Happy Pride Month! No matter where you are, no matter who you love and what you identify as, you are valid - even without unit tests.

News and Articles

What a week in the world of security. There's a disputed Ticketmaster/Santander data breach linked to Snowflake cloud storage. Researchers cracked a 11-year-old password and recovered $3m in Bitcoin, the NSA advises us to turn our phone off and back on once a week, and, to give you an incentive to look into security more, Netflix's Bug Bounty program paid out over $1m so far.

Google released an explanation of what happened with AI overviews and why they went wrong, but also verified a leak of search algorithm information. To make matters worse, there was another leak revealing thousands of privacy and security incidents. They also announced that they will phase out classic Chrome extensions over the coming month.

In the AI space, OpenAI Insiders warn about a reckless race for dominance, other experts even ask for a Right to Warn about AI and Chip Huyen analysed the 900 most popular open source AI tools. O'Reilly wrote about learnings from a year of building with LLMs, there is good insight on understanding the cost of generative AI models in production and why chatting with models is not the same as training.

Amazon is working on a product that uses AI to detect physical product defects before they ship.

Microsoft got amazing Microsoft Edge speed improvements by moving from React to native Web Components.

And, to end with robots, a robot guide dog could inspire new assistive technology and researchers ask what you would do with a robotic third thumb. There is more than upvoting on Facebook as shown in this video.

Code and Tools

Let's start with pride 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 resources. Gaydient are copy+paste pride flag gradients, LGBTQ.css use CSS variables and Alvaro Montoro has tutorials for all of them.

Marvin Hagemeister added to his excellent speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem course by explaining Server Side JSX. If you want to get a reminder of more basic improvements here are three JavaScript performance tips and you can brush up your knowledge on CSS grid by planting a garden. Marcelo Lazaroni wrote a Virtual DOM in 200 lines and Gurveer Arora built a random tic-tac-toe game in pure HTML/CSS. Honest developers admit that they learned by looking at other people's code, so here's a walk-through of uBlock Origin's code. And Stoyan Stefanov shows how to capture web page video with bookmarklets. The web is powerful, indeed.

Some tools for you:

• SVGL a collection of high quality SVG icons.
• Freeze generates PNGs, SVGs, and WebPs of code and terminal output.
• gh-dash is a Git dashboard with filterable pull requests and issues.
• Extension a cross-browser extension development tool.
• SVG Gobbler to optimise, copy, edit, or export SVGs in the current tab.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey - Make your voice heard!

Stack Overflow is again running their annual Developer Survey and extended the deadline. As one of the biggest surveys in the dev space, there is a lot to learn from it, so how about you help making it even better? Take the 2024 Developer Survey.

Events

Next week is the Merge Developer experience conference in Berlin where we record a lot of Coffee with Developers sessions. Get your ticket!

Work and Jobs

Job safety is a worry, and it is important to understand the real threat generative AI poses to our jobs. Maybe it isn't about losing our jobs, but having to deal with less salary? Do you spend a lot of time in stand-ups and wonder why? What about  meetings leading to the wrong outcome? Lastly, here are some unexpected anti-patterns for engineering leaders with findings from Stripe, Uber & Carta.

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

• The Forgotten History Of Chinese Keyboards
• US ruler allows you to explain meters to people abroad.
• Can you guess the music genre by the album cover?
• Windows 98 in the browser.