In the US, the daylight saving time ended over the last weekend. The start and end of daylight saving time reminded me of when I was working on data visualizations.
If you store and render the data in UTC, you can safely assume that every hour exists. But that’s not true if you want to represent the data in timezones with daylight savings. I remember that our visualizations would break because 2 AM is missing when the saving time ends (you also get two data points for the same hour when the daylight saving starts). It’s a funny reminder that even seemingly absolute things like time can’t be relied upon in programming.
Photo by Ocean Ng on Unsplash
Software Engineering ⚙️
ts-prune – Nadeesha Cabral
While code linters can automatically detect unused variables inside the modules, it has been very time-intensive to find unused modules; I manually global-search exported variables (it gets much, much worse if the same names are used for different variables). This CLI tool promises to automate that process.
Why Rounded Corners Are Easier on the Eyes – UX Movement
Have you wondered why your designer always round corners? Here are your answers: First, sharp edges make the object look brighter and harder to look at. Second, we are raised to avoid sharp objects in the physical world. And last, smoother paths make it easier to process the information.
Myths about useEffect – Kent C. Dodds
I started using hooks as soon as they’ve become available. However, I still learn every day. In this article, I found the shift in perspective from “when does this effect run” to “with which state does this effect synchronize with” illuminating.
Rebuilding Twitter’s public API – Twitter
Twitter is building its public REST API with a GraphQL backend. In other words, if you hit their REST endpoint, they translate your request into a GraphQL request to an internal GraphQL endpoint. I am most curious about how Twitter develops and maintains the internal GraphQL schema for both consumer app use cases and the REST API use cases.
People ❤️
Career ladders aren’t enough – you need a thoughtful promotion process, too – Sarah Milstein
If a company leaves the personnel decisions solely up to the managers, it is hard for employees to see that the process is fair. The process needs an explicit and well-understood structure to justify its decisions.
Business 💸
How Riot created the virtual universe of the 2020 League of Legends World Championships – Polygon
Because of the current pandemic, much of the League of Legends world was held in a closed space without live audience. To create a dynamic stage suitable for the competition of this level, Riot Games used the virtual studio based on Unreal Engine, also used by The Mandalorian. I very much look forward to how this technology will change film productions.
NVIDIA Announces Cloud-AI Video-Streaming Platform to Better Connect Millions Working and Studying Remotely – NVIDIA
Instead of saving bits with more efficient compression, Nvidia saves by regenerating the image with AI on its cloud platform based on a few key points. It is most useful if your upload bandwidth is limited. Here is a link to the demo video.
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