Saturday 26th March, 2022 - Mozilla’s vision for the evolution of the web
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
The last few issues have been a bit light on actual links, so I’ve bulked out the links section with some interesting picks. The stand out article for me this week was Mozilla’s vision for the evolution of the web. Interesting to get a sense of where one of the most influential entities in web development sees things going. I like that they are outlining their values, a lot of thought has no doubt gone into putting this together.
Bit of a slog to read, but I found that if I imagined it was being read by metaverse pioneer MZ, it started making a lot more sense. Bizarre how similar the styles are, perhaps he’s been moonlighting for MZ? Weird.
In unrelated news, apparently Nic Cage is playing himself in an upcoming movie (17:24), which by all accounts gets even weirder.
I hope Nick Clegg is alright in all this crazyness.
The only thing that gets weirder than that is Duncan Trussell, especially around 40:00.
Moving on…
I’ve been dealing with an injury from, a little accident, that resulted in a hole in my right knee. I’ll spare you the photos and details. Luckily I had some good punk rock music to listen to after performing a self repair operation using a pair of tweezers and a bottle of disinfectant. Quite painful.
On the development front, yesterday I managed to fix a couple of bugs with the components implementation in my ssg. Props now get passed to components properly and it’s possible to nest components, so I’m happy about that. Hopefully next week I’ll be tackling some issues I’ve been having installing npm modules from private repositories. Expect a writeup once I get that working.
I reached max capacity with my current note taking and information organisation system. I’ve been mostly doing things in a very casual way recently. That was good for a while, and gave me a good sense of all the various things that I do, listening to podcasts, reading articles, taking notes, development work etc. but it was clear that I needed to up the bar, so I spent a few days re-organising things. I now have an agile workflow in place, and I’m hoping that will help me focus on getting things done more effectively. If you’re interested it’s based around a previous project, but it’s a different implementation.
I wrote a couple of blog posts this week, sort of follow ups from last week’s articles, and covering some difficult topics.
Mental health issues affect developers a lot because we are constantly using our brains. It’s worth spending the time to understand these things.
There wasn’t much actual music in last week’s Punk Rock Internet issue, so here’s some phenomenal recent selections from the punk/hardcore/indie/metal scenes. Punk News Ep #580.5. Particularly the final cover song which will sound familiar to you if you’re from the UK. Very poignant observations, perhaps a tad depressing, but a bloody good rendition.
Also relevant is this Tim Ferris interview with Stewart Copeland, drummer of the Police, that have their roots in punk. Has a really interesting bit about emotions and anger, among many other excellent parts in this fabulous interview.
If your looking for some chill out after all that loudness, I had a lot of fun listening to ambient music artist Yota Morimoto while reading about very large numbers in this article about Graham’s Number. Kind of trippy.
This week’s podcasts:
Interview with Jane McGonigal (Tim Ferris Podcast) - Urgent optimism, futurism, social scenario simulations as a way to prepare for a future with deep fakes, virtual people created from your intimate personal data, how our cultures will likely change in the coming years. Super interesting, though I worry about nefarious and / or cruel uses of this type of research, at infiniti things might get very weird
Being a developer with ADHD (VanillaJS Podcast)
This week’s links:
Mozilla’s vision for the evolution of the Web - Worth being aware of, they are one of the biggest influencers in web development.
Gogoro Motorbike EV with super quick battery swap - Once EV motorbikes start trending there’s going to be an almighty shift in many places where motorbikes are the dominant form of transport as all the repair places and workers transition their operations. Quick swap batteries like this might just get us to that tipping point
Librem Review - I’m super interested in Linux on mobile so this stood out. Still a lot of things missing or not working, but there’s been considerable progress
LibHunt - Trending open-source projects and their alternatives - I like how you can get a sense of what’s popular using the various trend indicators
awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted - A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers
metarank/metarank - A low code Machine Learning tool that personalizes product listings, articles, recommendations, and search results in order to boost sales. A friendly Learn-to-Rank engine
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!