august.md

August 2018

• Being Human Podcast - #23 Leaving Facebook – with Kent Beck - Kent was fired for being the one who wanted to point out the downsides to tech choices whereas FB's performance review process incentivizes promoting your "impact" (thus, only upsides). This is what growth-only companies do, because they fear hostile takeovers, market share reductions, etc., more than they fear the desctruction of everything.
• (PDF) The Scientific Prize Network Predicts Who Pushes the Boundaries of Science - see also
  • Matthew Effect
  • Robert K. Merton
  • Matilda Effect
  • Harriet Zuckerman
• HTML and the DOM. Properties vs. Attributes
• Things to watch out for when it comes to JavaScript Object Type Coercion
  • in particular, Symbol.toPrimitive
• "schema-typed: Front-end data validation begins with modeling" => Schema for data modeling & validation
• How have I lived without YAHOO's xss-filters
• Stop future proofing software - Or start doing it the right way
• (PDF) The Abstract is ‘an Enemy’: Alternative Perspectives to Computational Thinking
• Test Driven Development: what it is, and what it is not.
• Pack JS code fast & easy. fastpack
• Zach Bonaker, Helping People Understand TDD by Writing a Story
• What they don't tell you about event sourcing
  • I wanted to like this one, too, but off into the weeds about task-based UIs and I stopped caring...
• I wanted to believe, but this is just another hack-laden dynamic import fest with ObjectURLs, Implementing single file Web Components
• (podcast, 10:32) Eric Normand on Representing state changes with pure functions
• server-side rendering JavaScript views with Hypernova

  First and foremost, server-side rendering is a better user experience compared to just client-side rendering. The user gets the content faster, the webpage is more accessible when JS fails or is disabled, and search engines have an easier time indexing it. Secondly, it provides a better developer experience. Writing the same markup twice both on the server in your preferred templating library and in JavaScript can be tedious and hard to maintain. Hypernova lets you write all of your view code in a single place without having to sacrifice the user‘s experience.

• Axax, Async Iterator Extensions for JavaScript
• JavaScript fluent validation library
• speedscope - Interactive Flamegraph Explorer
• Thumbs up Lessons Learned Writing Unit Tests
• @webreflection, domdiff - Diffing the DOM without virtual DOM
• Conversational flow diagrams... Lessons learned moving from web to voice development
• Phenomenon, A fast 2kB low-level WebGL API
• New from the "Programming is terrible" guy => Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything
• @rajaraodv on JavaScript Symbols, Iterators, Generators, Async/Await, and Async Iterators — All Explained Simply
• hafcaf is extremely minimal single-page application (SPA)framework
  • Inspired by @heydonworks, 2015 Reimagining Single-Page Applications With Progressive Enhancement
• No need for null checking if you use the Null Object pattern

  • Instead of throwing an exception or returning a null reference, return a null object (i.e. an empty list) instead, so that there is no need to verify that the return value is in fact a list.

• Happy 10th birthday to MinUnit, a minimal unit testing framework in 3 lines of C.
• Frank McSherry on Differential Dataflow, "an implementation of differential dataflow over timely dataflow on Rust."
• Vitaliy Akimov(2018), Async Generators as an alternative to State Management
• 5 Mistakes I Made When Doing Custom Data Visualization With D3.js
• CSS Tricks 2014, Centering in CSS: A Complete Guide
• The A11Y Project, An accessible widget & pattern library
• Universal Nearest Neighbor Algorithm to Sort Complex Data Found
• WebAssembly: How and Why
• Basics of Bi-directionalism
• "Filter Before You Parse:" Faster Analytics on Raw Data with Sparser
• (PDF) Simon Thompson's book on Constructive Type Theory
• Program synthesis with TLA+
• What are Bloom filters and why are they useful?
• @_nobodyme_ on Dynamic Programming for Brute-forcers
• Student finds classical alternative to quantum algorithm
  • What really happened: Student tries to prove quantum speedup can't be done with classical techniques but can't, then derives a classical version to match it
• Like Homebrew for Windows, Scoop installs the tools you know and love
• from 2014, Joe Gregorio's Zero Framework Manifesto

more miscellaneous

• The Clipboard API Crashcourse

• Using React with Statecharts

  • first article in the series, How to visually design state in JavaScript

• RisingStack's D3 Bar Chart Tutorial

• Slot Pattern in JSX, means you can Pass Multiple Children to a React Component with Slots

• William Raseman, Multivariate Distances: Mahalanobis vs. Euclidean

  • history of Mahalanobis distance on wikipedia
  • implementation of Mahalanobis distance in JavaScript

• Andrew Coyle on designing

  • Better Forms
  • Better Tables

• Complex Loader and Progress Management for Vanilla JS

  • by Fatih Kadir Akın @fkadev, who also wrote Managing Complex Waiting Experiences on Web UIs

• "declarative, terse and fastest approach to rendering" with once

• @FogleBird, Solving Rush Hour, the Puzzle

• Colin Eberhardt, April 2018, Writing WebAssembly By Hand

  • works on webassemblyjs
  • also published Oct 2017, Migrating D3 Force Layout to WebAssembly
  • use AssemblyScript to compile TypeScript (or just JavaScript) to webassembly...

• Jordi Moraleda, TDD means zen; TDD + Serverless means nirvana

• Ashley Davis, Server-Side Visualization With Nightmare

• Florian Rappl, Building a progressive web app (PWA): No React, no Angular, no Vue

• Very nice 2017 writeup by @herbertograca on Event-Driven Architecture

• Curated collection of useful JavaScript snippets that you can understand in 30 seconds or less

• How to manage your workstation configuration with Ansible

• Mark Seemann, 2012, The Resemblance idiom

• @cowboyd (charles lowell), microstates

• experimental itty bitty

• @webreflection, Universal Bundle Loader

• better type checking with Maybe types

• (sounds like a Decision Table) - design UI states and communicate effectively... using the Finite State Machine table

• wired - mutation math that shows how life keeps evolving

• reduce javascript payloads with tree shaking

• frontstuff, in defense of utility-first CSS

• Alexander Zlatkov, How JavaScript Works: internals of shadow DOM

• chris ferdinandi, polyfill the browser's <datalist> element autocomplete

• angus croll, why i wrote just

• jeremy church, responsive table

• chris ferdinandi, check whether part of an element is out of the viewport

• (PDF) State of Mutation Testing at google

• Heydon Pickering discovers CSS: A New Kind Of JavaScript

  • Get reacquainted with CSS here The Ultimate Guide to Learning CSS

• Jorge Manrubia, Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails

• More FUD from the "too many tests make your code hard to fix" camp, Lean Testing or Why Unit Tests are Worse than You Think

• Hidden Cost of TouchScreens

• If You’re Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language, plus links to original by Leslie Lamport.

• (PDF) Rainer Manthey, 1990, Declarative Languages-Paradigm of the Past or Challenge of the Future? - advocates a language design that supports both declarative and procedural (OOP) programming paradigms (specifically for the database) in 1990.

more math and logic

• (PDF) David Harel, Dexter Kozen, and Jerzy Tiuryn, Dynamic Logic

• July 18, 2018 - huge news - Evolutionary algorithm outperforms deep-learning machines at video games

  • more about Evolutionary Algorithms
  • such as Ant Colony Optimization algorithms
  • and the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm

• (PDF) 2012 online version of, Stephen Read, 1989, Relevant Logic: A Philosophical Examination of Inference

• Ruth Barcan Marcus

• Frege's Puzzle on the names Hesperus and Phosphorus

• (PDF) online versin of Theodore Sider's book, Logic for Philosophy

• Dynamic Epistemic Logic

• (PDF) Johan van Benthem, 2001, Logics for Information Update

  • introduces the concept of Bisumulation, "a binary relation between state transition systems." (q.v. Transition System)

• (PDF) The problem with knowledge update and entailment update is the problem of logical omniscience -- blecch, this piece by Robert Stalnaker is about belief rather than the model of knowledge update and how thoroughly a catalog of entailment is updated

  • on the other hand, here's a (PDF) MA thesis by Indrek Lõbus, In Defence of Logical Omniscience
  • (PDF) Indrek Lõbus's brilliant BA thesis in philosophy from the University of Tartu, Criticsism of the Propositionalist Approach to Solving the Problem of Opaque Attitude Contexts, and an Outline of an Alternative

• Epistemic Temporal Logic, AKA Epistemic Modal Logic

• (PDF) Joseph Halpern, Why Bother With Syntax?

• (PDF) Yde Venema, Temporal Logic

• (PDF) Johan van Benthem, Eric Pacuit, 2006, The Tree of Knowledge in Action: Towards a Common Perspective

• more reversible computing stuff

  • (PDF) Culik, On Invertible Cellular Automata
  • (PDF) Toffoli on Reversible Computing

• Standard ML

  • Mythryl Mythryl, bases on SML/NJ
  • Mythryl is Not just a bag of features like most programming languages
  • (PDF) Online guide to Programming in Standard ML
  • Pretty cool introduction to SML with A Sample of Standard ML, the TreeSort Algorithm, and Monoids

• Self-Adjusting Computation and Data Structures

  • (PDF) splay trees, Daniel Sleator & Robert Tarjan, 1985, Self-adjusting binary search trees
  • Umut Acar's dissertation and other resources on Self-Adjusting Computation
  • (Video) Yaron Minsky's Lambda Jam 2018 video talk on self-adjusting computation, Reactive Programming with Diff and Patch

• (PDF) J. R. Driscoll, N. Sarnak, D. D. Sleator, R. E. Tarjan (1986), Making Data Structures Persistent

• (PDF) Chris Okasaki's masters thesis version of Purely Functional Data Structures

• (PDF) Robert Kowalski, 1979, Logic for Problem Solving - full-length book on clausal forms, etc., for Prolog programming.

tweets to send out next week (July 9)

• What Your Standup Reveals About Your Team by @xshay https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/what-your-standup-reveals-about-your-team-ccebfb3a0b0f

• Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time by @xshay https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/performance-reviews-are-a-waste-of-time-87c88d7553b4

• RT'd earlier ~ thread about importance of whiteboards from @MrAlanCooper https://twitter.com/MrAlanCooper/status/1013097960979120128

• The "Boring Software" manifesto via 'Maurits van der Schee' https://tqdev.com/2018-the-boring-software-manifesto

Some Examples

`The things on the left that are simple and proven, while the things on the right are hyped and volatile.

• 3-tier applications vs. micro services
• relational database vs. NoSQL
• page reloads vs. single page applications `

• No, you don't need ML/AI. You need SQL by @cyberomin https://cyberomin.github.io/startup/2018/07/01/sql-ml-ai.html

reminder:

• state-function: https://gist.github.com/dfkaye/7b62e6e8139436306f4b
• value-function: https://gist.github.com/dfkaye/692c0a527d5ee5eeda3c