Weeknotes 71

“Welcome to hell, Elon” is absolute fire 🔥

So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

VPN update: I mentioned a while ago that I would be trying out some different VPNs, one of which was Mullvad VPN and I’m currently three weeks into trying it.

Good: it connects really quickly and seems fast - NordVPN and ProtonVPN would often take a while to connect. Bad: I don’t love the app design, I wish it were a bit more Mac-like. It’s the most expensive.

I wrote a tiny bit of CSS is week and was both surprised at how far it’s come whilst also being astounded at how the simplest of things are still difficult.

This is cool, but still not universally supported.

body:has(> .foo) {
  # Apply rule to body if it has a direct descendant .foo
}

I used to really like doing frontend work earlier in my career, but it has rather taken a back seat in recent years with most of my work being purely backend. It’s something I’d like to do more of, but it getting back into it is overwhelming.

It’s really important that everyone on a team feels like have input into making a difference. Without that, no matter how conscientious the developer, they will eventually get sick feeling ignored, and, if not careful, a culture of not caring can develop.

The Google Chrome team decided, for some unfathomable reason, to remove support for the new JPEG XL format.

There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL

You can see from the Chromium bug thread that this decision is crazy. Support from other browser vendors is also incomplete, but when you have most of the market it does send the wrong signal.

All that overtime you’re doing for free isn’t doing your colleagues any favours 😉

I consumed a couple interesting takes on Git commit messages recently.

Firstly, a new podcast, YAGNI, hosted by Matt Swanson with guest Chris Toomey. Chris mentioned that you might as well note down all the context which you built whilst working on a problem, or it’s lost. A great point.

Secondly, The Perfect Commit by Simon Willison. He talks about keeping the documentation in the same repo, which I think is a great idea, but I’m not sure how actionable it is for most teams.

Both had interesting points even though I didn’t agree with all.

Most people are not even writing decent commit subjects, never mind the whole message, which is my experience tends to be empty almost all of the time. We can do better.