Weekly notes are here again and I have to say that the week has passed swiftly. With all the pre-christmas parties and switching jobs, I also managed to read some articles. Here are my chosen articles for this week.
Issue #2 // Week 49, 2015
Technical
Exploring the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-Winning Medicare Investigation with SQL
Interesting writeup with examples how they used SQL to cover controversial practices in Medicare billing in Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-Winning ‘Medicare Unmasked’ data investigation. (from Slashdot)
Segment’s Engineering Team’s Best Practices
There are lots of “Best Practices” you gather while working with things and Segment’s Engineering Team chose a handful of ‘pro tips’ to share that seemed most broadly applicable. They keep their engineering guidelines in Wiki page. Do you? (from Weekend reading)
Broken Performance Tools (pdf)
Good overview to performance tools and how to be cautious using them as they are broken and misleading. Trust nothing, verify everything. Observe, Profile and Visualize Everything. Benchmark Nothing. Do Active Benchmarking. (from IRC)
Tools of the trade
What Are The Best JavaScript IDEs?
Crowdsourced summaries and comparisons of 18 different IDEs and text editors used by JavaScript developers. (from JavaScript Weekly)
1Password for teams
Passwords are everywhere and 1Password for team sharing is said to be better than Meldium, OneLogin or Bitium. It has fantastic UI, works great on mobile, can share logins, WiFi, credit cards, notes and documents. (from Weekend reading)
Zube, task board for Github issues
Zube is a task board for Github issues looks crafty. (from Weekend reading)
To watch
HTTP/2 101: A 25 Minute Introduction to HTTP/2
Good talk by an engineer on the Chrome team about the second major version of the HTTP network protocol which is already supported by most major browsers.
To think about
Seriously, Don’t Use Icon Fonts
I’m not sure what’s my opinion about using icon fonts and by reading the comments the issue isn’t quite clear. SVG browser support is fine so there is no need to use icon fonts anymore as it can harm accessibility. (from Web Design Weekly)
Buffer’s Transparent salaries
Salaries seems to be a thing you don’t talk about but maybe we should. Couple of years ago Buffer shared their transparent salary formula and now they have update it and made a web app to test it. Haven’t seen similar approaches here in Finland although if I remember right Vincit has internally transparent salaries.
(from Web Development Reading List)
Chrome Extensions – AKA Total Absence of Privacy
Using extensions should be done with care as they aren’t always what they look like. Some Chrome extensions are constantly tracking you per default, making it very difficult or impossible for you to opt-out. These extensions will receive your complete browsing history, all your cookies, your secret access-tokens used for authentication (i.e., Facebook Connect) and shared links from sites such as Dropbox and Google Drive. (from Weekend reading)
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