Exploring Node.js Internals — Smashing Magazine
Node.js is an interesting tool for web developers. With its high level of concurrency, it has become a leading candidate for people choosing tools to use in web development. In this article, we will learn about what makes up Node.js, give it a meaningful definition, understand how the internals of Node.js interact with one another, and explore the project repository for Node.js on GitHub.
Stripe Issuing is now open to all US businesses
Today, we’re opening Stripe Issuing access to everyone in the US, so you can sign up and start creating cards instantly.
My Visual Studio Code Setup: Extensions and Themes
Matthias Ott's posted his VS Code setup. I find lists like this (I rounded up some recent updates of my own) irresistible, probably because, like y'all, I
The case for lightweight prototyping
Some tried and true ways to use prototypes, and an unexpected use case from the Figma team.
Domain Driven Design
Improving notifications for everyone
We’re dedicated to making notifications as simple and valuable as they can be, so you can be as productive on GitHub and you can be.
GitHub Actions: Community momentum, enterprise capabilities, and developer improvements
GitHub Actions continues its community momentum and ships new features for enterprises and developers.
The Quest for the Perfect Dark Mode
Dark Mode has become common enough that it's a user expectation. And yet, creating the perfect dark mode with a statically-built site/app is deceptively tricky. In this in-depth tutorial, we'll see how to build the perfect, flicker-free, customizable theming solution for React/Next.js apps.
Responsive Web And Desktop Development With Flutter — Smashing Magazine
Flutter has already made quite a splash on the mobile development scene. Now it’s taking on bigger devices as well. In this article, Carmine Zaccagnino will show you what you need to know to be ready to take on the task of developing web and desktop apps using this wonderful cross-platform framework. Flutter is a lovely framework, very easy to use, and its extreme cross-platform support only makes
Deploying Gateway using a Raspberry Pi, DNS over HTTPS and Pi-hole
Like many, I work remotely and want to show how to deploy Cloudflare Gateway from home. Its DNS filtering protects networks from malware, phishing, ransomware, and other security threats effectively.
Building a Scalable CSS Architecture With BEM and Utility Classes
Maintaining a large-scale CSS project is hard. Over the years, we've witnessed different approaches aimed at easing the process of writing scalable CSS. In
PostgreSQL v13 new feature: tuning autovacuum on insert-only tables
PostgreSQL v13 introduces autovacuum for insert-only tables. This article tells you why and how to make use of this new feature.
How Inneract Project empowers the next generation of brown and black designers
Students' stories and what they built in Figma.
Meet some of this year’s GitHub Satellite speakers
GitHub Satellite is back, and this year it’s virtual. Tune in at githubsatellite.com on May 6 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET to hear from CEO Nat Friedman and developers around the world.
Stay on top of your code reviews with scheduled reminders
Scheduled reminders is out of beta to help your team be more efficient by reducing time spent waiting on code reviews, and more.
An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus
A history of an anomaly in the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic, an independent research project about it, and what we need to learn about our next steps.
Dropping hashes: an idiom used to demonstrate provenance of documents
There exists an idiom called “dropping a hash” which is widely understood in the security community and not widely understood elsewhere. Somewhat surprisingly, there does not appear to be a canonical explanation. I have dropped hashes before and wrote this up to explain the significance of it to non-specialists.
Turbine: Facebook’s service management platform for stream processing
What the research is: A scalable service management platform for Facebook’s stream processing service. Turbine is designed to bridge the gap between the capabilities of existing general-purpose cluster management frameworks like Tupperware and Facebook’s stream processing requirements. In production for several years now, Turbine has enabled a boom in stream processing at Facebook. Turbine is
A Day in the Life of a Mobile Product Engineer at Slack
6:45 am My alarm is set for 6:45 but I often wake up before it goes off. I tend to wake up earlier during Vancouver’s long summer days, when the sun is up from 5:10am to 9:10pm and already peeking through my blinds, but it sometimes happens in the winter when it’s still dark out.…
How To Create A Compelling Landing Page — Smashing Magazine
A landing page is a standalone webpage created to support a specific marketing campaign or targeting a particular search term. They are where users “land” when they click a link in search results, email or an ad. In this article, Paul Boag will show you how to create a compelling landing page, which involves a combination of clear focus, persuasive copy, considered design and relentless testing. W
Smashing Podcast Episode 14 With Rachel Andrew: How Can I Run Online Workshops? — Smashing Magazine
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about running online workshops. How can a traditional event adapt when participants can’t attend in person? Drew McLellan talks to Rachel Andrew to find out.
11 activities in Figma for your classroom
Hands-on exercises for learning design.
Git credential helper vulnerability announced (Update)
Learn more about the security vulnerabilities affecting Git 2.26.1 and older.
Implementing Skeleton Screens In React — Smashing Magazine
Skeleton screens offer a better user experience by reducing loading-time frustration. By focusing on progress instead of wait times, it create the illusion for users that information will be incrementally displayed on the screen. In this tutorial, Blessing Krofegha will show you what a skeleton screen UI is and some types of skeleton screen libraries, along with their pros and cons. We’ll build a
Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing
Hard to believe that I’ve had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that’s yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster up the initiative to get my system fully upgraded! 🥱 I’ve been slogging away at this for quite some time now. My PC build blog entry series spans 13 glorious years: *
Helping with COVID-19 Projects: Cloudflare Workers now free through Project Galileo
The Internet has been vital to our response to the COVID-19 crisis: enabling researchers to communicate with the rest of the world, connecting resources with people who need them, and sharing data about the spread.
How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
Interesting research from Dan Luu¹:
Is BGP Safe Yet? No. But we are tracking it carefully
BGP leaks and leaks and hijacks have been accepted as an unavoidable part of the Internet for far too long. Today, we are releasing isBGPSafeYet.com, a website to track deployments and filtering of invalid routes by the major networks.
Time-Based One-Time Passwords for Phone Support
Cloudflare Enterprise customers can now authenticate themselves for phone support using TOTP tokens, either by using an authenticator app or generating single-use tokens from the Cloudflare Dashboard.
Better Form Inputs for Better Mobile User Experiences
Here’s one simple, practical way to make apps perform better on mobile devices: always configure HTML input fields with the correct type, inputmode, and
Pseudo-Randomly Adding Illustrations with CSS
Between each post of Eric Meyer’s blog there’s this rather lovely illustration that can randomly be one of these five options:
Front-End Challenges
My favorite way to level up as a front-end developer is to do the work. Literally just build websites. If you can do it for money, great, you should. If the
Figma + Lambda School: Where the remote classroom comes together to learn
Collaborative, interactive lessons inspire a new generation of design professionals
Staying Connected And Learning From Each Other — Smashing Magazine
A month is a long time to stay on top of things. Here you’ll find an overview of everything we’ve been working on and have also enjoyed reading over the past month. Of course, you can always find us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and also stay updated with our RSS feed as well as our Smashing Newsletter (sent out every second week with all sorts of goodies!).
Cloudflare Workers Now Support COBOL
COBOL is often a source of amusement for programmers because it is seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. COBOL can now be used to write code for Cloudflare’s serverless platform Workers.
Cloudflare Dashboard and API Outage on April 15, 2020
Starting at 1531 UTC and lasting until 1952 UTC, the Cloudflare Dashboard and API were unavailable because of the disconnection of multiple, redundant fibre connections from one of our two core data centers.
Jetpack Instant Search!
Jetpack has had a search feature for a while. Flip it on, and it replaces your built-in WordPress search (which is functional, but not particularly good) with
Remote work: Working together when we’re not together
GitHub shares best practices for making remote work part of your company culture.
GitHub Sponsors is now available in Mexico, plus some exciting updates
GitHub Sponsors is now generally available in Mexico, and we’ve also released a lot of exciting new features for sponsored developers, inspired by the community.
GitHub Protips: Tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets from Jason Etcovitch
From GitHub Actions and magic URLs to gists, check out Jason Etcovich’s top ten tips and tricks to help you hack your GitHub experience.
Django Highlights: Models, Admin, And Harnessing The Relational Database (Part 3) — Smashing Magazine
The admin panel is one of the most powerful, flexible features that the Django web framework provides, combining instant off-the-shelf functionality with infinite customization. Using an example project based on a library inventory system, we’ll use the admin panel to learn about creating models and interacting with relational databases in Django.
Offer of Assistance to Governments During COVID-19
During the spread of COVID-19, Cloudflare is offering free services to government agencies around the world to help them stay online and provide essential information to the public.
Research, remotely
Tips for running user interviews and debriefs when your team's working remotely
npm has joined GitHub
With the npm acquisition complete, we’re ready to start the next chapter of npm and support the JavaScript community in a new way.
Software Release Culture at Shopify - Shopify
We try to find the path to those goals that our developers want to take. We want to create experiences through tooling that can make our developers feel productive, and we want to do our best to make shipping feel like a celebration and not a chore.
Best Practices With React Hooks — Smashing Magazine
React provides a few built-in Hooks like useState. You can also create your own Hooks to reuse stateful behavior between different components. The example below shows a counter whose state is managed using the useState() hook. Each time you click on the button, we make use of setCount() to update the value of count by 1. In this article, Adeneye David Abiodun covers the rules of React Hooks and ho
Comparing HTTP/3 vs. HTTP/2 Performance
We announced support for HTTP/3, the successor to HTTP/2, during Cloudflare’s birthday week last year. Our goal is and has always been to help build a better Internet. Even though HTTP/3 is still in draft status, we've seen a lot of interest from our users.
Intersecting GPS-Tracks to identify infected individuals
PostGIS' functions can be used to trace down infected people and their contact with healthy individuals | GPS-Tracks | spatial data
Refactoring: This class is too large
In this article I walk through a set of refactorings from a real code base. This is not intended to demonstrate perfection, but it does represent reality.
Sawfish phishing campaign targets GitHub users
A phishing campaign targeting our customers lures GitHub users into providing their credentials (including two-factor authentication codes). Learn more about the threat and what you can do to protect yourself.
Git credential helper vulnerability announced
Learn more about the security vulnerabilities affecting Git 2.26 and older.
GitHub is free for teams
Every developer and team can now get private repositories with unlimited collaborators at no cost with GitHub Free, and we reduced prices for some of our paid plans.
HubSpot Migrating ZooKeeper into Kubernetes - High Scalability -
We recently migrated hundreds of ZooKeeper instances from individual server instances to Kubernetes without downtime. Our approach used powerful Kubernetes features like endpoints to ease the process, so we’re sharing the high level outline of the approach for anyone who wants to follow in our footsteps. See the end for important networking prerequisites. Click to read more
Hacklang at Slack: A Better PHP
Slack launched in 2014 with a PHP 5 backend. Along with several other companies, we switched to HHVM in 2016 because it ran our PHP code faster. We stayed with HHVM because it offers an entirely new language: Hack (searchable as Hacklang). Hack makes our developers faster by improving productivity through better tooling. Hack began as a superset of PHP, retaining its best…
How To Create A Particle Trail Animation In JavaScript — Smashing Magazine
If you are thinking about distracting visitors of your website with a fancy, glittering particle animation for a few moments, while some data is loaded in the background, all you need is some basic knowledge of CSS and JavaScript and a lightweight animation library such as anime.js. In the end, we should have the following result: Particle animations belong to the most impressive animations that e
Environment Variables UI
Configure different Environment Variables for Production, Preview, and Development – right in the Dashboard.
Helping sites get back online: the origin monitoring intern project
Over the course of ten weeks, our team of three interns (two engineering, one product management) went from a problem statement to a new feature, which is still working in production for all Cloudflare customers.
Cloudflare for SSH, RDP and Minecraft
Cloudflare now covers SSH, RDP and Minecraft, offering DDoS protection and increased network performance. Spectrum pay-as-you-go now available on all paid plans.
Styling in the Shadow DOM With CSS Shadow Parts
Safari 13.1 just shipped support for CSS Shadow Parts. That means the ::part() selector is now supported in Chrome, Edge, Opera, Safari, and Firefox. We’ll
