2020 has taken the concept of “new normal” and given it a whole new lease of life. It’s a word that’s been thrown around so often but it’s true – it’s permeated every aspect of our lives. Our once loud and proud office culture has been replaced with remote work; the ultimate “new normal” for businesses around the world. We’ve had to juggle family life and childcare with our usual working routines, shifting from video calls to email on a near-constant basis to stay “updated”. ...

Language is one of the most powerful tools we have as humans. It binds us. Instructs us. When used well, it creates a common understanding. And it’s essential for creating an environment where everyone feels welcome and included. Historically, language has left many out. Individuals and groups have been marginalized and discriminated against because of their culture, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, socioeconomic status, appearance and more. ...

The Rules (according to Graham) Don’t use @here unless it is truly relevant to everyone in a channel Don’t use @channel unless there is a fire or a nuclear explosion that everyone needs to be aware of now Use targeted Slack group mentions for getting a hold of stakeholders in a channel (i.e. @support_ in the #support channel) Use Slack as an asynchronous medium, not a synchronous one (assume people will not respond immediately, rather than the opposite) Link: Why you shouldn’t use @here on Slack ...

An in depth exploration of how far you can get with using JSDoc (and the TypeScript compiler) without resorting to writing TypeScript or having a build step in your project. Link: JSDoc typings: all the benefits of TypeScript, with none of the drawbacks

My partner and I travelled back to Berlin from Las Palmas on a flight on Saturday. Since it was not a long haul flight, there would be no in-flight entertainment. We wanted to wanted to watch series and movies together using my computer, while both using noise cancelling headphones. This turned out to be surprisingly easy to do. I’ll be sure to do this for our journey, which I hope to make by train. That would make watching a couple of lectures or interesting talks from conferences quite enjoyable. ...

This means startups don’t adopt new technologies despite their immaturity, they adopt them because of that immaturity. This drives a constant churn of novelty and obsolescence, which amplifies the importance of a technologist’s skillset, which drives startups to adopt new technologies. Link: trapped in the technologist factory

Stop interviewing, stop organising the off-sites, stop onboarding, stop fielding requests from users, stop anything that sounds like team building. Stop helping other people with their work. Archive mail. Quit slack channels. Do not curate the team roadmap. Crucially: don’t catch things that are about to drop. That’s incredibly hard for a lot of us, but remember that the rest of the team already does this. Stop being the unofficial lead. (If you’re in the same situation and you’re the official lead, consider stopping that too!) ...

It’s understandable to think that JavaScript frameworks and their communities are eating the web because places like Twitter are awash with very loud voices from said communities. Always remember that although a subset of the JavaScript community can be very loud, they represent a paltry portion of the web as a whole. This means that when they say something like “CSS sucks” — what they mean is “CSS sucks for a small subset of less than 1 percent of the web”. ...

I often need to look up details in the Mozilla Developer Network documentation (MDN). It’s a great resource, that keeps getting better every year. A few years ago, I learned that lovely people have set up a very convenient “url shortener” / “search service” to do an “I’m feeling lucky” search on the MDN documentation. In your browser’s URL bar, type mdn.io/‰s, where %s is your search string. Hit Enter and arrive at the best matching page on MDN. ...

In order to get the development environment on localhost closer to the production environment, I’m using HTTPS on localhost. This helps me with discovering bugs much earlier, which saves a lot of time. I use the excellent tool mkcert for managing the certificates locally. mkcert is built exactly for this purpose and removes most of the friction. I regularly use httpie to interact with HTTP servers. However, httpie doesn’t know about about the certificate authority installed locally by mkcert, so we’ll have to help it a bit. ...