Mark Smith’s a Newsletter - Saturday 15th May, 2021
Serverless, v8, resources for CTOs, Internet Archive infra, cool javascript tutorials & libs, design vs dev, Apple privacy vs Ad Tech , NFTs & crypto, LinuxOnM1, space travel, dev tips
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
This week’s intro is super brief, hopefully the regular newsletter intro will be back next week.
The link bounty is slightly lighter than usual, partly because it’s been a light news week, but I’ve also had a lot of stuff going on this week.
That’s all from me this week…
I hope you enjoy the links!
As usual all the articles from the linkblog in chronological order are included below, which is also a good way to explore, there are some pieces there amongst the main summary items that didn’t make it into the main themes, but these are interesting in their own right, and often end up developing into something more substantial further down the line.
Special mentions
If you or anyone in your network is looking for web development services, consider hiring me :)
Consider becoming a sponsor to get your company featured on the linkblog and in the newsletter
Consider becoming a patreon, any support would be very much appreciated
Stuff from me
Nothing from me this week :(
Stuff from around the web
Articles
What Serverless Computing Is and Should Become - The Next Phase of Cloud Computing - I’m most of the way through this article and it’s a great read, although it’s quite long, it makes the distinction between the first phase (sysadmin) and second phase (programmers) of serverless computing and goes on to discuss the serverless computing landscape in a lot of detail and with much clarity acm.org #
V8 release v9.1 - Includes FastTemplateCache improvements, top-level await, private brand checks a.k.a. #foo in obj and short builtin calls v8.dev #
kuchin/awesome-cto - A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers, with the emphasis on startups - Looks like a rather good resource github.com #
Jonah Edwards - Internet Archive Infrastructure - Looks super interesting, especially if you’ve ever had a chance to manage a large fleet of servers, careful though the file looks like it could be quite large, I’m hoping to watch this later archive.org #
Using the Switch(true) Pattern in JavaScript seanbarry.dev #
How to Send Tweets With a JavaScript GitHub Action hibbard.eu #
shelljs/shelljs - Portable Unix shell commands for Node.js github.com #
Voyager 1 hears the hush of interstellar plasma - Really liked this space science article, I didn’t know our entire solar system has a sort of ozone layer called the heliopause, that’s pretty cool, and there’s also a neat diagram of the Voyager and Pioneer space ships that are currently travelling into deep space, they’re all heading in different directions, which I guess is on purpose so we get a better aggregated view, it occurs to me that we should send out large fleets of very small devices in all directions all travelling at the same speed, to get a sort of Google Street View of interstellar space - Also it reminds me I had this idea a couple of days ago while watching a large crane moving a massive pile of dirt from a barge onto the river bank, I was really impressed by how the crane operator was able to move large amounts of dirt by swinging the claws using angular momentum to perfectly position the them to pickup the dirt, well anyway it occurred to me that if we ever find a way to create artificial gravity, then we could use the same technique to create a solar roundabout, so space ships could get slingshot in the direction they need to go in, you would probably want to have several of these orbiting of different distance from the sun, space travel is awesome nature.com #
Web design VS Web development dev.to #
Apple robbed the mob’s bank - All about Apple’s recent privacy crusade, the article creates an interesting framing, essentially calling out their behaviour as daylight robbery, it’s an interesting angle and it feels like it lines up with reality, the one thing I’m wondering is whether Apple really is using all the AppStore apps first party data to improve their advertising business, my understanding was that each app handled their own tracking data mobiledevmemo.com #
EBay officially opens its platform to NFT sales theblockcrypto.com #
CryptoPunks NFTs sell at Christie’s for $16.9 million theverge.com #
Latest Linux kernel introduces preliminary Apple M1 support appleinsider.com #
Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money? babeljs.io #
Tesla has stopped accepting Bitcoin for purchasing cars, citing environmental concerns twitter.com #
Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service - No official word yet as to why they decided to shut the service down zdnet.com #
Vitalik Buterin donates more than $60M to charity after selling meme tokens including Shiba Inu theblockcrypto.com #
Elon Musk’s SpaceX inks satellite connectivity deal with Google Cloud theverge.com #
The Three Things to Never Build In Your App - Authentication, Notifications, and Payments - Of the 3 mentioned I’ve always used 3rd party services for payments, but the author in this article makes quite a good case for why you might want to do the same for auth and notifications courier.com #
Podcasts
No podcasts this week :(
——-
Thanks for reading!
Mark Smith‘s Newsletter is a weekly roundup of some of the best javascript, tech and web development links published to my daily linkblog.
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!