WDRL — Edition 281: Progressive Image element, striving for enough, SpiderFoot and the architecture of a web search engine today

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Hey,

There’s so much potential in all of us. There’s so much distraction in our lives today. We tend to continue doing not something different because we have too much on our plates, we are too distracted. We don’t have time to focus on what we really want to do, focus on what we want to change, focus on helping other people or focus on self-care.

In 2020 I opened a Community Supported Agriculture to provide local, naturally grown and healthy food to people nearby. No need for them to buy it in the supermarket where it was transported many hundred kilometers through the country and isn’t fresh anymore. My action to foster local community, to do something for the better, for the climate, for other people with a real impact.

I will also take three months of parental leave time for my family (my wife and soon my newborn child) and for myself, to get focus on the things that are in my mind but never find time to think properly about. This means no work, no WDRL, no other developer related stuff during that time so an entirely different lifestyle for a limited time. Let’s see what this brings.

News

• PHP 7.4 is the latest version but v8 is in the works and Brent shares what’s new in PHP 8: We’ll likely get Union types, a Just in time compiler, a static return type, weak maps, ::class on objects as easier form of writing get_class(), it lets us create DateTime objects from an interface, and some more. What’s changing? Concatenation precedence, error reporting types, and error silencing via @ suppression.

Generic

• Hugo Giraudel shares the path of how they transformed a very MVP app into a great, modern web app that’s scalable, fast and accessible: Lessons from building N26 for the web.
• The Architecture of a Large-Scale Web Search Engine, circa 2019. A deep dive into Microservices, Kubernetes and more. Real time indexing with Kafka, Cassandra; Deployments with Ansible, Salt and Terraform. A lot and this is still just a snapshot of a fast changing ecosystem.

UI/UX

• Jonathon Colman analyzed mobile app designs and 36% is the right amount of text in mobile apps. An interesting design journey through countless apps that shows the importance of text in design.

Tooling

• Now this site is incredibly useful for configuring PostgreSQL as it’s a complete config guide written for humans.
• SpiderFoot is an open source intelligence (OSINT) automation tool. What’s that? A tool that integrates with every data source available and analyses them, making that data easy to navigate in a UI.

Accessibility

• Marcus Herrmann shows us how to build accessible routing in Vue.js.

JavaScript

• This is <progressive-image>, a custom element that progressively enhances image placeholders once they are in the viewport, made by André Ruffert. It lazy loads, has a dave data option, produces no reflow, and has no dependencies.
• Philip Walton shares how we can serve way smaller HTML payloads in applications by using Service Workers for them.

CSS

• It’s interesting to see where we started with CSS over twenty years ago and where we are now. I myself built my first website in 2001 with Framesets and inline CSS and HTML 4 style attributes. Quickly after, I learned a bit how to use tables to create layouts (Photoshop could write most of the code, huh!) but gladly this didn’t take long until we had CSS2.1 which allowed us to create way better and more semantic layouts.

Work & Life

• Enough is enough. But what’s enough? Having less stuff (aka “minimalism”) can’t be successful for us long-term, it can only serve as a path to sufficiency and satisfaction. The goal needs to be that we solve enough for us, that we realize and incorporate that we don’t need more, that we have enough.
• Frank Chimero with a list of things that foster burnout: Our achievement culture, hyperactive comparison, isolation, the lack of work ethics, unnecessary self-improvement thoughts, and a couple more. It’s the first step to identify these points and then take care that not too many in parallel are true for our lives.
• A new guide 'With Great Tech Comes Great Responsibility' arrives during a period of backlash on campuses, where tech companies like Amazon and Palantir recruit. It’s by Mozilla and it wants young people to consider ‘Ethical Issues’ before taking jobs in tech. It’s on healthy work places, healthy company and startup culture, working on real problems in the world and not causing any harm with our work we do.

Go beyond…

• How your clothes become microfibre pollution in the sea. We buy plastic fibre clothes, wash them and the plastic is slowly dissolving into microplastic in the washing mashine and the sewage treatment plants can’t filter it so it gets into the rivers which end up in the sea.
• Paris, France, 2020: The mayor announces that they plan to make the city fully cyclist friendly in the next four years. But what does it mean and how will the city change? It’s a great plan that ensures cycling is )the most efficient way to navigate from A to B.
• Simon Weckert is an artist and he has a fun project where he hacks Google’s traffic jam algorithm by walking on empty streets with a dozen phones using Google Maps directions. The result? More empty streets because Google reroutes other cars to avoid the jam.
• The open climate science group has analyzed the past 2k years and this shows the development of global temperature in a visual way between year 1 and 2019 AD. It’s super interesting to see that how unusual the current period of the past 150 – 200 years is in terms of our planet’s climate. See, humans exists since way longer than 1AD so this visualization also shows us where the solution to fix climate change would be. We have to look back and adapt our lifestyle a bit. Local, following the year rythm, slower, and happier.

Finally, let me recommend you the printed books of Cabins that are simple and serve the one purpose we all strive for: A space that spellbind us in its warmth and ingenious simplicity.

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!

—Anselm