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Saturday 4th June, 2022 - Pain in the eyes
markjgsmith.substack.com

Saturday 4th June, 2022 - Pain in the eyes

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Mark Smith
Jun 4
1
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Saturday 4th June, 2022 - Pain in the eyes
markjgsmith.substack.com

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Another season 2 instalment…

Lot’s of interesting links and podcasts in this week’s edition.

It’s been a hectic week health wise, the abyss’ on my knees cleared up, after over a month of pain, but the same day a rash appeared on both my feet, and some sort of eye infection started. The rash is slowly fading but the eye infection is the worst.

Both my eye sockets started aching and have been soar to the touch, and it spread to my forehead. The last two days have been agony, a throbbing, aching pain that gets worse throughout the day. I don’t have a temperature and no aching body, so it’s not COVID. It feels like the optic nerves are swelling.

It hasn’t been helped much by the environment, where seemingly every place I go, an argument breaks out between people with unbelievably piercing voices. It feels a bit better today. I just need some good rest, which is easier said than done.

I’ve been thinking more about the structure of the newsletter. The plan is to have more blog posts, but I still want some good content in the newsletter. So what I’ve been thinking is that in the newsletter I’ll write ideas I have during the week, so you get to see the seedlings of the ideas, these then develop into blog posts, and who knows perhaps bigger projects. Kind of like how the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy started out as a radio show, then became a book series, a TV series, and finally a feature film. But of course my stuff isn’t anywhere near as grandiose as Douglas Adams’. And there will be the links and podcasts too.

Well we’ll see how it goes.

I’m going to keep this week’s intro short, and go and rest my weary head.

Podcasts

  • Ghosts in the Hit Machine (20000 Hertz Podcast) - Quite eye opening piece about the realities of how pop music is created these days, it’s about ghost writers and ghost producers, and about how the music creations we listen to are much bigger and carefully sculpted creations than just the musical notes we hear

  • JS Logging and Error Handling (JS Party Podcast) - Might sound a bit boring but I know from so so many hours of debugging how important logging and error handling is for the creation of good developer experience, it can literally turn days of slogging into a few minutes of tweaking, episode covers all aspects thoroughly with the usual penache that the show is great at, I now need to go and rewrite a bunch of my Promise based code to use AbortSignals :)

  • Why still 80 columns? (Co-recursive Podcast) - I feel like I post links to almost all of AGB’s podcasts, but that’s because they are so well done, nerdy programming content, mixed in nicely with history and interesting human stories, to me each episode feels a bit like a modern and audio version of a chapter from the Steven Levi Hackers book

  • Why Terra and Luna Collapsed with Jonathan Wu (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Something in this episode solidified several crypto concepts for me, JW is excellent at communicating descriptions of complicated dynamics, with just the right amount of concept reminders peppered throughout his explanations, so it’s easier to follow the sometimes long trains of thought that use financial primitives that you aren’t totally comfortable mentally juggling with yet, still I’ll need to go back and listened to it again cause I only grocked about 80% of it

  • The New Fastest Computer in the World - Tue 05/31 (Techmeme Ride Home Podcast) - AMD Frontier Super Computer, 6.88 exaflops of AI computation, equating to 68 million instructions per second for EACH of the 86 billion neurons in the human brain - How can that not be smarter than a human? Also consumes 21.1 megawatts which should be a familiar number anagram to any back to the future fans out there

  • What Nietzsche can teach us about Joyful Living in a Tech Saturated World (AOM Podcast) - Listened to this when I was feeling very scattered because of too many different parallel strands, I’ve always found Nietzche’s writing a bit heavy, and could never get into it, but this covered some of his thoughts very well, relating it to tech in interesting ways, yet it was removed enough from my day to day that it helped ground and calm my body and mind, nice episode worth listening

  • Jamal Green on Reconceiving Rights (Conversations with Tyler Podcast) - Great interview with a smart dude, clear thinker and very knowledgeable and eloquent at describing what he calls the “deep fictions” that are the legal system, also has a famous musician in his family, from an excellent band that I’ve seen live a couple of times

Links

  • Dark Moon: The Inevitable Collapse of Luna

  • Processing Arrays non-destructively: `for-of` vs. `.reduce()` vs. `.flatMap()`

  • What is Edge Compute? It's kind of like knitting dog hats

  • How we converted our Node.js library to Deno (using Deno) 

  • JSON and the stringification oddities in JavaScript

  • Buying bots are scooping up PS5s and Xboxes before you can

  • How to use Netlify Edge Functions

  • How to Store an SSH Key on a Yubikey

  • Ffmpeg buddy - Functionality is a bit limited but it’s a good idea for a web tool because it’s very difficult to create ffmpeg commands

  • Web3 is going just great - Very readable site with useful info, bit of a crypto reality check, shows all the latest scams that are happening, make sure to read the glossary, some well written explanations of common crypto verbiage

  • Apple’s Safari browser now has more than 1 billion users

  • Make your own chips for free - Costs for fabrication, packaging, evaluation boards and shipping are covered by Google for this program

  • How To Build A Group Chat App With Vanilla JS, Twilio And Node.js

  • New Express 5 Features to Try

  • Using N|Solid runtime from NPM - Live metrics from core elements and statistics of Node.js, libuv, and the V8 JavaScript engine, no noticeable performance impact

That’s all from me…

Best reguards,

Mark

Consider becoming a patreon, any support would be very much appreciated


Thanks for reading!

@markjgsmith

If you liked this newsletter you might like my blog, daily linkblog or experimental podcast :)

I’m a freelance web developer, consultant and automation engineer, consider hiring me!

Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!

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