Web in April - The Mindless Newsletter by Agney Menon

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 The Future of Remote Work 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 20% of their workforce.

The release for is-remote got people in JavaScript community talking. This library is a one liner that determines if a variable is a promise or not. Everything was fine until one day the maintainer made a minor release for supporting ES Modules for new NodeJS update and broke a whole lot of packages. Apps that broke include Serverless and create-react-app. People have been talking about the heavy reliance of third party libraries and how the number of dependencies can kill your app when maintainers make mistakes. There is a post mortem for incident on Medium which is an interesting read.

Releases

• Last Python2 version - End of an era.
• Github is free for Teams - A Microsoft enterprise is waiving off all fees for teams. While this is indeed great for indie programmers there are growing concerns that Github might lose their way with only enterprise customers paying for the product.
• Gatsby - Incremental Builds - As the number of pages increases, it used to becomes painful to build a static app, every page has to get rebuild even if there is only small change. With Netlify’s build minutes, this was a question on everyone’s minds. GatsbyJS is now introducing a beta into incremental builds on their platform offering 1000x build speeds.
• GraphQL Playground - Prisma donated Playground to GraphQL foundation and now they are combining GraphiQL and Playground.

My Content

If you are looking to learn some computer science during the pandemic, I have a list of free courses for you.

• Effective Remote Communications - I wrote about keeping up with meetings.
• 10k and reflecting on Stackoverflow - I have reached a 10k reputation milestone on Stackoverflow and I wrote about things I learned along the way.
• TailwindCSS on Snowpack - I tried out Snowpack and then learned how to do TailwindCSS with it.

Tutorials

• CSS Doodle - A web component for drawing patterns with CSS.
• When debugging attitude matters - Julia Evans talks about the right attitude for debugging and I can’t agree more.
• Animating Complex SVGs - Alex Trost has lots and lots of tips in here that will help you learn a thing or two about SVGs.
• Integration Builder - Stripe - Is this an ad for stripe? Am I talking sponsorships from them? Click on the link and find out how awesome this tutorial is.

What am I watching?

Women of React happened last week and it was amazing. The live stream is still up on YouTube. The talks from Maggie Appleton on React Mental Models and Anusree Subramani’s talk on React Developer Tooling are absolute favourites.

In Other News

• Bootstrap dropping IE support for v5 - The sizes will fall by almost 10%, but the debate is still hot on this is a good decision (on HackerNews ofcourse)
• The right side for a Macbook charger - USB C meant that you could charge the Macbook on any side. But did you know it had a right side?
• Agile’s early evangelists wouldn’t mind watching it die - Agile went from being a manifesto and a corportate bandwagon of keywords really fast. Builtin speaks to Mary Poppendieck on Agile’s future.
• Fake Elon Musk on Zoom - First came the Zoom backgrounds. Now, deepfake has a hold on the faces. Nothing is real on Zoom anymore.
• It has number of views in the title - Tom Scott is one of my favourite YouTubers for the topics he picks. This video has the number of views on it’s title, literally.