WDRL — Edition 283: We decide what’s our future.

Celý článek

Hey,

Wow, time flies and I realise that I not only negelected this newsletter for a long time but since I started the draft for this edition, nearly two months of life happened. I’ll have to see how often I can write this again but the goal is to just publish it when I write the draft and not let it wait in the queue for such a long time. If you want to know what happened recently in my life, at least a part of it can be seen here and there are some notes on my Garden (in German only for now). My own blog has been neglected as well but maybe I’ll find more time over the next weeks to give back some life to it. Now over to this weeks topic:

It’s our money that rules the world. We together still own more money than anyone else on the planet. What we spend our money on is going to shape the direction where we as society go. We influence whether there will be a war, how many cars are produced, how many pesticides are sprayed across our planet, how many trees in the rainforests are cut, how many planes are polluting the air we breathe. Every single cent is spent either to a good cause or a bad cause and if we’d bear that in mind every day, we probably would change our shopping behaviour.

We can opt for renewable energy in our homes, at the workplace, we can buy natural, organic, non processed food. We don’t need to buy a new iPhone every year, a new car every two or five years, we don’t need to fly to far away destinations just for vacation. We don’t need to buy cheap meat, plastics, a pair of Jeans manufactured by poor children who breath chemicals and colors every day because of what we buy.

We’re a small dot in evolution but we can change where we are on the line. More importantly, we, and only we or maximum our children will decide whether the line continues or whether humans go extinct. Like dinosaurs in the past.

Generic

• The Climate Strike Github organisation created an open source license we can use which prevents oil and gas companies from co-opting our hard work to extracting more fossil fuels.

UI/UX

• Ahmad Shadeed on how to align a logo image correctly in layouts.

Security

• iOS 14 will bring App-Bound Domains to WKWebView, a new mechanism that will offer better privacy for users in an app’s web view. Until now, the app could monitor any user activity in a web view; with the new App-Bound domain concept that won’t be the case anymore. That comes with the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) being enabled in WKWebView starting with iOS14 as well.
• Did you know that you can capture CSP violation events in the browser with JavaScript? The SecurityPolicyViolationEvent does this and tells you all the details we want to know about such an issue. With that, we can easily build a simple reporting tool for our services.

Privacy

• “Being a Facebook-Free Business means your customers can trust that you aren’t collaborators with the Facebook machine. That when you spend your money with a Facebook-Free Business, none of that money will find its way back to Facebook’s coffers.” — DHH in Become A Facebook-Free Business. I personally highly value companies that don’t spend money on Facebook (incl Insta, etc.) advertising.
• A good example of why one browser alone isn’t making a good ecosystem for us and only diversity, transparency can create a safer product for us users. Chrome’s marketplace was recently cleaned from browser extensions that were installed on 32million browser instances. The fatal thing here is that they didn’t serve the purpose they advertised but instead captured all the browser history and user activity and sent it to shady databases for spam, advertising and retargeting purposes. Better don’t install any extension even from a “trusted marketplace” like Google’s.

Accessibility

• Learn how to design beautiful and accessible link focus states in this tutorial by Ethan Marcotte.

JavaScript

• Ada Rose Cannon shares how we can animate DOM changes in JavaScript.
• If we want to look for a specific index in JavaScript we don’t need to use any complex loop with a stop anymore but instead can use Array.prototype.findIndex() which returns the index of the first match of our testing function.
• Wenson Hsieh shares how to use the Async Clipboard API and the differences and advantages over the methods we used in the past.
• iOS Safari 13.4+ allows us to block back and forward navigation gestures. This is very useful for media galleries and image croppers where users interact with elements on the side of the viewport and most likely don’t want to navigate to another page, as Rik Schennink explains.
• Fluor.js is a cool small library that lets us animate a lot of details on websites. Quite nice!

CSS

• Chris Coyier shares how we can use the new shiny CSS property aspect-ratio in our layouts and with that finally replace various hacks we used to use for over a decade now.
• Lea Verou with a guide on CSS Variables that handles the basic concepts and real practical use cases.
• Bram Van Damme shares how to use CSS Grid layout Level 2 to create a Masonry layout.
• Sara Soueidan on how she uses global and component style settings with CSS Custom Properties.

Work & Life

• After a month of trial, the Buffer team now is moving entirely to a 4-day work week as the results of significantly reduced stress, higher autonomy, and higher work happiness, more motivation, better collaboration while productivity surprisingly didn’t suffer.
• Why it’s important to connect productivity with our purpose to make it essential and meaningful productivity. Because what doesn’t serve the mission is burning ourselves out which happens if we just strive for more productivity when it doesn’t serve our own deepest mission.
• Finally, there’s a resource to find ethical job sites for freelancers instead of ending up on sites that try to exploit us.
• Lucas Miller is neuroscientist and he sees Slack as a particularly “scary offender” in stopping people getting their work done because it encourages them to be constantly distracted. Of course that isn’t only about Slack but about all the messenger style chat systems we use — no matter if made by an independent company, Microsoft, Facebook or any other.

Go beyond…

• If we frame our own life a little bit different, in evolutionary context, everything we do, everything we see as given or as inherited by our parents can be seen a bit different. We’re then only a small dot in evolution and yet, we are the only ones who can still decide whether the human species will continue to be part of evolution on our planet or not. Evolution is a quite simple concept.
• Let’s try to understand why biodiversity is collapsing worldwide at the moment. It means that less species of animals are around in our ecosystem and climate change is fueling it while our agriculture is actively killing the living ground and plants these species need to live. Weirdly, we fail to understand that we won’t get any food, wood and other things that are vital to our health and ability to live if there is no biodiversity anymore. Technology won’t save us in that case, it can only help understand the issue and maybe help improve the situation but the major impact is how we act, what we buy and how we farm.
• We are facing one of the biggest decisions of humankind — a decision on how to face the climate crisis. This is a huge responsibility and at the same time an opportunity. Our chance to work together to initiate a comprehensive change towards a more just society. Here’s the Grassroots Climate Plan with a solid plan what we need and can do to change the current state of burning down our own habitat.

Thank you all for reading this, I hope you’re doing fine and stay positive, find your way to make an impact and help build a better society, better friendships and make our world a little better.
If you want to support my work, you can give back via PayPal or Stripe. Thank you!

—Anselm