Monthly Digest August 2019

Hello everybody! 👋

I hope you had a good summer and took the chance to take a break! As we're now entering the time with wind and rain, I want to send you articles that you can read over a sweet tea. Enjoy!

Maybe you're like me, and you're running Lighthouse on your sites to see how the rating of your websites is. For my site, it's currently a 98 performance score.

While this is still pretty good, I always wondered what I need to do specifically to reach the 100. Lighthouse gives you a lot of helpful tips, but it doesn't tell how it calculates the score.

If you're curious what metrics you have to improve, you'll find answers in this Google Sheet.

How much does your browser communicate back home, you ask? Jonathan Sampson did helpful research on what different browsers (Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Chrome, and Firefox) do when you open them for the first time. Very interesting!

I switched back and forth between Hyper and iTerm2 several times over the last few years. I like Hyper because it looks great and is nicely extensible, but it always felt a few milliseconds slower than iTerm. With the latest iTerm update a reduced look entered the stage, and you can enable a beautiful status bar, too!

If you're using a Node.js version manager and wonder how you can display the currently used Node.js version in the status bar this article by Nick Jones will help you out.

The "dangerous knowledge-comparison" is very present in our industry. It's always about what we know or don't know. This article by Alon Kiriati is an excellent read advising how to deal with the feeling of "not knowing enough".

How to create your custom JavaScript repl

I'm a person that prototypes a lot in the Browser or Node.js console. I learned that you could build a custom Node.js repl with just a few lines of code. A custom repl can be very helpful if you have a complex Node.js app. You can set up a quick-to-run entry point that provides you all the needed application state so that you can prototype away!

caption-side controls the position of a table caption

The caption element in tables is rarely used in Web Development. It provides you with a way to label your tables, but it has one gotcha. The spec defines that caption has to be the first element in a table. This makes it hard to style and hard to fit with design requirements.

Did you know that there is a caption-side CSS property? You can use caption-side to control the position of the caption element. This property might be useful if you're captioning your tables.

Select multiple tabs in Chrome and firefox

A very short one – I learned that you could select multiple tabs in Chrome and Firefox. This feature can be very convenient if you want to mute or pin several tabs at once.

A few months back, I attended NDC Oslo, and "Shaving my head made me a better programmer" was such a strong talk! Alex Qin describes her journey in the tech industry. It's a scary, emotional, and eye-opening talk!

Highly recommended!

Currently, I'm reading "The Manager's Path" by Camille Fournier. It's an excellent read, even if you don't want to become a manager. The following sentence profoundly resonated with me.

Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings.

For background: I feel quickly tired after too much human interaction, which leads to me not being my best self. Sometimes I have to push through to treat people like they deserve it.

I discovered "Jungle" by Tash Sultana on YouTube and oh well... It's a hypnotic song, and the living room performance is just amazing!

And that's it friends. 👋 Have a great September!