After 3.5 months of stay-in-place, it’s amazing what a slight change in routine can do for my mood. My wife and I started going out for a picnic every weekend, and I feel most invigorated after the picnic. We also booked a one-week trip to a local Airbnb, just so that we get a change in scenery.
The biggest benefit of remote work is how we can experiment with our time and place. None of us chose to work remotely, but we can still try to make most of it. I hope all of us try something new!
Our picnic snack! (Rice cakes, homemade smoothie, and some leftover fries)
Software Engineering 🌐
🌟 When frontend means full stack – Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier goes into different challenges we UI developers face.
Even though we all technically fall within the same big-tent title, many frontend developers wind up specializing.
Throughout my frontend career, I’ve enjoyed figuring out the data and business logic more than perfecting the beautiful user interactions, or building design systems. So I work on internal tools, and this is the specialization I am happy with.
Type-Safe Error Handling In TypeScript – Giorgio Delgado
Typescript code with many exceptions loses type-safety, especially with multiple layers with their failure states (network error, parsing error, business logic error, etc.). Other languages have “throw” annotations to guarantee safety but not Typescript.
Returning an error, rather than throwing an error is a type-safe solution for this problem. A similar technique can be used on GraphQL to provide typesafe errors.
tota11y: an accessibility visualization toolkit – Khan Academy
I find it hard to improve an app when I don’t see how my users use the app. This barrier exists in all forms: different browsers, slower network, smaller screen size, and, most importantly, assistive technologies. total11y helps me see what’s lacking in my app with a button click.
Picking Your Tech Stack For Dummies (and the future) – Stay Sassy
As a startup, your job is to innovate on one thing and one thing only. Otherwise, you are stretching yourself too thin.
People ❤
5 Engineering Manager Archetypes – Pat Kua
Pat Kua’s article is similar to Chris Coyier’s article above in that it unwraps the meaning of the title “engineering manager.” Just as we distinguish design-focused UI engineers and data-focused UI engineers, Pat Kua differentiates engineering managers with different focuses on tech, team, process, or product. Although all posted job titles sound the same, we need to find the match between what the rolerequires and what each of us enjoys.
Why we can’t stop fighting about cancel culture – Vox
To cancel someone (usually a celebrity or other well-known figure) means to stop giving support to that person. –Merriam-Webster
I hear the term “cancel culture” around but didn’t quite get it, so I read more about it. In essence, social media gives voices to the ignored and holds our establishments and leaders to the higher standard.
Business 💸
Apple doubles down on its right to profit from other businesses – Techcrunch
Despite WWDC 2020 starting this week, Apple and its Appstore policy are embroiled in the controversy with Hey, a Basecamp’s email client. Apple’s seemingly arbitrary and opaque bureaucracy has been a burden on the iOS developers for a long time. I doubt that, given its dominant and lucrative position, Apple will change its policies unless the regulators step in.
The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police – MIT Technology Review
I doubt these decisions by the big companies can contain facial recognition technology employed by the small dev shops (the tech is mostly open-sourced). How will we hold not just the big tech companies but those providers accountable?
youngk.im 