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:
Releases
- Firefox Android - comes with Total Cookie Protection build in.
- Parcel CSS - Parcel Bundler now has a CSS parser, transformer and minifier completely written in Rust.
- Class Sorting Tailwind Classes with Prettier - After many extensions and plugins, tailwind now has official class sorting with Prettier and it sorts to a default no config recommended order.
- MacOS 12.3 - This release is important because Python 2.7 was removed from macOS in this update. Developers should use Python 3 or an alternative language instead.
- Topics API from Google - Because everyone is isolating third party cookies, advertisers need a different API to communicate with users. Google is the company to lead the pack coming up with FloC API which we had discussed on a previous newsletter. Now it is being replaced by the new Topics API - the gist being that every browser saves a list of topics relevant to the user which is then shared with the advertisers.
- Private Network Access - Introducing Preflights - Chrome is deprecating direct access to private network endpoints from public websites as part of the Private Network Access (PNA) specification. Preflight request will carry a new header, Access-Control-Request-Private-Network: true, and the response to it must carry a corresponding header, Access-Control-Allow-Private-Network: true
Tutorials
In the Spotlight 🔦
It was a month Wordle to take off. If you aren’t privy to the game that has taken over Internet, here’s my hot picks.
Anyway, Internet’s best creators got over to building Wordle overnight and here’s my picks.
But more than any of these, Wordle is proof of how a simple JavaScript app with a single developer can take over the World. If that doesn’t simple you to create, I don’t know what will.
In Other News
- Pandemic & laptop categories - More people staying at home also meant that people are diversifying what they can do online. This means each laptop has to support a wide range of features and they are starting to do so. Better Conferencing surely being one of them, remember Apple’s webcams?
- Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
- Theranos is the biggest scam of recent times from Silicon Valley, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley is worth the watch if you aren’t aware of how this played out.
- Best Gadgets of CES 2022 - CES concluded this month and while the new take up of COVID cases did dull procedures, there were bright spots. Samsung’s Odyssey Arc looks amazing to say the least.
- Reducing Carbon Emissions On The Web - Did you know the Internet can have the same effect on the world as fossil fuels? How do we counter this?
Looking Forward