Hey,
Winter isn’t here yet, instead I was just out for another biking session in the mountains today. You might already have noticed how important nature is to me. So this week, seeing the international climate conference in Paris not aiming for an ambitious goal, a reader sent me this great article in which he questions what we as people in the tech industry can personally do against global warming. If you’re caring only a bit about this, read it and think about it (this video snippet is from 1992 but still so true). Have a great week and try out some of the amazing web development stuff I collected for you this week:
News
- Since yesterday, Let’s Encrypt is in public beta which means anyone can try it now. So if you have a virtual server, give it a try by following this guide. My hoster here in Germany will deploy it today, and I hope a lot of other hosting companies will follow soon now.
- Big news from Adobe: they rolled out updates for Photoshop and Illustrator. In Photoshop, you can now import and export SVG and the asset export got an upgrade, too). Illustrator got a (better SVG export, and a new shaper tool). And even bigger news: the Edge tools and services will no longer be developed (Edge Animate, Reflow, Inspect). Instead, they renamed Flash Pro to Animate CC, with plans to integrate Edge Animate’s features into the new tool in the future. Besides that, Adobe plans to bring Dreamweaver back to life, also integrating Brackets into it and de-cluttering the software.
- PHP 7.0 has finally been released this week. If you aren’t yet familiar with its new features yet, this guide will tell you more.
- As announced earlier this year, Apple finally open sourced its programming language Swift now. You can get the code on Github and find all information on the new website.
Tooling
- Wouldn’t it be awesome to detect faces in images with JavaScript? We can now do that with smartcrop.js. And if you prefer doing it on the server, here’s a node.js implementation of it.
Security
- Snyk analyzes your node.js application for vulnerabilities. And now they open sourced their vulnerability database.
- This demo explains you why browsers show this “annoying” message when you go into fullscreen mode. It’s there to let people detect phishing attacks.
Privacy
- “The borderless world of money and business is, ironically, a world of ever-more-imposing borders for humans. For example, governments have made ineffectual gestures at getting multinationals to pay their taxes, creating systems that assume an adversary with a huge and well-oiled accounting machine. The resulting system is virtually impossible for individuals to understand or comply with.”
Web Performance
- Rebecca Murphey shares the fresh concepts of HTTP/2 and how it will affect our tool and build-chain for JavaScript applications. A few good thoughts in there that we can keep in mind to optimize the delivery of large-scale front-end applications.
Accessibility
- Facebook seems to push on accessibility lately. Seeing the recent development for React Native, they now published a useful guide that will bring you from accessibility zero to hero in very short time.
JavaScript
- Did you ever want to really understand how promises work? This guide is the definitive answer to probably all your questions.
CSS
- Heydon Pickering shows us how to get a clean flexbox grid that doesn’t look bad in the last row.
- Style guides are a good thing to manage your components and designs in the company. They constantly evolve, and even animations and transitions appear in style guides lately. But keeping them up to date is sometimes a challenge. I’m glad there are tools like DocumentCSS that make things like these easier.
- The
calc()function in CSS is still pretty new but has good browser support now. So why don’t you start trying it out? Ana Tudor wrote up a few handy use-cases that’ll solve common problems with CSS calculations.
Work & Life
- “As a leader, your goal should always be to build structures and processes that don't depend on you and ideally don't need you.” says Adam Pisoni in this great article on how to scale yourself as a technology leader.
Go beyond…
- It might be one of the most controversial topics of the weeks, but seeing Mark Zuckerberg shifting most of his assets to a self-founded charity organization to improving humans’ lives, to me is a good thing. Of course he might save taxes doing that (not necessarily as this post explains), and it would perhaps be better if he had went the official way of doing charity, and likely he will be able to control things that usually are controlled by governments with this money. But honestly, he had most of this power already when the money was still in his own pockets. And seeing rich people care about human problems is a good first step out of rich vs. poor lives and towards a more united world. Let us do the same instead of beefing about it and doing nothing.
- Care about the environment? This week, Elon Musk held a talk this week to students in Paris in which he reflected on how we can reduce carbon emissions. It’s interesting to read this different opinion on the topic, especially from someone who clearly knows how companies roll. Worth reading.
Anselm