Saturday 25th March, 2022 - Aftermath
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
We are still in the Silicon Valley bank crisis aftermath, so things feel a bit weird. I’ve tried to focus on more directly related dev content in this issue, or at least move the focus away from money issues a bit. I know it’s causing me trouble in my life, everything feels like a big feedback loop sometimes.
Hopefully you saw the “Catching up” mid week special I sent out:
Mid-week special: Catching up
This week in my static site generator development I updated a plugin I use to prettify output so that it automatically detects whether the text contains code blocks, and doesn’t apply the prettifier in those situations because that breaks code syntax highlighting. It’s quite an elegantly general solution where you pass an enable function, so theoretically you can enable/disable the plugin for any situation. Seems to work well so far.
I’ve also made a potentially interesting modification to the renderer core, which would make it possible to nest plugins recursively. I’m going to test that today. I think it might make it possible to drastically simplify the entire app. It’s still very much prototype phase though, it might turn out to be a dead end.
I wrote 3 blog posts you might find interesting:
Monetary system link dump - I've decided to not cover so many monetary systen / finance / bitcoin topics in the newsletter and get back to more things web development related, so here's a link dump from the past 10 days https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/03/21/monetary-system-link-dump
Review: Robolledo RA#876 - I took some notes as I listened to this superb Resident Advisor mix, it's sort of a review but takes the form of an imaginary trip report, if you have an hour to chill out, I definitely recommend listening to this https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/03/21/review-robolledo
Normal process for banks in distress - A summary of what the normal process is for banks in distress, sheds a bit of light on some of the things happening recently in the banking sector https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/03/25/normal-process-for-banks-in-distress
There will be less finance stuff in the newsletter but perhaps it’s a good excuse to write more blog posts about that sort of stuff. Let’s see how it goes.
Podcasts
Solo Acts: Marco Arment and his podcast app (Vergecast Podcast) - Great to hear that it’s possible to Raj out a living as a solo dev, but I think it’s quite rare, the days when things were relatively simple to build are very far behind us https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdmVyZ2VjYXN0/episode/OGE5ZDdlYzYtOTc1Yy0xMWVkLTgxNjYtYjdkOGY4Zjc5Y2Nl?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwi4tpuG8PX9AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
What happens to gas stations when the world goes electric? Emily Grubert (TED Daily Podcast) - Short but extremely important, looks at the dynamics at play and the enormity of the fossil fuel to clean energy transition, from an engineering and societal perspective, I think many of the issues seen here are highly similar to what is ahead in the transition to digital money, in fact IMO it might be wishful thinking to assume we can move to digital money before we have moved to clean energy, doing both these things at the same time is like changing the engine of your car while driving it, except your car is the entire world economy https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9vcGVuLmZpcnN0b3J5Lm1lL3Jzcy91c2VyL2NqemR4emY3dmJ6dmowNzU4NzJrYW5vaWI/episode/ZW4uYXVkaW8udGFsay50ZWQuY29tOjEwODM5Mw?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwi4tpuG8PX9AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQDg
HTML First (Vanilla Javascript Podcast) - I very much had this idea in mind in my recent site migration and redesign, while it is minimal in terms of styles, it is very fast and extremely resilient in the face of connectivity issues, and I expect to improve the look in the coming years https://vanillajspodcast.com/html-first/
You deserve the right to repair your stuff (TED Talks Daily) - Brief look at how we’ve come from products with manuals to products with authenticated websites, and finally products that try to stop you from carrying out repairs https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9vcGVuLmZpcnN0b3J5Lm1lL3Jzcy91c2VyL2NqemR4emY3dmJ6dmowNzU4NzJrYW5vaWI/episode/ZW4uYXVkaW8udGFsay50ZWQuY29tOjg4MjYx?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwi4tpuG8PX9AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQMQ
How to play the long game with NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien (Decoder Podcast) - The way they implemented their org structure to ensure editorial independence is interesting as well as how things have changed as they have grown into new areas, I still totally hate the paywall and rarely read their stuff because of it, I do miss reading their articles because they are very high quality but I can’t afford to be subscribed to 10 different media companies https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vcmVjb2RlZGVjb2Rl/episode/ODY4MmJlOWEtOTgyYS0xMWVkLWJlNDctMDNmN2I3NzllYTA5?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwi4tpuG8PX9AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQKA
How to calm your anxiety from a neuroscientist (TED Talks Daily) - It’s so easy to get caught up in the busy panic of everyday modern life, but there are several ways to balance your anxiety and even use it to your advantage https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9vcGVuLmZpcnN0b3J5Lm1lL3Jzcy91c2VyL2NqemR4emY3dmJ6dmowNzU4NzJrYW5vaWI/episode/ZW4uYXVkaW8udGFsay50ZWQuY29tOjEwNzMyMQ?sa=X&ved=0CAgQuIEEahcKEwi4tpuG8PX9AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQCw
Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the value of the Countryside (Conversations with Tyler Podcast) - Tom is so unbelievably good at breathing life into the past, he really inhabits the people and events he researches, personally I find Christianity very unapproachable, compared to say Buddhism, but it’s clearly had a massive impact on western culture, and listening to what he has discovered over the years gives huge insight into modern culture; side note I reckon a Cory Doctorow and Tom Holland debate would be phenomenal, very different politics but they both have encyclopaedic knowledge about their fields https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2Nvd2VuY29udm9zLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz/episode/MjJmYzNlNDItZDIwMy00MmZhLWFlNmUtY2ZmMTczYzNhZjFj?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwi4tpuG8PX9AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQHw
ChatGPT, Conferences, Fidgets on the Web, and Modern CSS in Real Life Ep#557 (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - Nothing earth shattering, but just a good general run of the mill dev chat, and sometimes that’s all you need, that’s how I felt listening to this, there’s a bit of a lul in good dev podcast content at the minute, I probably need to subscribe to some new shows https://shoptalkshow.com/557
Links
The Future Smartphone: More Folds, Less Phone, a Whole Lot of AI https://www.wired.com/story/phones-of-the-future-more-folds-less-phone-lots-of-ai
UBS agrees 'emergency rescue' of Credit Suisse https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65007871
Glaze protects art from prying AIs https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/17/glaze-generative-ai-art-style-mimicry-protection
Solo Acts: Marco Arment and his podcast app Overcast https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/20/23648650/marco-arment-overcast-solo-acts
Putin to Xi: We will discuss your plan to end the war in Ukrainehttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65018657
The End of Front-End Development https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/the-end-of-frontend-development
Elon Musk Might Start Up a ChatGPT Rival, Report Says https://www.cnet.com/tech/elon-musk-reportedly-eyeing-development-of-chatgpt-rival
Balaji on Twitter: "The BitSignal How do you ring the fire alarm on the internet? How do you show it’s not a false alarm? I am putting up the BitSignal. $1M in BTC to alert us to the stealth financial crisis. $1000 per tweet, for the best 1000. Reply with your charts, graphs, stats, memes!
How we built an open-source SEO tool using Workers, D1, and Queues - Cloudflare queues sound pretty cool, and the general idea of this tutorial is great, hoping that Netlify add something similar https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-an-open-source-seo-tool-using-workers-d1-and-queues
lucaong/minisearch - Tiny and powerful JavaScript full-text search engine for browser and Node https://github.com/lucaong/minisearch
delvedor/find-my-way - A crazy fast HTTP router - Looks like it could be very useful if you intend on keeping things really minimal, no need for a framework https://github.com/delvedor/find-my-way
Hono - [炎] means flame🔥 in Japanese - is a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework for the Edge
https://hono.dev
Last minute addition: Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder and creator of Moore’s Law, has died - He was 94 years old https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23655844/gordon-moore-intel-co-founder-creator-moores-law-died
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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