WDRL — Edition 280: Prometheus, new Edge, dark mode for emails and no-track efforts

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Hey,

First I wish all a great, healthy and stressles new year, and hope many of you had a bit of a calmer time over the last weeks.
In a company, culture is key to success. But how do we get to a good culture? Most importantly, we need to keep in mind that culture is not a top down approach. Anyone in a company is part of it and needs to foster it. As always, there will be some people or a specific person in the company who is leading the efforts and ideally it’s one from HR or the director itself. But what we can see in bigger companies that there are many subcultures in the various departments and teams and it all depends on these individual groups whether they spend energy on creating a communication culture, talk about work ethics or not. In the end, work for most of us happens during the most prominent 8 hours of the day — the daylight hours. Why would we spend it on a place with a bad culture? Better spend some energy on creating a healthy, warm and friendly atmosphere where we love to go to each day.

News

• Chrome will change how they ask for notification permissions to protect the users from these annoying requests. The downside of course is that legit requests are harder to find for the user. Lead by example and only use these types of requests when necessary and initiated by the user.
• Firefox 72 is out and brings enhanced tracking protection for everyone, Shadow Parts CSS in ShadowDOM, Motion Path animations, Nullish coalescing operator (??) in JavaScript, and Picture in Picture for macOS and Linux.
• Safari 13 is out for already a while now but we haven’t seen a complete roundup of what’s new in there yet. Here’s the Webkit teams’ article about all the news, including Desktop-class Browsing on iPad, Pointer Events finally, the visual viewport API, programmatic paste, accelerated scrolling on iOS and iPadOS, support for FIDO2-compliant USB security keys, Apple Pay in WKWebView, Dark Mode support, Safari WebDriver for iOS, and more.
• The new Microsoft Edge is out (v79) and it’s the first official Chromium based release. This means a lot, especially as it’s available not only for the latest but also for Windows 7 so it’ll be a big boost for the modern web.

Tooling

• Understand how prometheus works as a beginner. What is it? It’s an open source metrics and analysis collector service and pretty cool because it’s so flexible that you can use it for server statistics, collecting platform metrics or user data.

Security

• Using Avast products? Here’s why it collects and sells your web habits. Maybe it’s time to reconsider a software switch?

Privacy

• Do you know what your car knows about you? Ever considered how much data it collects and who it can send it to? It’s crazy, and we usually know very little about the scope of this data.
• See, a profitable company can stop using third-party tracking services while still providing a very good product and making enough money to pay employees and even grow further. It’s a matter of the mindset, it’s a matter of will. The only problem I see here is that they say their title says they removed the last tracker but instead what they did is that they now use a custom analytics service that isn’t a third-party. However, I see business metrics combined with the very basic, anonymously collected user browsing behaviour on a website as way more powerful than having e.g. Google Analytics in place. The power of Business Intelligence tools is huge and lets us easily detect problems in our services, see which features are used and which ones are not. And many of them are easy to set up and don’t need a third-party involved — a Postgres/Timescale database and UI tool like Grafana often is enough.
• Since a year and a half we face cookie banners on every website. Many, even some of the biggest on the Internet (e.g. Tumblr) block the initial view and only let you proceed after accepting cookies and the privacy policy. It’s agreed that most websites don’t really put the banner on the page in an informed decision but to be safe. Most people neglect the user experience over being safe. But barely someone reflects and asks whether the cookies requiring the banner by law could be eliminated. This article summarizes the situation of cookie banners and how possible solutions could look like and why informed decisions are often better than decreasing conversion and sales due to unnecessary overlays and banners.

CSS

• This CSS only carousel by Christian Schäfer is a cool show of what simple HTML and CSS are capable of these days. The nice thing it’s even basic-accessible and could be extended easily via JavaScript for additional features.
• Litmus has tipps on how to code your emails to respect Dark Mode theme for your OS. As usual with email, support is very wild and inconsistent but this article explains what’s the best thing to do until the situation improves.

Work & Life

• Basecamp shares their internal communication guidelines to the public and we can learn a lot for our own businesses or place of work.
• Adam Blanchard shares the fine line between micro- and macromanagement in companies and why the golden middle is key to a self-organising team.

Go beyond…

• Why don’t we look at some very beautiful and interesting photos from around the world that have been captured in 2019 to get inspired for the new year? When I looked at them, it was a short moment of calm, and my mind wandered into these moments.

If you want to support produce WDRL, contribute via PayPal or Stripe. Every small amount you pledge will help pay my costs. Thanks a lot!

We will read each other next year, I wish you all the best until then and hope you get some time for yourself as well.

—Anselm