It is weird that we don’t talk about our past experiences at work unless it is the very first introductory 1:1. Even during that chat, we may talk about the newer person’s history, but we don’t talk about the others’.

That is a big loss on everyone’s part. You may have relevant experience that could help my current project (“Are you an expert at web components? Great! We are considering it for the next project. What’s your take on the technology?”). Or just the empathy from understanding our background would be useful.

I loved how my team shared our individual journeys with 5-7 photos as an icebreaker last week. I think you should try it with your team!

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Software Engineering ⚙️

Writing accessible code – Julia Ferraioli

A product may be accessible, but that doesn’t mean its code is accessible. So Julia wrote about a couple of ways to make code more readable to disabled engineers. Among others, the tip about using newlines meaningfully was new to me. Just as non-disabled people find accessible products easier to use, I expect the same for the accessible code.

International Telephone Input – Jack O’Connor

I recently had to add a country code input at work. It was more interesting than I anticipated. I originally planned to create a dropdown option per country, but that wasn’t possible because some countries have more than one country codes. So I ended up creating an option per code, which was also complicated because some countries share the same country codes.

I couldn’t have done the work in the short amount of time I did if this open-sourced collection of codes had not existed.

Does it ARM?

It turns out backward compatibility is hard. This website shows if your favorite devtool runs on M1 Macbook yet. (Spoiler: VS Code doesn’t yet)

People ❤️

Being visible – Will Larson

I believe that internal visibility at large companies leads to more opportunities and credibility. One shouldn’t have to play this game if they don’t want. But if you do, this article has a few useful tips like “Write more long-lived documents,” “Be a cheerleader for your team’s and peers’ work,” and “Attend, or potentially even host, office hours for your team.”

Business 💸

Developers see a world of possibilities with new App Store Small Business Program – Apple

Apple announced a program to half its fee to 15% for businesses with <$1M revenue. It may be due to antitrust pressure, but I still think many indie developers will find their apps more viable now. I don’t particularly care if which of the large co (say Epic or Apple) takes the cut.

Flash Loans, and Attacks — explained – The Defiant

A video describing flash loan attacks in the decentralized finance world in an amusing style. In short, attackers take a large flash loan (a loan for a single transaction) to create a price difference of a crypto asset between markets and take advantage of it. Notably, all the protocols have been “audited.” It makes me wonder what they actually “audit.”