The Week That Was: October 10th, 2022

Selected Links; Observations; and Recommendations, for Hackers of Quality.

There really is no apology here. It has been almost a month. It was a very rough month, indeed, ending as it did with two examinations, an abortive attempt at seeing a doctor, a dental filling, an essay, and two conferences in a row.

Well, the second is still imminent. I shall be travelling to San Francisco to present at QConf, 'pon the topic: "Are Programming Languages... actually Languages?". A brief exploration of Second Language Acquisition, and what it can teach us about upskilling our teams. I am Quite Excited About It.

Nevertheless! Onward and upward.

For Developers

Be Productive

Abi Noda has summarised a paper from Meyer et al detailing what makes for a Good Developer Workday. Good days are those with an appropriate amount of collaboration, where the developer feels they were productive and added value, and most of all:

Good Days go as planned.

Store Things in the User's Browser

There are many, unique and wonderful APIs in hidden in the depths of Chromium and Friends. One of those is IndexedDB, a client-side API for storing structured data on the client side. This can be a most efficacious way of storing data such as, say, search indexes, document drafts, or infrequently-updated reference data.

The GentleHacker suggests perusing the Web.Dev introduction, should you wish to learn more.

Or perhaps not!

Randel Degges concurs, partly because he believes that one of the alternatives, that of LocalStorage, is always a bad idea. You can read his take here; it's excellent nuanced.

Be secure

It is a sad fact that the internet is awash with rapscallions, vagabonds and charlatans of the highest water. As such, the clever girls and boys who work in technology have come up with a multiplicity of techniques for ensuring the safety and security of you and your customers.

One such technique is Subresource Integrity, which allows you to specify a cryptographic hash for each resource you retrieve, keeping you safe from MITM attacks on CDNs and such.

How clever.

With Thanks

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