Readings for Lunch — [ 15 Jun 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
Hair ice (also known as ice wool or frost beard) is a type of ice that forms on dead wood and takes the shape of fine, silky hair. Scientists identified the fungus Exidiopsis Effusa as key to the formation of hair ice. The fungus shapes the ice into fine hairs through an uncertain mechanism and likely stabilizes it by providing a recrystallization inhibitor similar to antifreeze proteins. (Wikipedia)

UX

You have the right to remain silent

Here’s a story about how subtly things that seem “good” can also be harmful. What might our Miranda rights be for software?

REACT

Advanced React Component Patterns

Kent C. Dodd has updated his comprehensive list of useful coding patterns (requires paid membership, but it's worth every penny).

Readings for Lunch — [ 14 Jun 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
Purple poppies have sprouted in north-east England (source)

FRONT-END

5 years of OpenComponents

Matteo Figus tells the story of how OpenComponents went from a simple internal project to a successful open-source solution for the distribution of micro-frontends. 🙌

DIVERSITY

Where are the Women?

A passionate talk about the diversity in the technology sector, and in the society in general. Where we are, where we should be, and why it matters. 💜

Readings for Lunch — [ 12 Jun 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
Shoreditch, London – Street art in progress.

MACHINE LEARNING

Deep Learning in JS

Amazing talk, amazing slides, amazing speaker. One of the most impressive and clear presentations at JS Conf EU. It made the core concepts of machine learning clear and accessible to everyone.

PSYCHOLOGY

Impostor Syndrome Type 2

I then realized I had what I jokingly called “Type II” impostor syndrome: my fear of being a fraud is replaced with the anger of demonstrating I can do it.

Readings for Lunch — [ 11 Jun 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
A green tree frog on a leaf in the mountainous area of Hualien, Taiwan. (source)

UI

Gallery of programmer interfaces

These images bear witness to the passionate work of so many people striving to improve programming.

NODEJS

Keeping Node.js fast

When it comes to performance, what works in the browser doesn’t necessarily suit Node.js.
So, how do we make sure a Node.js implementation is fast and fit for purpose?
Let’s walk through a hands-on example.

Readings for Lunch — [ 07 Jun 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
36 Days Of Type (source)

TYPOGRAPHY

Alphabet in Motion

Each year the project 36 Days of Type invites graphic designers, illustrators, typographers, and artists from around the world to submit their own alphabet-based designs during a 36-day typographical marathon. Designer Ben Huynh submitted animated letters for each day of the open call which he combined into a short film.

TYPOGRAPHY

Type Safari in Farringdon, London

A type safari is an expedition inside a specific territory in order to research and record the different graphic signs you can find inside this area — commercial signs, road signs, graffiti… The goal is to find the signs that tell the story of a place, but also to look after the signs that would be “a treasure”, a typographic inspiration.

Readings for Lunch — [ 05 Jun 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
Broken things by Chilean artist Livia Marin. (source)

REACT

Beyond React

React fundamentally changed how we build UI in JavaScript, yet the principles behind React are equally powerful outside the JavaScript ecosystem.
What if we could build a design tool based on these principles, allowing us to design flexible, composable component systems?
What if we could transpile these components into any language on any platform, such as a Swift components on iOS, or Kotlin components on Android?

JAVASCRIPT

Event delegation in JavaScript

In this article, Aurelio De Rosa discuss how a web developer can optimize the addition of event listeners in all these situations by employing a technique called event delegation.

Readings for Lunch — [ 04 Jun 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
(source)

PEOPLE

Neha's Story

Neha Sharma's talk was one of the most inspiring (and moving) talks at JS Conf EU. She managed to create a community of more than 2000 JS developers, against all the social restrictions a woman has in India. Here is her amazing story.

JAVASCRIPT

10 Things I Regret About Node.js

Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, in his closing keynote looks back at the "errors" he made in these years while around the Node ecosystem. Here the slides of his talk.

During the talk he announced Deno: a secure TypeScript runtime on V8 that aims to undo some of these errors and offer a better platform for JavaScript development on both client and server.

Readings for Lunch — [ 01 Jun 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY

TALK

The web is not just left-to-right

The amazing talk about web typography, fonts, CSS and writing directions that Chen Hui Jing gave this morning.

(Did you know that a Chinese font has more than 60.000 glyphs?!)

GENDER

Women’s visibility in academic seminars: women ask fewer questions than men

“Furthermore, our observations indicated that the gender of the first person to ask a question predicted the gender imbalance in subsequent questions, with proportionally fewer questions asked by women when a man was the first to ask a question.”

Readings for Lunch — [ 31 May 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
GDPR ante litteram 🙂 (source)

REACT

x0

Zero-config React development environment & static site generator. Created by the incredible folks at Compositor.

TOOLS

Mak

Mak is an online, universal notepad. It syncs with your Gists (otherwise saves the data in local storage, so be carful to not delete it). Very interesting concept.

Readings for Lunch — [ 29 May 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
The first image from one of the four cameras aboard NASA's new planet-hunting satellite. You’re looking at more than 200,000 stars in this remarkable image. (source)

DEVELOPMENT

Spring clean your dev machine

Development machines can build up such a lot of cruft. Old versions, oudated programs and unused caches litter the hard drive. It’s good to take time once in a while to clean all of this up and free up some space.

DEVELOPMENT

Text editing techniques every Front-End developer should know

Ben Frain shares what he considers some of the most useful or perhaps underused text editing techniques that pays to know about and that you will able to perform with fluidly in your editor or IDE of choice.

Readings for Lunch — [ 22 May 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
New robot, daisy, disassembles iPhone to reclaim precious materials (source)

CODE

Stop writing code

An awesome presentation by Sunil Pai at React Europe

FEEDBACK

How to take criticism

To talk about taking criticism, we first have to talk about why we’re here.
We’re here because we design things.
Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in what we do, we forget we’re designing for people. We forget how what we make adds to an already crowded world.

Readings for Lunch — [ 21 May 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
A Sea Bubble electric maritime flying taxi drives along the river Seine in front of the Eiffel Tower
(source)

ARCHITECTURE

GitHub: scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team

"C, Shell, Ruby — quite a simple, monolithic stack.
We’re really not an overcomplex shop, we don’t intend to try and drop new languages for every small project."

TRUST

How to build (and rebuild) trust

Trust is the foundation for everything we do.
But what do we do when it's broken?
In an eye-opening talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust

Readings for Lunch — [ 18 May 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
Culture, Leadership & People (source)

TOOLS

Gulp@next

The next release of Gulp, a well-known building system, will see a lot of breaking changes. Here an overview of the most imporant ones, and the reasons behind them.

TOOLS

PixelSnap

"The fastest way to measure everything on screen." they say. Well, I must admit it's very useful*, especially if you are a designer 🙂

* though, I must admit, is not cheap 🙂

Readings for Lunch — [ 16 May 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
Ask me anything – via @thekitze (source)

DESIGN SYSTEMS

Storybook vs Styleguidist

This article looks at the unique strengths and design intent of Storybook and Styleguidist, two of the most used tools to build style guides for design systems.

TYPOGRAPHY

How we introduced Airbnb Cereal to our UI

Airbnb launched a new typeface called Airbnb Cereal across their product and brand. Here the case study with details of the technical process behind it. 🙌

Readings for Lunch — [ 15 May 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
Visualization of the terms and conditions of different apps (source)

UX

How LEGO Run Design Sprints at Scale

A case study about how LEGO scaled Design Sprints throughout its organisation (which is kind of unbelievable considering that they are a company that produces physical products, not just digital ones).

JAVASCRIPT

BigInt: arbitrary-precision integers in JavaScript

BigInts are a new numeric primitive in JavaScript that can represent integers with arbitrary precision. This article walks through some use cases and explains the new functionality in Chrome 67 by comparing BigInts to Numbers in JS.

Readings for Lunch — [ 14 May 2018 ]

IMAGE OF THE DAY
Machine learning job interview (source)

UX

Vanity Metrics

Revenue is a pretty boring metric until the data focuses on profits. Instagram follower numbers don’t matter if no one likes your posts. Visits to a website mean nothing until you can see correlation to higher conversions. So let’s stop playing the vanity metrics game and start using the collected data as a tool to our end goals.

SCIENCE

The Weirdest Stars in the Universe

How big can a star get? Why would a star only pretend to explode? Can you hide one star inside another?. Emily Levesque will answer this and many other questions in this mind-blowing public lecture.