Happy October, friends!

I hope you had a good week! Mine was a nice one, I had fun with some coding experiments and seeing family and friends.

Onwards!

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Web links of the week

The accidental history of 3000, 8080, and other port numbers
How Evil Martians moved from Gatsby to Astro in nine days without rewriting a single React component
New HTML and CSS features you should be using in your design system
AI is still in its terminal era
You Don’t Know Bidi (And Neither Does ChatGPT)

Something that interested me this week

I wrote about accessibility and the internet this week. It's a post I've been sitting on for upwards of 2 or 3 months as I've been thinking about how much is being automated away in our work as software engineers, which things are still important (and more important than ever), and how we might think about the internet moving forward.

Honestly the post is kind of short and simplifies some things, but the summary is: I'm kind of sad that it took AI to make some people take accessibility more seriously, but I'm also glad that that work is happening more. And so much of the internet is bots now, it'll be interesting to see if like... there's a new "pricing model" for the internet for humans and bots to surf/work/buy separately. If you have thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them!

Sponsor

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Interview question of the week

Last week, I had you get days of temperature drops! Keepin' warm with great answers were Amine, Vasanth, Raymond, Dani, Kyle, Paul, Ten, Ross, Kriszti, Alex, Christian, Ricardo, Rhett, and the jazzy devs in the Ruby Users Forum!

This week's question:
On Halloween night, a town is represented by a grid where 0 is an empty lot, 1 is a living person, and 2 is an infected zombie. Every minute, infection spreads to any living person directly above, below, left, or right of an infected zombie. Return the minimum number of minutes until no living people remain, or -1 if some people can never be reached.

Examples:

> minutesUntilApocalypse([
  [2, 1, 1],
  [1, 1, 0],
  [0, 1, 1]
])
> 4

> minutesUntilApocalypse([
  [2, 1, 1],
  [0, 1, 1],
  [1, 0, 1]
])
> -1

(you can submit your answers by replying to this email with a link to your solution, or share on Bluesky, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Mastodon)

Cool things from around the internet

Busyness Is a Choice
Gboard Conveyor Belt Version (video) (repo)
More than words
Now Entering: The Era Of Bleh

Joke

What do ghosts use to wash their hair?
Sham-boo!

That's all for now, folks! Have a great week. Be safe, make good choices, and try a new food!

Special thanks to Ben, Kinetic Labs, and Marta for supporting my Patreon and this newsletter!

cassidoo

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