February 28, 2022

Web in February - Newsletter by Agney

It is a month that usually starts with A short and sweet month that passes like a breeze. But this month we almost had a World War and we have people still fighting it out on the street. (Nations? Those are just imaginary borders that we drew around ourselves. People fight, People die. Nobody wins)

• Here’s What You Can Do to Help People in Ukraine Right Now - The Time
• Here’s how you can help - NPR

Tech companies and startups that operate from Ukraine and Russia have been scrambling to take a stand and help their colleagues. Here are key stories on how technology has been influencing the war.

• How the tech industry is responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - TechCrunch
• Ukraine seeks volunteers to defend networks as Russian troops menace Kyiv - The Register
• Starlink is now operational in Ukraine - Elon Musk tweet
• What is SWIFT, what shutting Russia out of it means - Indian Express
• Internet becomes battleground in Russia’s Ukraine invasion - Axios
• Snowflake Tor Brides are starting to get popular
• Update in Signal; Telegram being a Russian company is in a tight spot

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Read this on a TechCrunch report and even though I even always knew it was possible, still blew my mind:

In addition, consumers are spending more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia, and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021.

Releases

• Retrospective and Technical Details on the recent Firefox Outage - It’s usually the sites that go down and create havoc in the remote community. This month, the browser itself went down and here’s the Firefox team analysing what went wrong and how a quick fix was created.
• Safari 15.4 Beta - Safari is starting out with the dialog element and now it’s everywhere, you can safely start modelling out modals with it.
• NextJS 12.1 - Now supports Faster Minification with SWC, React 18 and first alpha preview for React 18 & Server Components.

Tutorials

• A Complete Guide to CSS Cascade Layers - CSS Cascade Layers is a newish CSS feature that some frameworks like Tailwind are already adopting. If you like to find out more, this is the complete guide.
• Develop a Text Editor for the Web - You might not have to develop a text editor on your own but there are some very interesting tips and tricks along the road here.
• Send an HTTP request on page exit - There are cases where you want to send one last request as the user navigates away from the page. This might for ad purposes, analytics or managing user presence. Since the normal fetch does not guarantee that the request will complete if user closes the tab, you might be pressed to look for alternatives.
• What does it mean to listen on a port? - I did not know this was a thing, but this is discovery fiction. Paul explains how OS uses ports through a structure of two students working their Python assignments and explaining to each other how each program works. Very captivating writing style.
• CSS4 Colors - More colors, human colors and lightness colors. Here’s a whole bunch of new upcoming CSS color features.
• How I make CSS Art - This is walkthrough on making a friendly ghost using HTML and CSS. If you look at these expansive art pieces (_I made this using CSS) on Codepen and wonder how these are made, this one’s unravelling.
• Understanding Rendering in JAMStack - There are several confusing terms and solutions stacked up under the umbrella of JAMStack right now and this article tries to make some sense of the mess.

In the Spotlight 🔦

You were probably not a victim of Y2K, but this is a bug that gently reminds you of it. If you were using user-agent parsing libraries for getting that number, you might be in for a surprise when it stops working. Browsers are all getting together to analyse how many websites might be at fault when it gets there.

• Firefox Blog tracking the timeline
• web.dev Explainer
• Version 100 of Chrome, Edge, and Firefox may break some websites - Techspot

In Other News

• Falling In Love With The Web: Inspiring Websites And Tools - I have fallen out of love with Twitter threads that list down websites for web developers. But this Smashing Magazine thread is all art and lit with great website references for developers from Cosima Mielke.
• Reselling gig work is TikTok’s new side hustle - Companies have been outsourcing their work for decades now and the company you outsourced it to is probably outsourcing it to someone else, another region may be another teenager. What happens when you do it on TikTok and you are just the contact person? Drop Shipping Gig works.
• Compromising Angular via Expired npm Publisher Email Domains - If you are a Github Dependabot user, you might have seen references to updating this package named ajv-formats (turns out that is very popular). This blog post describes how the package was compromised using an expired domain.
• Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto - Casey Newton talks to Molly White on what Web 3 is struggling with and averting the scams that come with the catchphrase.

Looking Forward

• Gatsby Conf - March 2 & 3, Also beautiful website.
• MWC Barcelona - Feb 28 - March 3
• Strapi Conf - March 16,17