The Fortnight That Was

Fortnight Beginning 19th September, 2022

Apologies, dear reader. The previous two weeks have been a flurry of activity, whose result was the postponement of this collection of entertainments. It was remiss of me, and I beg your understanding.

Speaking of understanding, I am quite unsure of what to make of this older article from the Atlantic. I myself completed an Engineering degree and must agree that I often find the rigour lacking in the Software industry. As it happens, many countries (including Australia and Canada) consider Engineering a Chartered profession, thus describing all technologists as such is not only wrong, it may even breach the boundaries of legality.

My uncertainty arises from the unpleasantness of contradicting someone's identity, along with the faint whiff of snobbery engendered therein... But there is something to be said for dis-allowing people to use well understood titles if they are unwilling to fulfil the obligations therein.

Speaking also of titles, it is a sad day for many in the Commonwealth countries, including the Gentlehacker. I think perhaps it is that, regardless of some substantial failings in the institute of Monarchy, the Queen herself seemed to treat being Monarch as a position of service, and lived her life accordingly. I greatly respect how diligent she was in her attempts to service the emotional needs of her subjects; for strength, for comfort, for unity and a sense of belonging to something great.

She will be missed. Vale, your Majesty Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. Rest in Peace.

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For Developers

Community

Hacktoberfest

Impends. Hacktoberfest, a month-long virtual hackathon, encourages folks of all persuasions to collaborate on open-source projects. Despite some... regrettable happenings... in earlier years, Digital Ocean's event provides a wonderful opportunity to contribute to Open Source.

Additionally, the design of the website is wonderful.

Convenience

Automatic Key Vaulting for Everyone

Simon Sickle has written a guide, demonstrating how you can store keys in 1password and have them automatically synced to your terminal. Clever Lad.

Design

ASCII Diagrams

Bring back the old days of funny-symbol-only diagrams, with Asciiflow, a lovely free diagramming tool. It's simple to use, although the options currently are a little basic.

Micro-Animations

Micro-Animations are those which provide your users with helpful feedback that their actions have been noticed. Here is a tidy little guide on implementing them using Anime-JS.

Open Source Design System

Penpot is a web-based, open source design system for cross-domain teams, and looks very pleasant. The Gentlehacker would try it in a heartbeat, if he had any kind of design skill whatsoever.

Machine Learning

AWS Visual Conversation Builder

The Zaibatsu has released a visual conversation builder for Amazon Lex, thus enabling no-code chatbot/assistant building. Quite neat.

For everyone

FLYING CAR

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

The future has finally arrived! Samson Sky's Flying Car has passed FAA Approval!

Yes, it requires a conversion step to go between Road and Air vehicle, but it's a step in the right direction and the beginning of the fulfillment of the promise of future times. The Future has been a disappointment thus far. Let me have this, I beg you.

Edifying Reading

Upon Serverless Applications, and Sessions Thereof

I have recently begun a series on Building an API for Serverless App Sessions, of which I'm rather proud.

Therein, I discuss using API Gateway, DynamoDB and Lambda to build a flexible session authentication system. Features include separate Web and API authentication, session expiry, and extensibility for differing permissions (inc. authentication delegation).

I would appreciate a share and follow.

For Usability

Usability expert Jacob Nielsen recommends you Stop Listening to Users.

With Thanks

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Should you wish to find previous entries, you shall find them all collected here.