I had an excellent week
It's been an exciting week at work! First and foremost, Jason Baum joined us as the Director of Community at Saucelabs (Hi, Boss!).
Secondly, my friend Kunal joined up with Jecelyn Yeen from the Chrome DevTools team to show off how you can export user flows from Chrome's DevTools and play them back with Sauce. Check it out here! Nicely done Kunal!
Developer Stuff
Check your flaky Jest tests are better now
I take a fairly strong opinion towards flaky tests: I think they're worthless. Unless you're testing something inherently indeterministic, your tests should always be more reliable than your code. If they're not, you should delete 'em; They're not providing you any value.
So, I was a bit hesitant to read Jakub Olek's article about running a flaky test multiple times in Jest... Until I did so, and found it's a neat trick for re-running no-longer-flaky tests enough times to ensure you've fixed the flakiness. It's good stuff!
Serverless Storefronts with Shopify
Did you know Shopify has a global hosting solution? It's called Oxygen and, from what I can tell, it exists to enable their new "Headless Commerce" solution called Hydrogen. Hydrogen is a React-based storefront you can deploy to Oxygen for free, letting you build custom stores with Shopify-backed processing.
I suspect part of this is a retention play by Shopify to stop people fleeing for full-custom Serverless solutions, but it's neat nonetheless!
Unix
.Plan files
Did you know that Unix has a .plan file in your home directory, intended to let other users know what you're doing when they use the finger command? Neither did I.
Design
The 60/30/10 Rule
I am awful at design, which is why Yuri's article on the 60/30/10 Rule for Beginners appeals to me. Yuri breaks down how to select colours, the proportions they should be used in, and gives you alternatives for those patterns.
It also linked me to the neat tool Colorhub!
Reading
Kanji and why it's so hard to read.
Did you know I'm doing a Linguistics degree? I am! Because I wasn't already busy enough, apparently. Anyhoo, majoring in Japanese led me to both an understanding of why the Japanese writing system is so difficult and a core CSS feature designed specifically to help with it? Weird. You can read part one of my article about it here.
The Genesis of DevOps and why it matters for writing Terraform
This article by Ian Miell is great. He goes through the evolution of DevOps, the (questionable) motivations behind organizational decisions and why it often, DevOps initiatives failed to deliver their desired outcomes.
But, this is all just context to answer the question; Who should write your Terraform documents?
Janet Jackson considered harmful
I'm going to drop this one in with no context. Just enjoy.