Hello there December 👋
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
Elon Musk also released a bunch of files dubbed #TwitterFiles which shows Twitter executives debating limits of their control and free speech. I’m not into American politics to speak on policies with the files but it’s ironic to me that Elon Musk is encountering the same problems as his predecessors (whom he fired) on content moderation.
That’s the political side of it. Moving on to the technical ones:
I generally use Twitter to connect to developers and generally follow blogs and technical talks. But now that it’s a dumpster fire, I’m open to looking for alternatives. Mastodon is what I hear a lot, but is there a good frontend communities on there? Let me know what you people use.
Chrome 108 includes support for the avoid value of the CSS fragmentation properties break-before, break-after, and break-inside when printing.
There is a change in how the resize works on showing keyboard in mobile browsers: Prepare for viewport resize behavior changes coming to Chrome on Android
The contain-intrinsic-size shorthand CSS property can now be applied to specify the size of a UI element that is subject to size containment. This allows a user agent to determine the size of an element without needing to render its child elements. The shorthand properties contain-intrinsic-width and contain-intrinsic-height are also supported, along with the logical properties contain-intrinsic-block-size and contain-intrinsic-inline-size.
OpenAI is introducing a new AI model with ChatGPT in research preview. ChatGPT maintains context with conversations and it’s amazing how barbaric it makes competitors like Siri feel like. ChatGPT analysing code it a breeze to use and there is already people trying to use it as a No Code platform.
There are also several Twitter threads of trying to game the system.
Seeing people trick ChatGPT into getting around the restrictions OpenAI placed on usage is like watching an Asimov novel come to life. pic.twitter.com/gSSQGU9w37
— Dare Obasanjo 🐀 (@Carnage4Life) December 1, 2022
satisfies operator. I might be off my TS game for a long time now since I don’t get it 😅 but looks cool. NaN == feature - NaN is not “equal” to anything in JavaScript. Not even itself.
The file watching now uses system file callbacks instead of the NodeJS watchFile and it should make watching large repositories a lot smoother. Black Friday Madness:
Another Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend done and dusted!
— Shopify Engineering (@ShopifyEng) November 30, 2022
We achieved 99.999+% uptime while averaging 3 Terabytes per minute of egress traffic across our infrastructure.
That’s 4.3 Petabytes per day! 🤯
Check out the thread for more awesome performance stats 🧵👇
Congratulations to the Stripe infrastructure teams! With record scale, Black Friday and Cyber Monday passed uneventfully. >20,000 peak RPS and >99.9999% API success rate.
— Patrick Collison (@patrickc) November 29, 2022
This blog post is from one of our regulars - Josh. To call it a simple blog post is a crime given it’s a entire website worth of content. Go check it out if you miss flexbox or love some interactive blog developer content.
Framer’s Magic Motion is the animation engine that auto-animates between layout changes in components. This is an interactive blog on how this possibel and the layout animation principles.
This is some awesome intermediate JavaScript content on analysing JavaScript libraries and making them faster.
Most popular libraries can be sped up by avoiding unnecessary type conversions or by avoiding creating functions inside functions.
Most of us are familiar with vh and vw. If you have used vh for long in production, you are probably also familiar with issues it has on mobile devices. There are different configurations on mobile screens, with address bars and different toolbars being shown and hidden on scroll that vh becomes a bug that you have to fix with % magic.
There are now new units approved and supported everywhere - small viewport units, large viewport units and dynamic viewport units. Long story short, dvh is a better substitute for vh if you have to support mobile browsers.
Last month, I had written about Sacha Grief’s thought on if CSS surface area is getting too large for a beginner to grasp. Geoff Graham writes on a list of properties that a Must-Have when you start. You don’t have to agree to his list but it’s pretty though provoking.
If you want a comprehensive tutorial and light opinion CSS units - px, em and rem, this is your stop. The base idea is that user gets to change the base font size of their browser (default set to 16px) and if you use px everywhere, it wouldn’t respect the user preference. rem all the way for font sizes.
According to UN estimates, the world population has officially crossed 8 billion, that’s a lot of us. Here are some interesting articles I came across on the topic.
There has been a lot of chatter about a “social credit law” in China over the Western media and widespread fear about it’s adoption. MIT Technology Review looks at the latest Central Government draft and analysis what it really entails.
This is perfect year ender with web technology evolution this year and what to look forward to next year. A lot of this, we have talked in the earlier issues of our Web in a Month newsletter, but this is good breather.
Carl Pei is one of those CEO’s who specialise in design and marketing for digital products. So watching him review an iPhone is interesting content. This is on the Nothing channel, so there’s a lot of Nothing ads.