explorer". An hilarious account of the new user agent string Microsoft Edge uses, and an exhortation to work on something else before the clock stops ticking--in about 1600 years. So better get to work!
  • Dealing with SMS spam -- Terence Eden went to the sources and confirmed what we thought: advertising standards bodies are pretty much not doing anything at all to protect the targets of said advertising, and advertising companies keep buying and selling consumers' data without following any of the rules. Woohoo!
  • Flickr Commons - many (public) institutions are putting their archive images in these collections. I believe this also includes photography marked as CC, but I'm not entirely sure. Be warned, browsing these can eat copious amounts of your time ;-)
  • IPFS is The Permanent Web - (yet another) p2p protocol. I'm always curious about these initiatives.
  • Decommissioned - melancholic pictures of decommissioned and deconstructed aircraft. As any proper engineer I'm always curious to see the innards of objects, and aircraft are not an exception. Still I feel oddly bad about these pictures; I believe perhaps they are humanising the aircraft? and that's why, empathically, I feel sad.
  • Soléy - I'll drown ---I'm really fascinated by how she builds layer upon layer. Great discovery--I will be listening to more from her! (I'm also a bit amused by her name being so similar to mine, hehe)
  • When to use the button element from CSS Tricks. I had a moment of doubt last Friday and some searches brought me to this page which is a good recap.
  • I'm pretty excited about learning to better use Browserify transforms for all sorts of things as for example tucking a worker into a bundle using Workerify, so you don't need to distribute two files with your worker-powered library!
  • Hire more women in tech. Some advice and resources so people can stop paying lip service and actually being impactful, diversity wise. Related: On the diversity-readiness of STEM environments: “It’s almost as if I could only enter the makerspace as a janitor” from Mel Chua.