Hello there, during the WeAreDevelopers World Congress last week many people got stranded on their way home because of the CrowdStrike debacle. But all worked out and we will be back 2025! Tickets are already available and you can try your luck at the spin to win wheel for discounts or "Black Pass" VIP tickets!

News and Articles

Last week millions of Windows machines went down in the biggest-ever global outage and we can learn a lot from that. One interesting claim is that EU rules forcing Microsoft to give third parties access to core functionality is to blame.

Google is also in the news, first of all for shutting down the URL shortener goo.gl soon and thus breaking tons of links. Furthermore, the company back-paddles on their announcement to ‘deprecate third-party cookies’. Might be a good time to read back up on cookies and tokens and to learn about concerns about passkeys as an alternative. They also plan a purge of ‘low-quality’ Android apps and good riddance - the store is a mess. A concern of us lovers of the web is that Google seems to defaults to not indexing the web because of AI generated garbage flooding it.

Talking of AI, Data Never Sleeps: AI Edition is an infographic on what happens in AI every minute. If you find  AI confusing here is a cheat sheet explaining AI terms. OpenAI announced that its now blocks the ‘ignore all previous instructions’ loophole, China orders AI companies to infuse their models with socialist values and at the creepy end of things, a supermarket tracks employees’ smiles and service.

Squarespace had weak security defaults causing domains hijackings, there is an unpatchable IIS forever day being actively exploited, on AWS, fake packages ship malware In JPEG files and according to Cloudflare almost 7% of internet traffic is malicious. Telegram had a Zero-Day enabling malware delivery which is bad with their user base climbing to 950M and their app store plans. Following an assassination attempt, the FBI used Cellebrite to crack the shooter's phone, and leaked documents show what it can and can't crack. Spoiler: all Android phones are fair game.

Free software might be facing harder times as FOSS funding vanishes from EU’s 2025 Horizon program. In nicer news, it might be possible to recycle solid-state batteries and you can help the W3C with collaboration tool accessibility.

Quick Tricks

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You can edit any web site by pasting:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable=true

in the URL bar. As an extra, this also shows typos in the page. Learn more.

CODE100 Berlin 2024 puzzles and questions

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The CODE100 finals are over and we have a champion, Vladyslav Krasnolutskyi. Could you have done the same? Test your might:

• Knowledge Questions
• Pseudo Code Quiz Round
• Audience Rounds (thanks Twilio!!!)
• Shift Left Code Challenge
• No Babel Needed Challenge

Code and Tools

The annual JavaScript golfing competition is over and we can look forward to some interesting entries. Running untrusted JavaScript code is a bad idea and if you want to know why Node.js is running in the background why-is-node-running helps. There are also some explanations why is spawning a new process in Node is slow and a great new guide to reading and writing Node.js streams.

In CSS, you can learn all about box shadows and the 3 types of browser and CSS magnification. There is also a surprising way to use CSS to get the screen width and height. And for those at home in the terminal, here are some handy Bash one-liners.

Some tools for you:

• GitHub Traffic Viewer - to show your boss that OSS is great.
• Diffy - share your diffs and explain your ideas without committing.
• Posting - a powerful HTTP client that lives in your terminal.
• Fakemail - A fake SMTP server for software integration testing.
• Magic CLI - use LLMs to help you use the command line.

Talks and Videos

We met with Saron Yitbarek, founder of Big Cash Money and CodeNewbie at the Merge festival to talk about building developer communities, avoiding burnout and more. Check out the video here.

Other talk write-ups and videos to check out:

• Simon Willison - Imitation Intelligence
• dotJS 2024 - Lea Verou - API design is UI design
• dotJS 2024 - James Q Quick - Dante’s Inferno of Fullstack Development
• Sara Joy: Everybody’s Free (To Write Websites)

Work and Jobs

AI is bad for customer service and the term for it is Botshit. I remember QR codes called "Robot Barf". A study found that agile software products have a 268% higher failure rate than others. Could be, but they do get fixed quicker, no?  The rise and fall of software developer jobs shows how we were in high demand until we were not. Another article explains that coding exercises are a terrible idea in technical interviews and there is a case for conferences in 2024, in case your boss is still on the fence. Lastly, small pull requests are a good idea, so let's cut the cruft.

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

• The Seiko UC-2000 -  a smartwatch from 1984
• What beats rock?
• Disk Defragmenter - procrastinate like it is 1998
• Tesla factory manager complains about people stealing coffee mugs
• Artifacting - how JPEG became the standard photo format of the web.