Web in May - The Mindless Newsletter by Agney Menon

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, Shopify and Facebook. 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?

Twitter decided to censor some of tweets of Donald Trump this week and has ensured a expected furore. US has come up with plans to stifle or take away this freedom from Twitter and ensure that it’s government property as well. But considering that this does not work out, can we trust a social media company to be a single arbiter of truth?

Releases

• Chrome 83 - Chrome 83 comes with some form look and accessibility improvements done with the help of Microsoft team. While some of the elements are debatable, the date picker is rad.
• Microsoft Build saw many interesting announcements including Terminal v1, Window package manager and improved Powertools. But Microsoft is honing in on improving Office as a platform introducing Office Blocks, which might just get rid of the file. Also, this Airtable competitor - Lists
• Nix - Nix is Shopify’s dependency manager and more.
• Github Satellite - Github’s major annoucement was Github discussions introducing a platform alongside issues where users could discuss. This was expected long time from Spectrum’s takeover.
• Increment Magazine - 13 - Stripe’s Increment magazine is out and all the articles are a must check out.

What am I building?

• A recording utility in the Browser - https://reco.agney.dev/
• A Slack bot for reading ad-free articles inside Slack - Open Source Repository

Tutorials

• Fastest way to load Google Fonts - Harry Roberts on his research to load Google fonts the fastest. Spoiler: self hosting is still the winner, but you also get tips to use the Google CDN faster.
• Getting Started with React - MDN - MDN has a page on React now.
• Realistic CSS Art Hacks - This tutorial dives into some of the tricks to those elusive CSS magic portraits.
• Use React memo wisely - You might think you can plug memo anywhere and get performance improvements (well, at least once you learned to use it). And then, you would be wrong.
• Tracing User Interactions with React - Kent C Dodds talks about Profiling with the Profiler in devtools.

What am I watching?

Rick and Morty is back and it’s amazing. Hulu’s nice little clone of R&M named Solar Opposites is also a little gem although it isn’t Rick and Morty (obviously)

In Other News

• Second Guessing the Modern Web - This asks What if everone’s wrong about the web. We have been wrong before.
• Facebook Redesign - Facebook on their learnings redesigning the interface the Internet is now familiar with.
• How Khan Academy Successfully Handled 2.5x Traffic in a Week - With everyone stuck at home, online education has seen a great surge. How did free websites like Khan Academy handle it?
• EU improves on it’s GDPR spec - Websites cannot place cookie walls before users see any content on the page and scrolling does not constitute consent anymore.
• This Meme does not exist - AI Meme generator, enough said.