This week has made it hard for me to stay optimistic. In the Bay Area, we got not just the worsening pandemic but catastrophic wildfires clouding over millions of people. It’s less than two years since this area saw fires like this, making global warming all the more evident. I worry that the workers (warehouses, restaurants, factories, farms, and more) who can’t work from home have already been exposed to the Coronavirus, but now they also need to bear with the smoke. Things can’t go on like this, and I need to act.

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Software Engineering ⚙️

An Update on MDN Web Docs – Mozilla

Due to the recent layoffs at Mozilla, MDN will get less investment from Mozilla—in fact, they laid off all technical writers. This change of directions worries me greatly because MDN has been THE go-to resource for web APIs.

TypeScript exercises – Marat Dulin

Marat created a set of Typescript challenges for you to test how familiar you are with the language. They get challenging quickly, and I confess I couldn’t solve the last two on my own (even though I’ve been using Typescript over the previous five years!).

ts-migrate – Airbnb

Airbnb released a tool that migrates Javascript to correct Typescript. I haven’t used it personally. But I, perhaps counterintuitively, recommend the tool if you are already familiar with Typescript. When I add the types manually, I clarify the domain and codify it into types. If you are not used to writing Typescript, that manual process will prepare you to think in a type-safe way.

People ❤️

Katie Sylor-Miller – Frontend Architect at Etsy – Katie Sylor-Miller

I am reading other interviews on StaffEng.com I shared last week. I read Katie’s since she is one of the rare staff+ engineers on the frontend. There are many bits of wisdom, but I especially loved this quote on how she operates:

It starts with taking in a ton of input from the work folks are doing – seeing that this team has a problem doing x, and another team has a problem doing y. Then you mix all that input up with your experience and what’s happening in the industry as a whole and let it sit in your brain for a while, until finally it all clicks and you realize that the deeper cause underlying both problems is z, so you come up with a plan to fix that problem which is really hard to fix.

Business 💸

Apple, Epic, and the App Store – Ben Thompson

I generally find Ben Thompson’s article insightful but especially liked this one on the Epic lawsuits. I liked how the article broke down what the App Store does, installation, payment, and CRM, and whether each piece benefits the consumers.