CSS Grid is the future. It’s time to start learning it. Manuel Matuzovic details how the ‘grid’ shortcut works, why ‘grid’ is better than ‘grid-template’ and how to handle implicit rows and columns. Manuel provides codepen examples on sticky footers and automatic minimum size of grid items.
The new Hyper terminal is here, Hyper 2.0. New features include a Canvas based rendering engine (which fixes their speed issues), a catalog of plugins and themes, and better support for keymaps and hyperlinks. It’s still an electron app, but it also still looks really cool. It also is no longer powered by hterm, but instead it is using xterm.js 3.0.
Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are two of the top dogs for data services. However, which one is better? Thomas LaRock does a side-by-side comparison, which serves as at least a starter guide for the research you might need when deciding between the two. Whether you need Cosmos DB, DynamoDB, or a specific type of cache, Thomas compares each service’s offerings for these and more. He also includes a dandy cost comparison for some of the different services offered in a follow up post. I would love to see a follow up from Thomas covering Google Cloud’s Datastore!
Sam Khawase just made an iOS app that uses data from OpenStreetMaps to help you find a nearby toilet. Google maps and OpenStreetMaps are both great and all, but this is revolutionary. Why has no one thought of this before? Clone the repo, and never search for a bathroom again. In the bay area, you can always check Jennifer Wong’s hackathon project to draw attention to homelessness issues via the SF PoopMap on Human Wasteland.
The Node community is revisiting the idea of adding Websocket support to core. It had been previously voted out, but recent conversations have led some members in the community to believe there is enough interest to at least revisit the topic. The Faye collection maintainer had some detailed thoughts about the subject. Editor’s note: what’s with the need to make everything a monolith? Node does a wonderful job of making userland extensions actually work, and it’d be a shame to move a bunch of those into core. Keeping a lightweight core reduces security vulnerability exposure and allows for faster iteration.
Are you a mediocre developer? Nope, you’re not. Just kidding you might be (well, maybe). Nikita Sobolev argues that just because you google the simplest of things or don’t trust yourself there are still ways to survive. Nikita states, “Problems happen to everyone. The only thing that matters is how ready we are for these problems.” Alejandro Wainzinger takes it a step further and casts blame to management for situations that head south. Alejandro argues that management key mistakes include not having a roadmap, not having thorough code reviews, and not approaching legacy systems appropriately.
Open Source Software decided to go big this week. Both Google and and Amazon participated. Google open sourced Agones, which provides dedicated game-server hosting and multiplayer, built on top of Kubernetes. While, Amazon open sourced AWS documentation on GitHub. Take a look at the new AWS open source docs with over 100 guides/docs now on GitHub.
Per Vognsen is taking a break from his usual gigs, like NVIDIA and Oculus, to start Bitwise. Bitwise is Per’s way to share his “passion and try to demonstrate by example how to build systems from scratch.” The kickoff was on Sunday, but you can watch the replay on twitch now, or sub to the YouTube channel to keep up with new material. The first project is going to be a language compiler. Other potential projects include Kernels, GUIs and fuzz testing! Per plans to stream one or two hours a day (or bi-daily). If you are interested in building systems, welcome to the gold mine. Read more about the project on Per’s GitHub.
GitLab released the results from the 2018 Global Developer Report. The top findings reported pointed to managers thinking highly of themselves, better teams having better tools, and working from home is the best. See how in-office results compare to remote results, top challenges devs face, and other interesting dev stuff in the State of the Union for devs.
Josh Marinacci started a two-part tutorial on ‘Building an Immersive Game with A-Frame and Low Poly Models’. Josh discusses how physics, collisions and scenery can make a game feel immersive. Starting with some boilerplate code, Josh takes you all the way through building an immersive game. After you make it through the first half, move on to the second half of the tutorial.
For a different take on learning go, Chris James made a tutorial to learn go with tests. Start with ‘hello world’ and learn how to write tests in Go. Then start getting familiar with constants, switch statements and refactoring. After getting comfortable with Go, take a look at Brendan Ryan’s piece ‘Profiling Go Applications With Flamegraphs’.
Web performance matters, and the team at Baqend wants the Internet to be even faster. Wolfram Wingerath’s article ‘Web Performance Made Simple: The What, When, How, and Why in 20 Words’ starts with what happens when a website loads, then discusses when, how, and why. There are also some solid ‘further reading’ suggestions at the bottom.
Atom is working on a new experimental editor called Xray. The goal of Xray is to allow rapid development and testing of radical ideas, which won’t risk the stability of Atom. The first update for the project was announced on March 5, in which Atom announced Xray would start as a 12-week experiment, and the beginning focus would be Text shaping, Anchors and Selections.
John Carmack took a week off to build a neural network with C++ on a OpenBSD system. John details the week, which was a break from work for him, in a facebook post. He found himself watching some Stanford CS213N lectures, debating the value of C++ and eventually having a hacky neural network that he will likely use when an established NN library isn’t needed.
No more worrying about what exactly the Hacky word means your boss posted on your code. Hackterms is an urban dictionary for Hacker / Computer buzzwords. Some currently trending words are code smell and rubber duck debugging.
Last week Google announced the beta for Flutter, which was designed to make native apps beautiful. Top features include high-velocity development, expressive and flexible designs, and high-quality experiences. Well, that is great and all, but for all the Android devs out there, Harshit Dwivedi went ahead asked the question for you in his piece ‘What the F**tter!? Understanding Flutter as an Android (Java) Developer’. In this piece, Harshit doesn’t debate on which is better, but instead will help you get a Flutter project up and going.
Phantomjs is suspending all development immediately. Ariya Hidayat announced that there hasn’t been active contribution, so PhantomJS will be archived. The last stable version will be 2.1.1.
Are you really good at Postgres? DailyDrip is looking for a couple of experts to help write amazing content on this topic. If you think you are a fit, email support@dailydrip.com for more info!
Uber introduced Queryparser, a new OSS tool that parses and analyzes SQL. The parser is written in Haskell and features table access, column access and table lineage. Read more about the tool or take a look at the code.