2020 was not a good year for learning
There, I said it.
npm ruin dev
In 2020, I rediscovered the enjoyment of building a website with plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no transpilin’, no compilin’, no build tools other than
How to Create a Favicon That Changes Automatically
I found this Free Favicon Maker the other day. It’s a nice tool to make a favicon (true to its name), but unlike other favicon generators, this one lets you
Upgrading and updating PostgreSQL
Update/ upgrade: what's the difference? This blog post covers the best ways of upgrading or updating PostgreSQL to the latest release.
GitHub in the enterprise
During the last year alone, over 56 million developers created more than 60 million new repos and made more than 1.9 billion contributions on GitHub. These developers are building the…
Building together: GitHub partner ecosystem continues to grow
We detail the great momentum we’ve had with our partners at GitHub this past year, building a healthy ecosystem aimed at making our users more productive.
How Facebook keeps its large-scale infrastructure hardware up and running
Facebook’s services rely on fleets of servers in data centers all over the globe — all running applications and delivering the performance our services need. This is why we need to make sure our server hardware is reliable and that we can manage server hardware failures at our scale with as little disruption to our […]
Ethical Considerations In UX Research: The Need For Training And Review — Smashing Magazine
Research is an essential part of creating good UX. We are often in roles where we interact with our users in order to collect data to inform our UX. We need to ensure our UX research is compliant with ethical standards of research conducted with humans. To do this, we need to have an awareness of potential ethical issues in research, training on how to conduct ethical research, and a systematic re
Good-bye ESNI, hello ECH!
A deep dive into the Encrypted Client Hello, a standard that encrypts privacy-sensitive parameters sent by the client, as part of the TLS handshake.
OPAQUE & PAKE Protocols
OPAQUE is a PAKE protocol that allows for password authentication without revealing the actual password to a server. Learn more about the OPAQUE protocol.
Improving DNS Privacy with Oblivious DoH in 1.1.1.1
Oblivious DoH (ODoH) makes secure DNS over HTTPS (DoH) queries into private queries which prevent the leakage of client IP addresses to resolvers. The new proposed ODoH standard addresses this problem and today we are enabling users to use this protocol with 1.1.1.1
Helping build the next generation of privacy-preserving protocols
Today, we’re making several announcements around improving Internet protocols with respect to something important to our customers and Internet users worldwide: privacy.
Creating websites with prefers-reduced-data
Spoiler alert: There is no support for it yet. But it is defined in the Media Queries Level 5 spec that includes other recent, but more familiar user
TypeScript & Relevance
In our wide world of building for the web, we have every opportunity to talk about tools. We lunge to fill every gap we find in our projects with a definitive
Very Extremely Practical CSS Art
I've always enjoyed the CSS art people create, but I’ve never ventured into it much myself. I'm familiar with many of the tricks involved, but still find it
New from Universe 2020: Dark mode, GitHub Sponsors for companies, and more
Check out the latest announcements from GitHub Universe 2020, including dark mode, Sponsors for companies, improvements to Actions, dependency review, and more.
Sponsored Post: Toptal, IP2Location, Ipdata, StackHawk, InterviewCamp.io, Educative, Triplebyte, Stream, Fauna - High Scalability -
Who's Hiring? * Looking to rapidly hire Top Software Developers? Get Started with Toptal. Toptal will match you with top-quality, pre-screened freelance software developers that meet your project requirements. All in under 48 hours. Get started right away with a no risk trial. * InterviewCamp.io has hours of system design content. They also do live system design discussions every week. They break
Day 22: getting OAuth to work in Rails
Day 22: getting OAuth to work in Rails
Day 21: wrangling systemd & setting up git deploys to a VM
Day 21: wrangling systemd & setting up git deploys to a VM
How to Reliably Scale Your Data Platform for High Volumes - Shopify
In this post, we’ll outline the approach we took to reliably scale our data platform in preparation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Building A Conversational N.L.P Enabled Chatbot Using Google’s Dialogflow — Smashing Magazine
The 2019 [Capgemini research institute](https://www.capgemini.com/research-institute/)’s report published after a research on the use of chat assistants showed a drastic 76% increase in customer satisfaction from organizations where chat assistants where built and incorporated into their services. But how does [Dialogflow](https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow/docs), a product from Google’s ecosyste
Introducing the Cloudflare Data Localization Suite
The Data Localization Suite helps businesses get the performance and security benefits of Cloudflare’s global network while making it easy to set rules and controls at the edge about where their data is stored and protected.
Web Performance Calendar
The Web Performance Calendar just started up again this year. The first two posts so far are about, well, performance! First up, Rick Viscomi writes about the
Now you C me, now you don’t, part two: exploiting the in-between
Aimed at developers, in this series we introduce and explore the memory unsafe attack surface of interpreted languages.
Release Radar
We’re here to bring you the latest and greatest releases for December 2020. These are exciting new releases from some of the coolest projects around. There’s everything from world-changing tech…
Toward a Better Quality Metric for the Video Community
Over the past few years, we have been striving to make VMAF a more usable tool not just for Netflix, but for the video community at large. This tech blog highlights our recent progress toward this…
The State of Ruby Static Typing at Shopify - Shopify
Shopify changes a lot. We merge around 400 commits to the main branch daily and deploy a new version of our core monolith 40 times a day. The Monolith is also big: 37,000 Ruby files, 622,000 methods, more than 2,000,000 calls. At this scale with a dynamic language, even with the most rigorous review process and over 150,000 automated tests, it’s a challenge to ensure everything works properly. Dev
Organizing 2000 Developers for BFCM in a Remote World - Shopify
With BFCM on the horizon, there is a lot of preparation that Shopify needs to do on our platform. This effort needs a key driver to set expectations for many teams and hold them accountable to complete the work.
How To Use MDX Stored In Sanity In A Next.js Website — Smashing Magazine
MDX gives you the minimalist ergonomics of Markdown with the flexibility of custom components. By combining MDX with Sanity and Next, you can build robust, team-friendly content editing experiences while keeping the pleasant and efficient developer experience of building Jamstack sites with React.
We Need You In The Smashing Family — Smashing Magazine
Do you like building relationships and exploring creative options? At Smashing, we are looking for a team member who’ll take good care of advertising and sponsorships across the range of everything we do at Smashing — from the magazine to our conferences. Interested? We’d love you to join us.
Welcome to Privacy & Compliance Week: Reflecting Values at Cloudflare’s Core
Over the course of the week, we'll be announcing ways that our customers can use our service in order to ensure they are in compliance with an increasingly complicated set of rules and laws around the world.
retvals, terrible teaching, and admitting we have a problem
Day 19: Clustering faces (poorly) using an autoencoder
Day 19: Clustering faces (poorly) using an autoencoder
How I write useful programming comics
How I write useful programming comics
Day 20: trying to figure out how Google Cloud IAM works
Day 20: trying to figure out how Google Cloud IAM works
An introduction to three-phase power and PDUs
This blog is a quick Electrical Engineering 101 session going over specifically how 3-phase PDUs work, along with some good practices on how we use them
Diversity and The Digital Divide: Thoughts From Tech Leaders
Leaders from across the tech industry and beyond recently joined us for Cloudflare’s Birthday Week, helping us celebrate Cloudflare’s 10th birthday. Many of them touched on the importance of diversity and making the Internet accessible to everyone.
Your DevOps guide to GitHub Universe
GitHub Universe is almost here. For more on what to expect from this year’s stream, we sat down with virtual host, Brian Douglas, for a quick Q&A on GitHub Actions,…
A World Rendered Beautifully: The Making of the BFCM 3D Data Visualization - Shopify
By Mikko Haapoja and Stephan Leroux 2020 Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is over, and another BFCM Globe has shipped. We’re extremely proud of the globe, it focused on realism, performance, and the impact our merchants have on the world. The Black Friday Cyber Monday Live Map We knew we had a tall task in front of us this year, building something that could represent orders from our one million m
Join Us For Smashing Meets Happy Holidays — Smashing Magazine
Meet our new friendly online meet-up, Smashing Meets, with three wonderful speakers, the entire Smashing family and plenty of truly smashing cats. As always, free for Smashing Members.
How To Migrate From WordPress To The Eleventy Static Site Generator — Smashing Magazine
If you’re a designer or developer with intermediate knowledge of HTML and JavaScript, and know your way around GitHub and the command line, this tutorial is for you. Today, Scott Dawson is going to walk step-by-step through converting a WordPress site into a static site generated from Markdown.
Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture
Our aspiration to augment and improve every aspect of business and life with data, demands a paradigm shift in how we manage data at scale. While the technology advances of the past decade have addressed the scale of volume of data and data processing compute, they have failed to address scale in other dimensions: changes in the data landscape, proliferation of sources of data, diversity of data u
Applying DevSecOps to your software supply chain
To best apply DevSecOps principles to improve the security of your supply chain, you should ask your developers to declare your dependencies in code; and in turn provide your developers with maintained ‘golden’ artifacts and automated downstream actions so they can focus on code.
The evolving role of operations in DevOps
GitHub’s team delves into answering the question “what are operations roles in the development and operations (DevOps) environments”. From automating the role of QA in DevOps and more for smaller, faster delivery cycles.
Improving the GHES release process: release candidates
In our ongoing “Building GitHub” series, we talk about some of the projects we’re working on to improve how efficiently we build GitHub, as well as increase GitHub’s availability, stability,…
Join our panel with WHO at GitHub Universe 2020!
The year 2020 has upended nearly every aspect of society. In a panel for GitHub Satellite back in May, we briefly covered some of the ways in which our social…
Day 18: an answer to an autoencoder question
Day 18: an answer to an autoencoder question
SuperCell: Reaching new heights for wider connectivity
As part of our efforts to help expand connectivity around the world, Facebook Connectivity has been prototyping SuperCell, a wide-area coverage solution for increasing mobile connectivity in rural communities. Now, after working with telecom industry partners to conduct several trials and data analyses, we’re ready to share what we’ve learned. Rather than produce this solution […]
Capacity Planning at Scale - Shopify
We cover our approaches to capacity planning, and how we rolled it out across the org and to dozens of teams. We’ll also share how we validated our capacity plans with scalability tests to make sure they work.
CommonMark: A Formal Specification For Markdown — Smashing Magazine
Markdown is a powerful markup language that allows editing and formatting in plain text format that can then be parsed and rendered as HTML. It has a declarative syntax that is both powerful and easy to learn for technical and non-technical folks. However, due to the consequential ambiguities in its original specification, there have been a number of distinct [flavors (or custom versions)](https:/
GitHub Availability Report: November 2020
Introduction In November, we experienced two incidents resulting in significant impact and degraded state of availability for issues, pull requests, and GitHub Actions services. November 2 12:00 UTC (lasting 32…
The State of the Octoverse 2020
Change is inevitable, and this year, it has been inescapable. We’ve had to find new ways to relate, learn, and balance both work and life at home. One thing has…
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Pummelling the Platform–Performance Testing Shopify - Shopify
Insight into the tools Shopify uses to raise confidence in our ability to serve large sales events, as well as the experimentation and regression framework built to ensure that we’re getting better, week-over-week, at handling load.
Designing An Attractive And Usable Data Importer For Your App — Smashing Magazine
Even though the development of a data importer is a complex matter, you don’t want your users’ experience with it to be just as complex or complicated. The second they experience any friction or fault in data onboarding, the chances of them bailing from the software will skyrocket. So, in this post, we’re going to focus on how best to present your data importer to users.
Painting With the Web
Matthias Ott, comparing how painter Gerhard Richter paints (do stuff, step back, take a look) to what can be the website building process and what can wreck it:
Under-Engineered Responsive Tables
I first blogged about responsive data tables in 2011. When responsive web design was first becoming a thing, there were little hurdles like data tables that
Against essential and accidental complexity
Revamping the Android testing pipeline at Dropbox
Adding it all up: The math behind designing your career
How to think about the 90,000 hours you spend at work