Highlights from Git 2.33
The open source Git project just released Git 2.33, with features and bug fixes from over 74 contributors. Here’s a look at some of the most interesting features and changes.
Securing your GitHub account with two-factor authentication
The benefits of multifactor authentication are widely documented, and there are a number of options for using 2FA on GitHub.
How To Develop Your Business’ Technology Roadmap — Smashing Magazine
Software development without a roadmap is akin to driving off a cliff — an undertaking that seriously jeopardizes your product’s life. What is a business technology roadmap, and how can one be developed to support software development? That’s what we’re here to talk about. Here’s how to develop a business technology roadmap that ensures your project safely reaches its final destination.
Apricot subsea cable will boost internet capacity, speeds in the Asia-Pacific region
We are excited to announce our participation in the Apricot subsea cable system, together with leading regional and global partners. When completed, the project (which is still subject to regulatory approvals) will deliver much-needed internet capacity, redundancy, and reliability to expand connections in the Asia-Pacific region. The 12,000-kilometer-long cable will connect Japan, Taiwan, Guam, th
Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge
We’re giving away 300+ boxes of our most popular swag, while enabling collaboration with other participants through our Workers Discord channel.
Building the Cloudflare Summer Challenge Application
If you haven’t already heard, we’re hosting the Cloudflare Summer Developer Challenge, a contest for the Cloudflare community at large. Anybody – yes, including you – can sign up for free and compete for a chance to win one of 300 available prizes.
Unicode Arrows
Looks like... 253 of them. I love the little water ⥾ spout one. (U+297e). Because. And I like how it's a fairly useful little site at a great domain and with
Building a Cool Front End Thing Generator
Whether you are just starting out on the front end, or you’ve been doing it for a long time, building a tool that can generate some cool front-end magic can
Modelling Developer Infrastructure Teams - Shopify
I’ve been managing Developer Infrastructure teams (alternatively known as Developer Acceleration, Developer Productivity, and other such names) for almost a decade now. Developer Infrastructure (which we usually shorten to “Dev Infra”) covers a lot of ground, especially at a company like Shopify that’s invested heavily in the area, from developer environments and continuous integration/continuous
More devices, fewer CAPTCHAs, happier users
Today, we are taking another step in helping to reduce the Internet’s reliance on CAPTCHAs to prove that you are not a robot. We are expanding the reach of our Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood experiment by adding support for a much wider range of devices.
Introducing Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Private Web Attestation with Cross/Multi-Vendor Hardware
In Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood the server sends a message to the browser that the hardware security signs, demonstrating its authenticity.
Stay alert
A few days ago, Chris wrote up his thoughts about how alert(), confirm(), and prompt() were being deprecated by Chrome and collected a bunch of thoughts from
Securing internal web apps
A deep-dive into how we provide access to internal applications
What’s new from GitHub Changelog? July 2021 Recap
A public beta for CodeQL package manager, additional options to manage Actions runs from first-time contributors, GitHub Discussions translation, and more.
Seamless teaching and learning through GitHub Classroom and Visual Studio Code
This GitHub Classroom extension for Visual Studio Code provides a simplified introduction to Git, GitHub Classroom, and Visual Studio Code.
Useful Figma Plugins And Tools — Smashing Magazine
Useful Figma plugins that will help you fix all the little slowdowns and boost your productivity. From color management and image assets to SVG shapes and animation. Whether you’re just starting out with Figma or have been using it for a good while now, this post will give you just enough pointers to make your design process faster and smoother.
Static vs. Dynamic vs. Jamstack: Where's The Line?
You'll often hear developers talking about “static” vs. “dynamic” sites, or you may have heard someone use the term Jamstack. What do these terms mean, and
Wanna see a whiter white?
Heck of a CSS trick here from Dongsung Kim.
Napkin
We took a surface level look at Pipedream the other day, which really does look cool. It's like a much more modern and fancy version of what Yahoo Pipes was.
PostgreSQL vs Redis vs Memcached performance
PostgreSQL vs Redis vs Memcached: How would it look on the performance side, if one just skips the cache & hits the database directly?
GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces
Over the past months, we’ve left our macOS model behind and moved to Codespaces for the majority of GitHub.com development.
Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance
Facebook engineers have built and open-sourced an Open Compute Time Appliance, an important component of the modern timing infrastructure. To make this possible, we came up with the Time Card — a PCI Express (PCIe) card that can turn almost any commodity server into a time appliance. With the help of the OCP community, we […]
Bridging the Gap Between Developers and End Users - Shopify
In every business, regardless of industry, it is important to keep an open communication line between the consumer and the producer. In the tech world, this line of communication comes in the form of customer support, chatbots, or contact forms.
How We Design Our APIs at Slack
More than five years ago, we launched the Slack Platform, giving developers an easy way to build apps in Slack and publish them in our App Directory. Today, millions of users bring their work into Slack, and those apps built by over 885,000 active developers on the platform are key to further improving collaboration in…
New Smashing Workshops on Front-End & Design — Smashing Magazine
How do we build and establish a successful, bulletproof design system? What’s the state of HTML Email? And what are new, smart interface design patterns we could use? Let’s find out. With our [brand new online workshops](https://smashingconf.com/online-workshops/) on front-end & design — to help us all boost skills online.
Handling Mounting And Unmounting Of Navigation Routes In React Native — Smashing Magazine
Often you need two different sets of navigation stacks for pre and post user authentication. Usually, to see more content, you have to be authenticated in some way. In many Apps, authentication is one of the most important parts because it confirms that the person trying to gain access to protected content has the right to access the information. Learning how to do it right is an important step in
WooCommerce With Apple Pay and Google Pay
Got a WooCommerce store? It behooves you to offer a variety of payment methods. Just anecdotally, I'm sure both you and me have been annoyed and even
View Source (on Mobile)
Have you ever wished you could see the HTML source of a web page while on a mobile browser, which generally doesn't offer that feature? If you have a desktop
CSS Nesting, specificity, and you
Here’s Kilian Valkhof on CSS nesting which isn't available in browsers yet, but will be soon. There are a few differences he notes between CSS nesting and
How we’re making Dropbox data centers 100% carbon neutral
Smashing Podcast Episode 41 With Eva PenzeyMoog: Designing For Safety — Smashing Magazine
In this episode, we’re talking about designing for safety. What does it mean to consider vulnerable users in our designs? Drew McLellan talks to expert Eva PenzeyMoog to find out.
Exploring the CSS Paint API: Image Fragmentation Effect
In my previous article, I created a fragmentation effect using CSS mask and custom properties. It was a neat effect but it has one drawback: it uses a lot of
Choice Words about the Upcoming Deprecation of JavaScript Dialogs
It might be the very first thing a lot of people learn in JavaScript:
The Large, Small, and Dynamic Viewports
We've got viewport units (e.g. vw, vh, vmin, vmax), and they are mostly pretty great. It's cool to always have a unit available that is relative to the entire
August 2021 Campus Experts applications are open!
The GitHub Campus Expert applications are officially open for the August 2021 generation!
The World of CSS Transforms
The “transform” property is such a powerful part of the CSS language! In this blog post, we'll take a deep look at this property and see some of the nifty things it can do.
Risk-driven backbone management during COVID-19 and beyond
What the research is: A first-of-its-kind study detailing our backbone management strategy to ensure high service performance throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic moved most social interactions online and caused an unprecedented stress test on our global network infrastructure with tens of data center regions. At this scale, failures such as fiber cuts, router misconfigurations, […] Read
HTTP/3 From A To Z: Core Concepts — Smashing Magazine
After almost five years in development, the new HTTP/3 protocol is nearing its final form. Earlier iterations were already available as an experimental feature, but you can expect the availability and use of HTTP/3 proper to ramp up over in 2021. So what exactly is HTTP/3? Why was it needed so soon after HTTP/2? How can or should you use it? And especially, how does it improve web performance? Let
Introducing Deploy Hooks for Cloudflare Pages
Today, we are proud to announce a new way to connect your Pages application with your headless CMSs and databases: introducing Deploy Hooks for Pages.
New Nuxt Features past v2.10
Nuxt offers an incredible developer experience, with a lot of performance and application setup best practices baked in. In recent releases, they’ve been
Efficient Infinite Utility Helpers Using Inline CSS Custom Properties and calc()
I recently wrote a very basic Sass loop that outputs several padding and margin utility classes. Nothing fancy, really, just a Sass map with 11 spacing
How we built a general purpose key value store for Facebook with ZippyDB
ZippyDB is the largest strongly consistent, geographically distributed key-value store at Facebook. Since we first deployed ZippyDB in 2013, this key-value store has expanded rapidly, and today, ZippyDB serves a number of use cases, ranging from metadata for a distributed filesystem, counting events for both internal and external purposes, to product data that’s used for […]
Understanding GraphQL for Beginners–Part Three - Shopify
In Understanding GraphQL for Beginners–Part Three, we learn what are mutations and create mutation queries to modify data.
Four Useful VSCode Extensions For Web Developers — Smashing Magazine
VS Code can be supercharged wuth hundreds of [VS Code extensions](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/05/useful-vs-code-extensions-web-developers/). In this article, Leonardo shares four useful extensions that help him in his daily work.
Cloudflare Helps K-12s Go Back to School
Cloudflare is excited to announce our Back to School initiative that provides special K-12 Education pricing to help school districts stop cyber attacks while improving web performance.
How to Build a Full-Stack Mobile Application With Flutter, Fauna, and GraphQL
Flutter is Google's UI framework used to create flexible, expressive cross-platform mobile applications. It is one of the fastest-growing frameworks for
Release Radar
It’s been a busy time of the year for our Hubbers (GitHub employees). We’ve been shipping products, getting ready for launches, and taking some much needed time off for the…
Usability Pitfalls of Disabled Buttons, and How To Avoid Them — Smashing Magazine
How can we make disabled buttons more inclusive? When do they work well, and when do they fail on us? And finally, when do we actually need them, and how can we avoid them? In this article, Vitaly Friedman will take a look to common usability issues with disabled buttons, how to fix these issues and when disabling buttons actually makes sense. We’ll start from the beginning, looking into when disa
Modernizing a familiar approach to REST APIs, with PostgreSQL and Cloudflare Workers
By using PostgREST with Postgres, we can build REST API-based applications. In particular, it's an excellent fit for Cloudflare Workers, our serverless function platform. Workers is a great place to build REST APIs.
GitHub Availability Report: July 2021
In July, GitHub experienced no incidents resulting in service downtime to our core services.
Open sourcing Winterfell: A STARK prover and verifier
We are releasing Winterfell, our implementation of a STARK prover/verifier to Crates.io Winterfell is an easy to use open source implementation of STARKs for security and privacy applications. One potential application for Winterfell’s zero-knowledge proofs is blockchain privacy and scalability. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Clarke’s Third Law What if the
React Children And Iteration Methods — Smashing Magazine
In this article, we’ll discuss and learn about the use case of iterating over React `children` and the ways to do it. In particular, we will deep dive into one of the utility methods, `React.Children.toArray`, that React gives us, which helps to iterate over the children in a way which ensures performance and determinism.
Durable Objects: Easy, Fast, Correct — Choose three
When multiple clients access the same storage concurrently, race conditions abound. Durable Objects can make it easier. We recently rolled out improvements to Durable Objects that automatically correct many common race conditions while actually making your code faster.
How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine
Embracing the fragility of the web empowers us to build UIs capable of adapting to the functionality they can offer, whilst still providing value to users. The User Experience (UX) doesn’t need to be all or nothing — just what is usable. This premise, known as graceful degradation allows a system to continue working when parts of it are dysfunctional — much like an electric bike becomes a regular
Helping Keep Governments Safe and Secure
Cloudflare and Accenture Federal Services (AFS) have been selected to deliver a joint solution to help the United States Government defend against cybersecurity attacks.
Evolution of search engines architecture - Algolia New Search Architecture Part 1 - High Scalability -
What would a totally new search engine architecture look like? Who better than Julien Lemoine, Co-founder & CTO of Algolia, to describe what the future of search will look like. This is the first article in a series. Search engines, and more generally, information retrieval systems, play a central role in almost all of today’s technical stacks. Information retrieval started in the beginning of com
Reliability meeting experiences
Refactoring CSS: Strategy, Regression Testing And Maintenance (Part 2) — Smashing Magazine
After analyzing CSS and its weaknesses, and management giving a green light to the refactoring project, it’s time to get to work. A team needs to agree on the internal code standards and best practices, plan out the refactoring strategy, and outline individual tasks. We need to set up a visual regression testing suite, and a maintenance plan to enforce the new standards and best practices in the f
Measurement, benchmarking, and data analysis are underrated
Four Lessons We Learned from Creating Spotify’s Desktop App
TL;DR Over the years, Spotify’s brand has expanded to encompass a number of products, from mobile apps to to . But sitting at the core is our flagship product, the one that started it all: the desktop app. In of our podcast series, “”, host and Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström walks through how the app (and Spotify in general) came to be — and the product lessons you should take away from that