Hello there and welcome to Dev Digest 113! This time, we got an old friend in the sky back, jQuery asks us to upgrade and AI is eating the web. Also, are you sure the LLM you use is secure against code injection?
News and Articles
Good news everyone! NASA’s Voyager 1 is answering again and sends useful data back to Earth. Due to a chip failure it stopped answering in November 23. That's what I call remote debugging - above the cloud.
Web platform news and articles:
Web bloat impacts users with slow devices in ways you may not know. Vercel also talk about important latency numbers. Microsoft's Edge team wants to improve text editing on the web and Airbnb released their JavaScript Style Guide.
Safari on iOS is often seen as a problem on the web and iOS404 is a gorgeous web site showing what it does not support. That said, the WebKit team is asking us to help implementing CSS Grid Level 3, aka “Masonry” layout. Remember masonry.js? Soon we can remove it.
Talking of removal, jQuery wants us to upgrade for a healthier web. Wordpress is one of the big reasons for a lot of its installs but it seems to decline, as PHP's usage numbers show (-40% in 2 years).
Some thoughts to ponder:
AI is eating the web as we know It, with content being released as part of a chat rather than documents. This also affects comments and discussions. Reddit already has a problem with 'Parasite SEO', AI generated comments that look like real ones. But then again, search engines have been optimised for ad display a long time ago as Edward Zitron explains in The Man Who Killed Google Search. What can we do? One thing people seem to be introducing is blockers for AI scripts scraping your web content. AI robots.txt is a list of all the AI crawlers out there.
And last but not least, Security news:
Linus Torvalds spoke out on Security, AI, Open Source and Trust following the xz incident. LLM4Shell shows that using LLMs in your applications can allow attackers to execute code remotely. All the details are in this paper. Michal Špaček explains how to steal session ids with phpinfo(). As GitHub allows file attachments in comments you can use legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware.
Videos and talks
We met indie maker Dan Mindru and asked what he learned launching on Product Hunt. Learn how to balance development and marketing as an entrepreneur.
More videos:
- All Javascript conference talks from 2023 ordered by the number of views.
- Soumaya Erradi - Testing web3 applications (53m)
- Simon Copsey - Technology is Necessary, But Not Sufficient (38m)
Weird code things…
Without trying, what do you think the innerText of this DIV is?
The answer is "I am" - and lots of people on X got it wrong. The reason is that innerText returns the content after it has been rendered by CSS. This also means that every time you use it, it triggers a reflow. Once again, a convenience method causes a lot of confusion and problems. What can we do instead? Well, there is Node.textContent to the rescue.
CODE100 Manchester news
CODE100 will be in Manchester on the 22nd of May as part of DTX Manchester! We are looking for participants and challengers. Head on over to the official CODE100 web site to learn all about it.
And if you have an idea for a challenge, you can tell us about it and win tickets for the WeAreDevelopers World Congress!
Demi Oshin is our first CODE100 Manchester challenger! Hear her story.
Code and tools
Here are some tools for this week
- Bat is cat on steroids, adding syntax highlighting and line numbers.
- Marta is a dual panel file manager, highly customisable to your own needs.
- difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax, not only line numbers.
Work and Jobs
Sure, there have been layoffs, but let's focus this time on some good in the work world.
- Akshay Khot has a lovely interview with Pedro David Garcia Lopez, a UK Lorry Driver who changed careers to development at 38.
- The Struggles of a Young Developer is an interesting retrospective.
- Fran Soto explains how he engineered effective meetings.
- Irina Stanescu says not getting a promotion is a blessing in disguise and
- Volksowl is a service to get CV feedback fromSenior Software Engineers
Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web
- Want to see an amazing electric car created by a programmer genius? The Sinclair C5 has sold more units than the Cybertruck and it's snazzy.
- Map of the web - a visualisation of blogs and sites and their connections.
- Figma released some old-school cursors to surf the web like it is 1999.
- The Track not Found game is incredible! It's only 13K JavaScript and has a totally different gameplay than anything we've seen.
