Recycle your infrastructure frequently to minimise security holes.

Strategies for dealing with Slack.

Nice concept summary.

Add placeholder image colours to images.

Computers and how we suck at it all.

Lots of meaty stuff.

A look at what engineering means, its history, and how software fits in.

Shawn Blanc:

Your own index is something you put in the back of the book (or the front if you prefer). It’s a list of the book’s themes and topics that most resonate with you, and the pages which have the best quotes and ideas around those topics.

I’ll use an index card to do this for the ebooks I read.

Amazing what’s happened in ten years.

An extensive look at what it takes to be a senior engineer.

Ryan Florence:

Rackt is a GitHub organization that was created to ensure critical open source projects in the React community receive long-term support and maintenance.

…

We believe these four principles will provide a strong ecosystem of our open source projects by ensuring projects have active and enthusiastic owners and contributors.

Jesper Louis Andersen:

I’m very fond of Erlang creator Mike Williams point: “If you don’t make experiments before starting a project, then your whole project will be an experiment”

If we instead ask about prototyping, then we need a programming language with certain traits. The team is usually small, so we need an expressive language, and we need to address the core kernel of the system in isolation, first. We don’t need a lot of interfacing to foreign systems and in general we won’t care too much if the system we build is fast. Also, we usually won’t need to operate the prototype in production, since it is simply a proof of concept.

There are more interesting points about language design in part one and two of this broad reaching interview.

Eric Clemmons:

At work this past quarter, we painstakingly started three new projects at work. I say “painstakingly” because every project required decisions to be made around tooling depending on the scope & needs.

Ultimately, the problem is that by choosing React (and inherently JSX), you’ve unwittingly opted into a confusing nest of build tools, boilerplate, linters, & time-sinks to deal with before you ever get to create anything.

the React ecosystem have, largely, opted for discrete modularization at the cost of terse APIs by offloading their architectural underpinnings to the user and, as a result, worsen the developer experience in aggregate.

Yep, the developer experience in Javascript at the moment is painful. The wide array of choice is crippling and the boilerplates and generators aren’t enough. I hope the following prediction from the article comes true.

2016 will likely involve a serious, focused conjoining of projects, tools, and language features to merge the best and brightest packages/tools/boilerplates into more formalized projects. — Matt Keas in State of the Union.js

Michael Fogus:

The approach that I now use for releasing code into the wild is governed by an approach called the “100:10:1 method,” a term coined by Nick Bentley.

I think I will give this a try.

Evan Czaplicki:

One of Elm’s goals is to change our relationship with compilers. Compilers should be assistants, not adversaries. A compiler should not just detect bugs, it should then help you understand why there is a bug. It should not berate you in a robot voice, it should give you specific hints that help you write better code. Ultimately, a compiler should make programming faster and more fun!

I’ve enjoyed stretching my brain a bit whilst learning Elm. These changes will improve the learning process tremendously.