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.

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.

I am reading this book on the life of a British on-demand courier (think UberEats or Doordash driver), and it’s been eye-opening. I realize I haven’t paid much attention to the human cost of these platforms where the companies offload the risk and the variability onto those individuals, hiding behind the faceless apps. As builders of these platforms, we engineers can and should affect changes for a more equitable platform. We all are workers.

Software Engineering 🌐

🌟 tooling.report – Google Developers

This report compares the documented capabilities of the most popular web bundlers. I was surprised to find that Rollup ranked higher than Webpack. But before you switch your bundlers to Rollup, there are two caveats: first, the test only uses the documented features. It may be possible to achieve what you need with other bundlers. Second, you may not need all these capabilities.
On the website, you can go deeper to see what individual tests are and how they are measured.

Getting Started with FAST Components – Microsoft

I’ve never seen a component library based on WebComponents, and FAST is the first one. From its documentation, I learned how to integrate with a WebComponent library and to create WebComponents. I loved that the codebase was in Typescript, which made it easier to follow its code. I wonder how to typecheck the usages of web component libraries when the hosting code is in Typescript.

Cascading Cache Invalidation – Philip Walton

I haven’t run into this problem of cascading cache invalidation since I haven’t tried code-splitting yet. But I still found this invalidation problem intellectually stimulating.

People ❤

My Time as a Black Woman Software Engineer at Capital One – Sailor Ghoul

This article is a horrific recount of how bad management and lack of support for BIPOC colleagues can leave lasting damage not just on their career but on their health as well.

Business 💸

The Slack Social Network – Ben Thompson

Ben Thompson argues that Microsoft Teams is a vertically integrated product, whereas Slack is a horizontal product. The argument made sense until Slack acquires an enterprise identity provider service, which will create an entry into other enterprise products.

Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App – Vice

Naturally, the powerful and connected would love to avoid accountability and exposure, and, thus, have tension with the press. But harassment is many steps too far. This specific article is on how Silicon Valley elites attacked a New York Times reporter for her recent reports.