May this be the Month 👋

This past month has been all about BlueSky, the app that Jack Dorsey and his team are building as an alternative to Twitter. BlueSky is based on a new protocol called the AT Protocol, which they have designed themselves. Although the app is currently invite-only, it’s starting to attract major names.

Releases

Browsers

Hey April 👋

In this month’s update on OpenAI’s LLMs and their counterparts, we’re looking at Google’s new LLM, Bard, which recently entered beta testing in the United States. It’s been compared to BingAI, and early reviews suggest that Bard may be the better search engine, providing concise and timely information. Meanwhile, BingAI (or GPT-4) appears to excel at creative writing and coding tasks.

This month, the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organization backed by Elon Musk, released an Open Letter urging AI companies to halt any enhancements beyond GPT-4. Prominent figures like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak have signed the letter. However, I believe that stopping progress on GPT-4 is unlikely. If OpenAI ceases development, another organization will undoubtedly step in, given the financial incentives at stake.

People seem to be divided into two basic camps regarding this issue:

Welcome to March folks.

The Bingu revolution

The ChatGPT revolution is sweeping the internet. Both Microsoft and Google launched their own chatbots this month. Bing AI is based on OpenAI’s new model and is currently being tested with beta testers. I have access to BingAI and can confirm that some of it is quite useful, while some results are purely imaginary. Use it only for verifiable information for now.

Google’s chatbot Bard is currently being tested with trusted partners, with no waitlist, and is therefore still an unknown quantity at this point.

Welcome to the shortest month!

Releases

Browsers

Chrome 109

Welcome to 2023 Fellows 👋

Three years of writing this Newsletter. It’s something that I took up like a journal to ensure that I read my articles. Thanks for reading the Newsletter, cheering for every issue and providing feedback.

I hope all of you are having a good start to the year. The web is alive and well. I don’t know if it’s an availability heuristic but the final part of the year has changed how I find my web topics. It was mostly Twitter and famous blogs that I knew how to find. The decline to Twitter and falling off for many developers have made that much more difficult. But it’s an opportunity more than anything else. We have the opportunity to create something out of that void and surely 2023 can’t disappoint.

Hello there December 👋

Twitter Turmoil

It is the month Elon Musk took charge of the social network Twitter and things have been going wild. From a promoter of free speech, Elon has moved to an arbiter of it

• Alex Jones being banned because nothing against children)
• Kanye West (or Ye) being banned and unbanned because of antisemitic statements.

Hello November!

Almost the end of the year. What’s on your year-end bucket list? Have you got through all your 2022 checklist yet? Now’s the time to tidy up.

It’s the season of layoffs for startups and tech companies in general as US is bracing an upcoming (or ongoing, depending on who you ask) recession. Remember, when the U.S. sneezes, the world catches a cold. Some major companies to layoff a chunk of their workforce include Stripe, Seagate, Lyft, Shopify, Pleo and Chime. Twitter is waiting for Elon Musk to drop the ball on how many of the employees are going out. Major companies like Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Facebook have announced slowing down of spending and hiring.

Hey October!

October means it’s time for Hacktoberfest. Over the years, there has been very different public opinion about what the fest and the month means for everyone and there are still apprehensions. If you aren’t familiar, the fest is about celebrating open source and encouraging more people to directly contribute and support open source projects.

This year, Hacktoberfest focuses on brining in non code interactions with open source projects b bringing chores like design, testing, documentation to the forefront.

Hey September!

The text-to-image AI are ruling the world and captcha suffers. This month, most people have received access to some version of a text to image AI. If you don’t know what these does, they translate the text you provide a visual representation. Most of these AI can imitate artists or convert between different art styles.

• Dall E 2 by OpenAI
• Stable Diffusion
• How to run stable diffusion on M1 Mac
• How to draw with Stable Diffusion
• Stable Diffusion Animation
• MidJourney
• Smiling Dogs? Horses Made of Clouds? Captcha Has Gone Too Far

If you are a user of Internet, you already know this - captchas are getting more and more complicated. It’s got a global community of people training Google’s AI. But since the advent of DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and others, we know that this isn’t sustainable.

Hey August 👋

The dependence we have on technology is becomes clear only when we are cut off from the Internet. There are areas and states that are cut off for months because of geopolitical tensions but Canada got a jolt last month as a carrier went down disrupting smart systems, ATMs and even emergency phone lines.

• Rogers outage: Why a network upgrade pushed millions in Canada offline

Tech Updates on the ongoing Russia - Ukraine war

Hey July 👋

Mostly a lazy month that I’m looking to turn productive. Ideas Welcome.

I would like to start with softwares that are going away this time and then move on to happier release notes. (Even though, one of these might be the happy news to at least some of you)

Internet Explorer

Hey June 🚀

Every time I start to make a reference to the season, I remember that it’s not the same season for everyone. It’s monsoon at my place, but it might be summer at yours. It’s impossible to generalise. I think it’s important that we remember this when building web applications as well. There are all kinds of people all around the world and experiences you build might be critical to some of them. Let’s be humble and keep the different seasons for users in our mind.

As we did for the last couple of issues, I will begin with some updates from the war field (I wish I didn’t have to)

• How Starlink Scrambled to Keep Ukraine Online - Wired
• A Timeline of Russian Cyberattacks on Ukraine - Wired
• The Russian invasion shows how digital technologies have become involved in all aspects of war - The Conversation

May the 4th Be With You

The month’s biggest news has been Acquisition of Twitter by the billionaire Elon Musk. It reminds you of the antics of Batman and Iron Man and by his tweets, he might want us to be reminded of it. While it has not been an aggressive takeover in financial details, that’s what it certainly looks like to the layman. Elon Musk has promised to bring back Free Speech or whatever the definition of it fits right now.

On personal front, I’m joining Circle App as Frontend Developer. Wish me luck 🍀.

Technology and War

There is still an ongoing war situation going on in Ukraine and my heart goes out to the affected.

From the knee jerk reactions from last month, the Big Tech companies that we know have had to take a stand and perform their own section of sanctions on the invading country.

• Putin’s War Has Changed Big Tech Forever - Foreign Policy
• Russia’s War in Ukraine Is a Watershed Moment for Internet Platforms
• It took a war for Big Tech to take a side - recode

Since the war began, there are several video reports from the ground starring drones. In multiple roles: attack, defence, journalism and surveillance. This could very well be the second Drone war (The first being Azerbaijan-Armenia)

It is a month that usually starts with A short and sweet month that passes like a breeze. But this month we almost had a World War and we have people still fighting it out on the street. (Nations? Those are just imaginary borders that we drew around ourselves. People fight, People die. Nobody wins)

• Here’s What You Can Do to Help People in Ukraine Right Now - The Time
• Here’s how you can help - NPR

Tech companies and startups that operate from Ukraine and Russia have been scrambling to take a stand and help their colleagues. Here are key stories on how technology has been influencing the war.

• How the tech industry is responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - TechCrunch
• Ukraine seeks volunteers to defend networks as Russian troops menace Kyiv - The Register
• Starlink is now operational in Ukraine - Elon Musk tweet
• What is SWIFT, what shutting Russia out of it means - Indian Express
• Internet becomes battleground in Russia’s Ukraine invasion - Axios
• Snowflake Tor Brides are starting to get popular
• Update in Signal; Telegram being a Russian company is in a tight spot

That’s the first month of 2022 and most places are drowning in Omicron cases. The virus must be the only being who went through the whole year with reinvention. I hope all of you are safe and doing well.

This Newsletter is turning 2 with this issue 🎉 January of 2020 was my first issue and it’s been a spectacular journey. It’s something I started during a new year to force myself to read more and to know it has helped a few more people is very pleasing. Thank you for all the feedback, let’s have a wonderful year ahead.

Open Source community had a new shocker this week with popular projects - faker and colors being intentionally sabotaged to output “LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY” by the founder developer. Also, a reference to Aaron Swartz. This broke several other packages that were depending on these projects. NPM saw these actions as malicious and proceeded to revert the package while it’s parent company decided to block the developer’s access altogether. Here’s worthy links to find out more:

Hello 2022 👋🏻

2021 was an year when restrictions that were placed in the previous year got relaxed. It is great to see that some of the ideas that were generated in the time of forced restrictions are continuing to be used. It’s a lot like building web for accessibility, when you are building for special cases you are making the web better for everyone. It’s the same with building for remote use cases, you make the world a lot more accessible.

Releases

• Safari Technology Preview 137 - This release is special because it brings a CSS feature (Safari first!), :has. It’s a the first CSS selector to select the parent which has a child.
• WebAssembly and Back Again - Firefox 95 now uses a new technique named RLBox to convert specific areas of code into Web Assembly. This way malicious actors will have one extra step to escape the sandbox created by browsers.
• Open Props - It’s like Tailwind but with only CSS variables. A token based CSS system where variables are prefilled.
• Framer Motion 3D - The excellent Framer Motion library has a 3D version now based on Three Fiber.
• patterns.dev - An ebook from the wonderful Addy Osmani and Lydia Hallie on architecting web applications.

Hello Holiday Season 🎉

Google Search -site:pinterest.com -site:quora.com

Google has been a very integral part of Web history and it doesn’t seem like it’s going away any time soon. But there are part of the search that doesn’t bode well with developers.

The obvious case AMP, forcing webpages onto Google’s domain and rules, they load websites faster for mobile users (some times) but at what cost. Last week, Twitter dropped support for AMP and does not redirect users to AMP specific sites. Hopefully more sites follow the suite.

Hey November 🪔

Facebook and it’s companies, Instagram and Whatsapp went down for hours straight this month. It got trending everywhere and even drove the installs up for competing products. In countries where Whatsapp is the main app for communication, people resorted to text messaging.

From the facebook explanation post:

October is here 🎃

This means Hacktoberfest is here too. Registration is now open for Hacktoberfest.

https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

August was a breeze, I’m not sure I have registered it in my 2021.

Everyone talks about how Safari is the new IE. Safari’s release cycles keep everyone on the web waiting for features and when they come they have some peculiarities that will need to be fixed or ironed out. This coming from a default browser on an OS that people actually use is disheartening. HTTP Toolkit delivered a comprehensive piece on the criticisms so far on their blog post - Safari isn’t protecting the web, it’s killing it.

Meanwhile the Chrome team put out an RFC to remove , and from the web and people delivered with criticism on point. Rich Harris (author Svelte) makes some great points on

It’s been a very quiet July. That’s no reason to pad the newsletter though, I don’t get paid on reading time - In fact, I don’t get paid at all 😅

Releases

June means Monsoon out here in Kerala and I’m glad to be out of the Summer heat.

I’m watching the news that there is a heat wave going across many countries. My sympathies if that is where you are right now.

Plan for React 18

and that was May..

Last week I was pair programming with a friend when he said JavaScript as language needs to evolve a lot more. Well, what are some of the features you want to see, I asked him amused. That’s when he talked about how the last version of JavaScript was ES6 and that was so long ago. I can even recite all of them, because I have learned it for the interviews he continued.

Since you are reading this newsletter, you probably know this. But ES6 was absolutely not the last version of JavaScript. It was a major shift in the feature release cycle and largest bunch of features to be released in recent times. But the rest of releases have just been spread over time and much smoother.

April might just be known as the month that Basecamp went rogue. After a successful stint of taking the fight to the big boys, the well known founders are falling from grace from Tech Twitter.

The March is Past.

Releases

The shortest month of the year, done and dusted. By popular opinion, it’s like this month did not exist. But we have news, because the Web never stops ⚡️.

Some updates on our favourite remote work environments.

We have survived the first month of 2021. Congrats 🥳

It’s the first birthday of this Newsletter, I have written this email every month for an year now. Thanks to all of you who subscribed and supported me. 🙇‍♂️

It’s the jQuery birthday month 🎂.

December marks 20 years since the birth of JavaScript - Our favourite language (I hope!). Here’s some history to catch up on the 20 years:

• JavaScript - The first 20 years - A paper co-authored by creator Brendan Eich.

December is here ❄️☃️

Release of the Year 🍎

November is the month that is probably going to be remembered for Apple’s groundbreaking processor upgrade. Apple has moved on from Intel processors to manufacture their own that they call M1 chipset. The first reviews have come in for the first Macbook Air and Macbook Pro and it’s very .

A full moon Halloween night! 🎃

Another month and another large company goes fully remote - Dropbox. Many people have been pondering what will happen to the offices that they have build so far and Dropdown answers it by transforming them to coworking spaces.

Github received a for the very popular cli - youtube-dl from RIAA. The cause seen here is that it can be used for downloading copyrighted songs from Youtube. This stirred up a controversy on whether DMCA was being misused against software which has lots of other lawful use cases. Here’s the to find out more.

October is here and so is Hacktoberfest!

In it’s 7th year, Hacktoberbest is one of the most recognised open source celebratory events all time. If you are looking to participate for the first time, here are the basics:

We have an Epic fight brewing between Epic Games and Apple and it’s story of the month. Epic created a built-in payment mechanism for Fortnite by which they could side step Apple’s hefty App store commisions. This did not sit well with Apple and pulled the game from the App Store. Apple then went on to terminate Epic’s account altogether pushing other games like off the store. Epic has another account hosting their Unreal Engine (which is depended on by several other games and graphical apps) which now exists . This isn’t the first time a company revolts against Apple’s apps store practices, you might remember . While this is also a prevalent issue on Android, iOS being a closed ecosystem amplifies the cause these companies are fighting against.

July’s down and I’m an year older.

This month was all about GPT-3. When OpenAI came up with GPT-2, they said they wouldn’t release it into the world because they did not know of it’s implications, but then they did and we now have online testing tools like Write with Transformer. With GPT-3 OpenAI takes another approach, they hold the resources and models but exposes the services through an API. It’s currently invite only at this point, but lots of people have been checking it out and been mind blown by it. It can write , or even .

and that’s June.

Taking a month off from bragging about remote work, I would like to shine the spotlight an amazing JavaScript tool:

• - A JavaScript bundler written in . ESBuild is currently used in tools like and . It is reported to be a 100x faster than existing tools 😱. Are we ready to accept JS tools that are written in other languages faster than JS? What does it mean for other tools in the ecosystem?

May I?

Catching up on remote work, this month saw several large tech companies plan for remote work in the long term. These include the likes of Twitter, Square, and . Facebook’s announcement included plans to cut down on the salary because these engineers did not work in the saturated Silicon Valley anymore and let to much discussion. Should engineers be paid by location?

April is ending and the world is still in quarantine.

Everything I said about remote working during a pandemic still stand, but remote work is certainly gaining momentum in at least some of the companies. TCS, an Indian service company employing 0.5 million people have announced that 75% of their workforce will be going remote by 2025. FYI has published a report analysing estimating by 2025, 70% of the workforce will work remotely at least five days in a month. In other news, Uber CTO is leaving the company and they might lay off .

March is coming to an end and it seems like every month is one upping the other on disasters.

I’m not going to waste talking about the are so who are it than I can.

It’s officially February and it’s a leap year. Years of studying programming has somehow got me to linking leap years with a program to check if it’s a leap year.

CSS Tricks is one of those publications that I have followed throughout my career. From the days I spent tinkering templates in college to building professional web apps for clients, CSS Tricks has been a constant companion. Some of their talented ensemble of authors are the ones that inspired me and whom I wish to emulate. To publish an article for them and have an is truly dream come true.

I hope you are all having a great 2020. The year has just began and so many things are happening.

I started a new job at Big Binary and my first time working at a fully remote company. It’s been a breeze so far, looking forward to rest of the year.