We are knee-deep in editing the WeAreDevelopers World congress videos with PHP on the command line(!), and will soon write about that. For now, here's your weekly fill of news, code tricks and tools…

News and Articles

The 2024 Olympics started in France and remember that it is all Math…

The results of the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey are out as are the State of React 2023 ones. You can also check what ECMAScript 2024 has in store for JS developers and what's new to the web platform in July.

The CrowdStrike outage showed how brittle our infrastructure is, but not to worry, they sent $10 Uber Eats gift cards as an apology, Microsoft took it as an opportunity to release a best practices for integrating security tools paper and it wasn't EU competition policy that was responsible after all.

The W3C weighed in on the third-party cookies debate and Alex Russel has all the details why replacements might not be ready yet.

GitHub had an issue allowing people to access deleted and private repository data and Copilot's Invisible Ghost vulnerability alters prompts to create malicious code.

Google's email verification was breached allowing attackers to create workspace accounts and 15 million Chrome users lost access to their passwords. The new, server-side, unskippable YouTube ads resulted in black screens for ad blocker users and reCAPTCHA v2 is accused of exploiting users instead of offering security. AI solutions like GPT4o Captcha Bypass do allow simple cracking of CAPTCHAs.

Anthropic is still in the news for excessive web scraping, an LLM feature and speed comparison shows that Open-source AI is close to proprietary leaders and AI produces gibberish when trained with AI-generated data.

And, finally, Switzerland requires releasing government software as open source.

Quick Tricks

Using the `light dark` CSS color-scheme  you can offer your app in light or dark mode in pure CSS. No need for any frameworks, media queries or JavaScript.

Code and Tools

When ranking programming languages by energy efficiency, it turns out that Python needs 76 times more energy and is 72 times slower than C. Also, when it comes to speed optimisation, storing data in SQLite is 35% faster than writing files to disk.

On the frontend slide of things, there are misconceptions about view transitions, an explanation why position:sticky can fail, an excellent explanation of CSS grid template areas, a primer on generating ZIP Files With Javascript and surprises about garbage collection and closures in JavaScript. If SVG is hard to grasp for you, there is a great SVG editor with explanations of the generated code and the SVG triangle of compromise discusses the pros and cons of using it in various ways. The Guardian, of all places, talks about the merits of strictly typed JSON. A memory leak murder mystery tries to understand why a process kept dying, unknown types are more useful than we think and there's advice on how to choose the best rendering strategy for your app. Last, but not least, learn how Facebook intercepted encrypted mobile app traffic, and ponder what visual programming could be like.

Some tools for you:

• JSON Editor Online - edit, format and query JSON. Top marks for naming.
• audapolis - editor for spoken-word media with transcription.
• Zerox OCR - a simple way of OCR-ing a document for AI ingestion.
• PNG Maker -  create images with transparent background from text prompts.

Talks and Videos

Join us for a chat with Robbie Russell, as we dive into open source, development journeys, and the story behind Oh My Zsh. Check out what he had to say.

Work and Jobs

While 99% of developers use AI code assistants, 15% of companies ban them. Does yours? When it comes to AI in other office work, it seems that it isn't that much of a game changer. However, it could be used to spy on your employees disguised as tracking their own efficiency. AI interview services claim to eliminate bias, but there is a debate about it. Others go even further to say that an AI bot-war destroyed the online job market.The $700bn delusion describes that advertising isn't much more effective when targeting specific audiences. Some people claim that Job Hopping allows you to go from IC3 to IC6 quickly, but I wonder if that is a US only thing. And, finally there is a question if companies should employee-owned.

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

• BSOD maker - create a BSOD to freak out your colleagues.
• Chrono Piano piano music based on the current date and time.
• kidpix a wonderfully whimsical paint program.
• Lessons from Ancient File Systems - how old computers stored data.
• Investigating corrupt Winamp skins - lots of stored data and malware.
• Don't use wet towels to charge your Tesla - also, don't charge your phone in the microwave or make it water proof with a software update.