Monthly Digest - April 2019

Hello everybody! 👋

When I sat down 30min ago to write this newsletter I felt like that not many things were going on this month... but oh well. I was on the road with Twilio for three events, spent Easter with my family and attended JSUnconf.

I still made it to write a few things and moreover read some very good articles. Here we go with my favorite content in April. Enjoy!

"Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective" by Facundo Corradini is one of the best articles on the topic I read in a long time. He describes his experience suffering from temporary vestibular disorders. It's an eye-opening read and reminds you of the fact that we all can benefit from an accessible web and world.

The last months I dived into headers for a talk and went onto the journey to learn how you can use them to build better products. I wrote a rather lengthy article on HTTP headers and how these can help to make the web safer, more affordable and respectful. It turned out alright, I think. 😉

Microsoft released a new accessibility tool – accessibilityinsights.io. Mark Reay, who works on this tool with his team, took the time to jump on a call with me explaining the functionality of this new tool and how you can check your sites for accessibility issues with it quickly.

Sometimes I notice that I treat the people I interact with differently depending on how many Twitter followers they have. I started an experiment and built a quick Firefox extension to hide all follower counts on Twitter. So far I'm enjoying the experience, and as a side-effect, I feel less pressured which is great. You can give it a try, too.

Unfortunately, I didn't make it this month to write down any learnings. But on the other hand, I was lucky and was allowed to present my talk "I didn't know that" at JSUnconf. You can have a look at the slides if you want to see a best-of of my TIL (Today I learned) posts.

I shared a few learnings on Twitter, though. 😄

You can use npm ls with additional arguments

Sometimes you have to find out the location of a specific dependency in your node_modules folder. The way I did it so far was to grep over the whole dependency tree to find a particular item. It turns out that npm ls accepts an additional argument which you can use in case you're only looking for a specific dependency. Very handy.👌

Arrays have a copyWithin method

map, reduce, filter, ... there are many array methods that I use daily. I came across copyWithin which I have never heard of before.

How to detect an async function

Did you know that you can detect async functions? I didn't – David Walsh shared a nifty trick using constructore.name.

I read a lot about habits and ways to improve my life to become more productive. There are many tricks to do better. One approach is not to set too ambitious goals. One tiny step after another is the way that works best for me.

In his TED talk "How to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals" Stephen Duneier shares his approach to achieve impressive and hilarious goals in his life. It's a very well executed and entertaining talk. Highly recommended!

Speaking again about Twitter - the following quote by Vala Afshar resonated profoundly with me.

You can spend a lifetime to build a good reputation and then ruin your efforts with less than 280 characters. Be mindful of what you share. Be less judgmental and mean spirited. Don't belittle people. And if given a choice between clever or kind, always choose kind. Be kind.

With the risk that this newsletter may become a Lucy Rose fan newsletter - she's playing tomorrow in Berlin, and I can't wait! This month the song that made me stop working was "Conversation".

And that's it for today. Have a great May everybody! 👋