Alright, first things first: we have an exclusive interview with David Heinemeier Hansson of Ruby on Rails and Hey fame for you all, so you can line that one up in another tab!
WeAreDevelopers CPO Thomas Pamminger met with David Heinemeier Hansson, Co-Founder and CTO at 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails to talk about EU regulations, big tech and the state of the web. Check out the video (1h 13m)
News and Articles
The 29th of February was not only great because we went to Amsterdam to run a CODE100 session, but also because it happens every four years. This, like anything time and date related, can be a massive headache for software development and people have discussed their leap year bugs on Hacker News. Gergely Orosz has collected stories of some things that went wrong, including a huge Swedish supermarket chain not being able to take payments on the day.
Linux on the Desktop passes 4% market share for the first time in decades! It's been a running joke for a while, but it makes you wonder that if other desktop operating systens become more and more advertisement and service focused that people will start embracing the penguin more. Small steps.
Google launched a $5m prize to find actual uses for quantum computing and it feels kind of good that even they don't know.
Coinciding the release of Dune 2, there's reports of worms that spread through generative, AI powered mails - sometimes, well, no, never is pure automation without supervision a good idea..
In good news, the web is getting a Storage Bucket API and lots of new Set methods. Sets now are not only really handy to remove duplicates from Arrays, but you get the following methods:
Filing bugs in browsers has effects as Nolan Lawson puts it:
I think filing bugs on browsers is one of the most useful things a web developer can do.
I worked with Nolan on Microsoft Edge and before that on Firefox and I can safely say that you all should not hold back filing bugs and asking for enhancements. Browser teams are smaller than you thing and outside demands and supports helps them get time and budget to make things better.
The is-number package has 59m weekly downloads and the reasons are several, but the most important to remember is how NPM counts downloads:
npm’s download stats are naïve by design: they are simply a count of the number of HTTP 200 responses we served that were tarball files, i.e. packages. This means the number includes:
- automated build servers
- downloads by mirrors
- robots that download every package for analysis
This makes me feel a tad better, as it's source code is nothing people should need to download all the time:
module.exports = function(num) {
if (typeof num === 'number') {
return num - num === 0;
}
if (typeof num === 'string' && num.trim() !== '') {
return Number.isFinite ? Number.isFinite(+num) : isFinite(+num);
}
return false;
};
And speaking of NPM, there is a new kid on the block when it comes to JavaScript package managers called JSR and David Bushell gave it a whirl to report if it is up to the task.
Code and Tools
Daytona, the coding platform used in CODE100 - is now open source! We use Daytona and here is a video showing the setup for challengers at CODE100 (2m) in live competitions:
If you use Firefox as your browser, you might know about the reader view which shows a much simpler version of the page. Microsoft Edge also has something similar called immersive reader. But Mozilla went one step further and released the code: Mozilla's readability.js is the library that powers Firefox's reader view.
Do you have the need to have people use a computer but all they have is access to a browser on another computer? Puter is an OS and desktop environment in the browser!
Browser automation is nothing new. Selenium, Puppeteer, Playwright and many others allow you to write scripts to make browsers do things - even in a headless, invisible fashion. For non-techies writing these scripts can be daunting, and that's where BrowserCat comes in to make automation a lot easier.
And in bonkers news, Google's Gemini can generate automation scripts from a screen capture.
CODE100 puzzle: Stars in their Eyes
On 29/02 CODE100 came to Amsterdam and this was the final challenge. Challengers got the README and the dataset. and here's how to solve it! The trick is not to get distracted by the green but focus on the black instead.
Videos and talks
VS Code now allows you to publish your local app as a public URL (36s).
And some more talks to check out from the WeAreDevelopers talk archive are:
- Paloma Oliveira & Timna Aversa PyLadies Berlin Interview (19m)
- Cathrin Möller - The Illusion of a Performant Web Application (30m)
- Paul Graham - Accelerating Python on GPUs (1h)
Work and Jobs
In the Work world, there is the question why job interviews became such a nightmare, proof that improving developer experience drives profitability and the story of an engineer leaving a big job because he prefers excellence over expediency. And we found a job ad with a red flag in every sentence.
Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web
- Want to spice up your morning routine? Doom runs on a toothbrush.
- Unflip Game - select with your mouse to invert squares
And that's it for this week! See you next Monday - or this Friday in your inbox.
