News and Articles

After declaring Google a monopoly there are now considerations to force it to break up - isn't that what the whole Alphabet thing was about? In the last act of Crowdstrike coverage here, they released a deep analysis of the outage they caused and their exec accepted the ‘Most Epic Fail’ award in person, a bit like actors celebrating their Razzies.

In other security news, about 2.7 billion data records with social security numbers were leaked last week in in one of the largest data breaches ever. A good reminder what can happen when credentials are left in public places or why allowing 0.0.0.0 as an IP is a bad plan. Apple is fixing an 18-year-old Safari loophole and there is a great Frontend Security Checklist to consult when reviewing your products. The History of HTTPS Usage explains how we got securer over time.

In AI news, Mozilla is funding 0Din: A GenAI Bug Bounty Program and it seems that only unscrupulous job seekers, jokesters and trolls use LLM prompt injection. The EU AI act is here, there is a surprising answer to where Facebook's AI slop comes from and in worrying news, ChatGPT unexpectedly began speaking in a user’s cloned voice during testing.

For the scribes among you, there is information how to write good documentation and copywriting hacks backed by science. For more, check the video section here!

And to end on a nostalgic note, WordStar 7 for DOS is now free and Doom and Doom II have new accessibility features.

Behind the scenes

Every year after the WeAreDeveloper World Congress we have tons of talk videos to edit. Normally this took months. This time we produced 175 videos in 5 hours. How?

We used PHP and open source CLI tools.

Code and Tools

In the code world, it's great that Puppeteer now officially supports Firefox, CSS allows you to transition to height: auto & display: none, you can style tables better and entry effects can now be animated. Aaron Gustafson has Web Component for  conditional dependent fields, there is a readable JavaScript design patterns guide and a guide to "powerful" Web APIs. You can also learn about Array grouping in JavaScript and explore the requirements of WCAG 2.2 as a map. Microsoft proposes an HTML attribute to allow/disallow handwriting input and Google explains how they built Purrfect Code: A Puzzle Game for Developers.

Some tools for you:

• CSS gradient generators, a more basic one and a fancy one.
• Whirl - CSS loading animations with minimal effort!
• A visual CSS Editor and CSS Grid Generator.
• Screen Studio screen recording with automatic zoom to the action.
• Skeleton Fingers AI-powered audio transcription.
• Oops.js advanced Undo/Redo Manager
• Buster Captcha Solver for Humans

Cool code demos

• WebGL Path Tracing
• CSS Doom Scroll
• Hit a pudding cat‍
• Procedural tree generator‍
• Procedural planets‍
• Ksenia Kondrashova: Laptop

Talks and Videos

Join Brenda Romero for an emotional, annoyed and very important talk about belonging in tech, the first World Congress 2024 video of many to be shown here.

Other videos and talk write-ups of note:

• Luise Freese: Why documentation matters
• Jelena Jelušić: Engineering management meetup success
• Wysopal, Reisinger, Steger: Digital threats in the age of AI

Work and Jobs

In the work world it seems that American workers are stuck in place, Google's ex-CEO claimed that remote work and a focus on work-life balance is the reason why it is not the AI leader and promptly claims he didn't mean it. Pinterest shared how it is there to onboard as a Web Engineer, TPGi explains how ongoing training prevents accessibility barriers and when it comes to measuring developer productivity humans are more important than data. Recruiters are drowning in a flood of AI-generated applications, people share that becoming an engineering manager was a mistake and others their learnings about becoming a senior engineer.

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

• A crystal fragment allows you to live in an 8-bit Pixel Art world
• Praise my GitHub profile!
• How the SNES Graphics System works
• Pathfinding algorithms visualized on a real map

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