I am returning to my final weeks at Netflix after two weeks of vacation. As much as I wanted to do the job well when I was here, I want to leave well, too. I started jotting down a list of things to do:

• Handoff ongoing project responsibilities and past knowledge
• Reach out to people I worked closely with
• Back up some of my presentations and documents
• Draft a farewell email early and iterate
• Figure out what to do with the company devices
• (and probably more as I think this through…)

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Software Engineering ⚙️

Shipping fast and safe: Building a culture of low-risk learning

An Intercom engineer shares techniques to move fast while de-risking changes. Two were new to me: Ship instrumentation first and Ship the “read” path first.

Announcing TypeScript 4.4 RC

I won’t be using Typescript for quite some time now, but I am still excited about the changes in this release. Especially, the improved control flow analysis and the new exact optional property types will be huge.

Choice Words about the Upcoming Deprecation of JavaScript Dialogs

Chrome tried to deprecate JavaScript Dialogs (the dialogs from alert() and confirm() methods). It broke quite a few websites and surprised many. The community pushed back, and the deprecation is now postponed but still planned to go ahead. Has Chrome become too big for the internet?

Business 💸

Google considers switching FLoC to a topic-based approach, as exec acknowledges cookie replacement has fingerprinting potential

Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, is Google’s proposed alternative to the soon-to-be third-party cookies. However, several researchers and companies have confirmed that the assigned cohorts are too granular to protect users’ privacy. So Google is now contemplating a switch to a more coarse topic-based approach.

The Epic v. Google lawsuit finally makes sense

The Verge goes into various tactics Google employed to dissuade Epic from building its own app store. When Google Play comes preinstalled on all Android devices, only a few will bother to side-load another app store. That Android technically allows side-loading doesn’t make the platform open.