Web Review, Week 2025-02
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-01.
An Open Letter to All European Politicians and Leaders to Abandon X/Twitter
Tags: tech, social-media, twitter, politics
A good petition to push forward. Political leaders shouldn’t keep interacting in this cesspool.
The Ministry of Empowerment
Tags: tech, social-media, facebook, politics
Good reaction and opinion piece about the latest policy changes at Meta. This is really going to be toxic, but they just don’t care at the top.
https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2025/01/08/the-ministry-of-empowerment.html
TikTok knows its app is harming kids, new internal documents show
Tags: tech, social-media, attention-economy, politics, law
I wish other platforms would go through so much scrutiny. Still it gives a good idea about the mental health issue they collectively represent.
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/11/g-s1-27676/tiktok-redacted-documents-in-teen-safety-lawsuit-revealed
I shared this post across 7 different social media platforms, here’s how their engagement stacked up
Tags: tech, social-media, politics, fediverse
Interesting little study of engagement on various platforms. Clearly the Fediverse could do better in terms of avoiding “friendly fire”, I suspect it’s the top reason limiting its growth.
https://fediscience.org/@kathhayhoe/113787783732811080
Time to check if you ran any of these 33 malicious Chrome extensions - Ars Technica
Tags: tech, browser, security, supply-chain
The browser extension ecosystems are definitely a weak link in term of security. Better not have too many random extensions installed.
Pushing the whole company into the past on purpose
Tags: tech, time, ntp
Sure, time handling is complicated… but really that opens the door at doing really fun stuff.
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/01/09/lag/
HipScript
Tags: tech, browser, gpu, webgpu, computation, webassembly
And now we got all the pieces to run CUDA code in the browser. How will you like your cryptominer? Joke aside this opens interesting use cases.
https://lights0123.com/blog/2025/01/07/hip-script/
Property-Based Testing for the People
Tags: tech, tests, property-based-testing, usability
Very interesting research. Property-Based Testing made quite some progress the past few years but indeed it still needs to improve in term of usability. Looking forward to some of that research to get available in existing testing tools.
https://repository.upenn.edu/entities/publication/72ca3499-c5f6-4fc1-b5a3-9d66d8dd534e
End-to-end testing emails
Tags: tech, tests, email
Definitely a nice trick for testing if an email is really sent by a system under test.
https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/e2e-testing-email
The future of htmx
Tags: tech, htmx, maintenance
This is a good goal, I wish them luck.
https://htmx.org/essays/future/
Goodbye SASS 👋, welcome back native CSS
Tags: tech, browser, frontend, web, css
With the progresses of CSS in recent years it’s clear that SASS becomes less useful.
https://medium.com/@karstenbiedermann/goodbye-sass-welcome-back-native-css-b3beb096d2b4
Unix and Microservice Platforms
Tags: tech, architecture, unix, microservices
I’m not a huge fan microservice based architectures. That said the parallel done there is interesting and a good reminder that the “write programs that do one thing and do it well” quote is incomplete.
https://www.brandonbloom.name/blog/2021/08/02/unix-and-microservice-platforms/
Overcoming Resistance to Extreme Programming
Tags: tech, agile, xp, management, learning, autonomy
Interesting exploration on the difficulties to switch a team to XP. I’m not fully aligned with some of the fine details pointed there… That said there is a core truth that “XP is about social change” so if you mandate it as a managerial decision it can’t be XP anymore.
https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2025/01/01/overcoming-resistance-to-extreme-programming/
Bad idea: Developer experience is equivalent to productivity
Tags: tech, productivity, developer-experience
It’s indeed tempting to conflate the two (at least for marketing purposes apparently, I see you LLM vendors…). Even if tempting, developer experience is definitely not equivalent to productivity.
https://jchyip.medium.com/bad-idea-developer-experience-is-equivalent-to-productivity-231f75c8c3f1
Engineering Growth — From Charmander to Charizard
Tags: tech, engineering, career, learning, leadership
Not a huge fan of the writing style and the pokemon metaphor. That said, seeing your growth as an engineer based on circles is spot on.
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/engineering-growth-from-charmander-to-charizard-e8fde93c69d5
Bye for now!