WDRL — Edition 223: Bringing People Together by Strategy, CSSTOM, Security Training And Returning Early

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Hey,

While this edition took a few more days than usual, I hope you all had a nice weekend and could recover your strength for your work. These days it is one of the biggest challenges for people to think long-term. In a world where we live with devices that last a few months, or few years, where we buy stuff to throw it away only days or weeks later, the term effort is an interesting one.

This morning I was reading an essay on ‘Yatnah’, ‘Effort’. In the past weeks I’ve been a lot outside in nature and created a small acre to grow some vegetables. I also attended a workshop to learn the craft of grafting fruit trees. I also cutted a few trees, and when you do this, you realize that our fast-living short-term lifestyle is very different from how nature works. I grafted a tree that is supposed to grow for decades now, and if you cut a tree that has been there for fourty years, it’ll take another fourty to grow a similar big one anywhere in the world.

I’d love if we all would try to create more long-lasting work, software that works in a decade, and in order to do so, put effort on learning how we can make that happen. So long, I’ll leave you with this quote and a bunch of interesting articles for this week.

“In our modern world it can be tempting to throw effort away and replace it with a few phrases of positive thinking. But there is just no substitute for practice”. — Kino Macgregor

News

• Chrome 66 Beta brings the CSS Typed Object Model, Async Clipboard API, and AudioWorklets, and support to use calc(), min(), max() in Media Queries. Additionally, select and textarea fields now support the autocomplete-attribute, and the catch clause of a try statement can now be used without a parameter.

UI/UX

• While there’s more discussion about inclusive design these days, it’s often seen under the accessibility hat or as technical decisions. Robert del Prado now shares on the Invision blog how important inclusive design thinking is and why it’s much more about the generic user we all have on our products than some specific people with specific disabilities. Inclusive design brings people together, regardless of who they are, where they live and what they can afford. And isn’t it the goal of every product to be successful by acquiring as many people as possible? Maybe we need to discuss this with marketing people as well.

Tooling

• There’s a new, fast DNS service available by Cloudflare now. Finally, a better alternative to the much used Google DNS servers is available under 1.1.1.1 and it’s the fastest DNS out there and probably one of the most secure one. They put a lot of effort into securing the service by putting encryption on it and partner with Mozilla to make DNS over HTTPS work. This means, they’ll close a big privacy gap that until now leaked all your browsing data to the DNS provider.
• I heard a lot about iOS’ machine learning already but despite the interesting fact that they’re able to do this on the device and don’t need to send everything to a cloud, I yet haven’t found out how to make use of this for own apps. Manu Rink now explains Machine Learning in iOS for noobs in her really nicely done guide.
• There’s great nes for the Git GUI fans: Tower now offers a new beta version that includes Pull Request support, Interactive Rebase workflows, Quick Actions, Reflog, and Search. An amazing update that makes working with the software much faster than before and even for me as command line lover is now a nice option.

Security

• PagerDuty just published an open source version of their internal security training material, full of interesting explanations about common security issues and strategies. This is especially nice as it can be given to people who are not technically experienced or simply to every employee in a company.

Web Performance

• Tim Oxley shares why he prefers to return early and avoid else wherever possible. This is something I’ve been doing in the beginning of my career, then lost at some point but nowadays do a lot again and can fully agree with. Especially the reduced complexity and simpler logic in functions is a key advantage for me here.

JavaScript

• For many years we could only get CSS values in their computed value and even this wasn’t flexible or nice to work with. But now CSS has a proper object-based API for working with values in JavaScript and Eric Bidelman shares how to use the CSS Typed Object Model. It’s yet only available in the upcoming Chrome 66 and it’s being worked on in Firefox but it’s a promising feature I’d love to use soon in my code.

CSS

• Amber Wilson shares some insights on how it feels to be thrown into a complex project in order to do the styling there. She rightly says so that “nobody said CSS is easy” and shares that mixing Scss and React together doesn’t necessarily make things easier but more flexible. And she expresses how important it is that we as developers face inconvenient situations where have no clue how to solve something in order to grow our knowledge.

Work & Life

• If there’s one thing we don’t talk much about in the web industry it’s definitely retirement. Jan Chipchase now wrote a lot of interesting thoughts all about retirement in his article I recommend to read this week.

—Anselm