Top picks — 2021 August
Automating with Alfred App with Chris Messina
I am a long term Alfred user, creator of multiple popular plugins and active contributor to the community. People ask me, “how did you do this” during the pair programming sessions, and the answer is usually the same — Alfred. I use it for clipboard history, browse GitHub projects, manage windows on my desktop, convert cryptocurrencies to fiat, open popular projects in my IDE and so on. I recently published “Alfred workflows that I can’t live without” about my favourite workflows. This video is for you if you are new to Alfred or don’t know where to start.
Empty npm package ‘-’ has over 700,000 downloads — here’s why
It is a pretty funny story of the - package on npm that hit a surprisingly high number of downloads purely by accident. To be more accurate, by poor typing skills of developers in a hurry. However, I admire the package author for his creativity.
Security headers quick reference
HTTP headers are a great way to protect your website from attacks but also misused can be a pretty dangerous security concern. This article is an excellent reference for all the headers you need to know to level up your security game.
CSS Modules (The Native Ones)
Did you know that something like native CSS modules in the browser is something that browser vendors are currently working on? I was freaking shocked when I read this article. I am looking forward to the day I will be able to assert { type: "css"} on the production version of my client’s project.
The CSS Nesting spec
I like what Miriam Suzanne does for the web ecosystem. I am delighted to see her as part of the CSS Working Group working on such a cool thing as native CSS Nesting. Kilian Valkhof published “CSS Nesting, specificity and you” which explains the technicality nicely.
🎉 The CSS Nesting spec has been approved for publishing as a First Public Working Draft. You can see the current Editor's Draft here:https://t.co/t71r99yQGb
— Miriam (But Terrible) (@TerribleMia) July 27, 2021
(This moves it from a theoretical proposal, to an official work-in-progress module in the CSS spec.)
Deno Deploy
Deno Deploy is a globally distributed Deno runtime. Deno is a successor project of Ryan Dahl, the same guy who created Node.js. Deno Deploy is what I have been waiting for because the more I use Deno, the more I love it. Web APIs, TypeScript support, ECMAScript modules support, great security model, and more cool stuff. The blog post “Deno Deploy Beta 1” reveals more details about the VM. I am playing around with it already, and you can probably expect a little write up about it very soon.
Deno - HTTP 203
The hype about Deno on this blog doesn’t stop. A few days after I published “Deno, a breath of fresh air for the server-side JavaScript”, Jake Archibald and Surma from the Google Web Dev team published this great video where they share similar excitement about Deno’s compatibility with the Web platform.
Deno on MDN
Clearly, someone got very excited about Deno here. For a good reason, and looks like I am not the only one. This runtime is gaining more traction than ever before, and now we can check feature compatibility on MDN — arguably the most popular resource for JavaScript on the Web.