Reading List
A weekly (mostly) dump of links to interesting things I’ve read and shared on Twitter. Sponsored by those nice folks at Wix Engineering who hurl money at me to read stuff.
- EU types: write to your representative! EU wants to require platforms to filter uploaded content (including code) says GitHub. Ah, the attempts to censor the web, by people who don’t understand its tech or its culture.
- Auto-Sizing Columns in CSS Grid: `auto-fill` vs `auto-fit` by the mighty Sara Soueidan
- What Houdini Means for Animating Transforms by the marvellous Ana Tudor
- Say Hello to Houdini and the CSS Paint API – very good introductory article
- The WCAG Standard in a JSON format. – maintained by Karl Groves
- My $169 development Chromebook – “How Chrome OS, Termux, YubiKey & Duo Mobile make for great usable security”
- Campaign – Ethan Marcotte on Google’s announcement that it will allow non-AMP content in Top Stories SERPS carousel (with them as gatekeeper)
- Hello, CSS Paint API, now in Chrome 65, and the first Houdini API to ship in a production browser.
- Houdini: Demystifying CSS has been recently updated.
- The inception of ESLint – like most good open source utilities, it builds on the work of others, and scratches its creator’s itch.
- Web development isn’t about you, dude – My chum Charlie Owen on how coding empathically with this in mind will let you produce sites that are usable by all.
- Blackberry sues Facebook in fight over app patents – Sad to see a once-mighty company reduced to patent trolling.
- Who will steal Android from Google? – “web programming is like a nice trip to Bali compared to the poo sandwich of mobile programming, including iOS. And Android? Yep. It’s the biggest poo sandwich of them all.”
- Opera Mini is fast losing mobile market share to Google Chrome in Africa – “whichever app is installed by default wins … UC Browser has been growing its market share…[it] comes installed on a lot of low-cost Chinese distributed smartphones”
- Facebook asks users: should we allow men to ask children for sexual images? – I’m nowhere near as rich or clever as Zuckerberg, but I’m gonna go with “no” on this one.
- Taking Action Against Britain First – Facebook bans far-right racist group. Your move, Twitter.
- Silicon Valley’s Tax-Avoiding, Job-Killing, Soul-Sucking Machine – Professor Scott Galloway on the business case for the regulation ””and possible break-up”” of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Via Peter Gasston’s excellent newsletter.
- Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent ‘weaponised’ web – Timbo warns over concentration of power among a few companies ”˜controlling which ideas are shared’
- Mozilla files response to European Commission ”˜Fake news and online disinformation’ public consultation
- Billion-dollar debts control the future of tech industry – “Giant global funds, such as SoftBank in Japan, are borrowing huge amounts to swallow up Europe’s robotic and AI firms”
- Amazon working to fix Alexa after users report random burst of’creepy’ laughter – Gosh I really want a machine listening to everything I say, all the time, then sending my data to a megacorp and laughing at me.
- Selfie culture & its impact on Asian beauty brands – three of my fave topics (tech, Asia, anthropology) in one article!
- 3 insights about Vietnam’s ecommerce landscape last year – “Vietnam has the highest growth in mobile traffic in Southeast Asia. Its ecommerce merchants are leaders in conversion rate.”
- Fairphone – “The world’s first ethical, modular phone”
- Can Chrome Sync or Firefox Sync be trusted with sensitive data? – TL;DR: no. This is why I don’t use any Sync services.
- YouPorn used AI to predict the porn searches of the future and, um, brace yourselves – phowwwoar “Girl Time Flanty”, “Doot Sex” and “Lesbian Masturbinge”
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