tech/webdev magazine

April 29, 2017

Familiarity Bias is Holding You Back: It’s Time to Embrace Arrow Functions

Saturday, April 29, 2017 Teklinks

I teach JavaScript for a living. Recently I’ve shuffled around my curriculum to teach curried arrow functions sooner — within the first few lessons. I moved it earlier in the curriculum because it’s an extremely valuable skill, and students pick up currying with arrows a lot quicker than I thought they would.

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Five Techniques to Lazy Load Images for Website Performance

Saturday, April 29, 2017 Teklinks

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible. With images making up a whopping 65% of all web content, page load time on websites can easily become an issue.

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Spring Into CSS Grid ?

Saturday, April 29, 2017 Teklinks

CSS Grid has been getting a lot of attention recently and I finally dedicated time this past weekend to sit down and get a basic understanding of how it works. It was an emotional rollercoaster of an experience (seriously, this is life changing stuff) but I was able put together some notes while creating my demo and wanted to share.

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April 28, 2017

Using Firebase as a Real Time System

Friday, April 28, 2017 Teklinks

I have been an avid user of Firebase for more than a year now. When Parse.com announced it would be shutting off, I was attending a Google Launchpad in Mountain View as a mentor. If you haven’t heard of the Google Launchpads, they are great.

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CSS in JavaScript: The future of component-based styling

Friday, April 28, 2017 Teklinks

By adopting inline styles, we can get all of the programmatic affordances of JavaScript. This gives us the benefits of something like a CSS pre-processor (variables, mixins, and functions). It also solves a lot of the problems that CSS has, such as global namespacing and styling conflicts.

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Now anyone can create a Google Classroom

Friday, April 28, 2017 Teklinks

Last month it was announced that Google Classroom would be opened up to anyone with a Google account — the collaboration tool for education was limited to those with a G Suite account, previously.

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Stealing Cars for 20 Bucks

Friday, April 28, 2017 Teklinks

[Yingtao Zeng], [Qing Yang], and [Jun Li], a.k.a. the [UnicornTeam], developed the cheapest way so far to hack a passive keyless entry system, as found on some cars: around $22 in parts, give or take a buck.

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April 27, 2017

Testing Angular faster with Jest

Thursday, April 27, 2017 Teklinks

Note: This article assumes you are using an Angular CLI v1.0 generated project from Angular v4.0.0. But it too works on Angular v2.x with CLI in beta. Despite Angular being a comprehensive framework with lots of default abstractions: e.g. custom JIT and AOT compilers, deep RxJS and Zone.

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A Service Mesh for Kubernetes (Part 1): Top-Line Service Metrics

Thursday, April 27, 2017 Teklinks

What is a service mesh, and how is it used by cloud-native apps—apps designed for the cloud? In this article, we’ll show you how to use linkerd as a service mesh on Kubernetes, and how it can capture and report top-level service metrics such as success rates, request volumes, and latencies with

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Vuejs 2 Authentication Tutorial

Thursday, April 27, 2017 Teklinks

TL;DR: Vuejs is a progressive JavaScript framework for building user interfaces on the web. It was launched shortly after ReactJS and over time, lots of developers started adopting it in their daily work. In fact, with the launch of Vuejs 2.0, the adoption and usage worldwide skyrocketed.

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How to install and use Headless Chrome on OSX

Thursday, April 27, 2017 Teklinks

This walkthrough shows you how to get headless Chrome up and running on OSX and explains in detail how to use the code examples provided by the Chrome team. Headless mode in Chrome is a new way to interact with websites without having to actually have a window up on the screen.

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5 New Programming Languages to Learn in 2017

Thursday, April 27, 2017 Teklinks

Being a developer has been a top career choice for a while, and it’s hard to imagine this will change anytime soon. Whether you’ve just started or you are an experienced programmer, probably your most frequently asked question will be what to learn next?

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Uber wants to test its flying taxis by 2020

Thursday, April 27, 2017 Teklinks

Today in Dallas, Uber is taking the wraps off its flying car plans. The company's three-day "Elevate" summit is meant to discuss all things relating to vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) craft and how Uber sees them as a major part of its future strategy.

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April 26, 2017

ES7: a simple and useful guide to master it

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 Teklinks

After exploring all the new features from ES6 (ES2015), installation, history and name pattern in this article, I will tell you about the releases of ES7 (ES2016). And if you are afraid that it will be as big as the first one, don't worry; it is much smaller.

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10 Machine Learning Examples in JavaScript

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 Teklinks

When we think of tools for developing Machine Learning software, languages like Python, C++, and MATLAB come to mind. Although it is the most popular programming language in the world, JavaScript is usually not on that list. This is mainly due to the lack of a strong AI ecosystem in JavaScript.

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The Many Tools for Shape Morphing

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 Teklinks

To no one's surprise, I'm sure, there are lots of different ways to do the same thing on the web. Shape morphing, being a thing on the web, is no different. There are some native technologies, some libraries that leverage those, and some libraries that do things all on their own.

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How To Edit A GIF Without Photoshop On Windows

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 Teklinks

GIF is a popular image format and creating GIFs is pretty easy. There are tools that let you record a screencast and save it as a GIF. There are quite a few tools that can create high quality GIFs. Imgur has a dedicated tool for creating GIFs from YouTube videos.

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Defense Against the Dark Arts: CSRF Attacks

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 Teklinks

After an unspecified "werewolf incident" we have become the new maintainer of the hogwarts.edu web app. Our first day on the job begins with Professor Dumbledore approaching us, explaining that his official hogwarts.

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April 24, 2017

Education of a Programmer

Monday, April 24, 2017 Teklinks

When I left Microsoft in October 2016 after almost 21 years there and almost 35 years in the industry, I took some time to reflect on what I had learned over all those years. This is a lightly edited version of that post. Pardon the length!

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Building a Python Code Review Scheduler: Processing Log

Monday, April 24, 2017 Teklinks

In this tutorial series, you'll see how to build a code review scheduler using Python. Throughout the course of this series, you'll brush up against some basic concepts like reading emails, sending an email, executing terminal commands from Python program, processing git logs, etc.

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Why TypeScript Is Growing More Popular

Monday, April 24, 2017 Teklinks

Why is TypeScript getting so popular? Key development frameworks depend on it and it improves developer productivity in the ever-changing JavaScript world. The recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey and the annual RedMonk programming language rankings both showed that TypeScript — the open source project started by Microsoft to combine transpiling for advanced JavaScript features with static type checking and tooling — is reaching new heights of popularity.

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Bot framework, web chat and push notifications

Monday, April 24, 2017 Teklinks

This blog article is explaining how to setup web push notifications on a bot framework web chat control. For this, we will use service workers and VAPID. All the code shown here is available in this Github repository containing the full version of it.

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April 23, 2017

Server-side Rendering With Preact and Firebase

Sunday, April 23, 2017 Teklinks

Node.js 6.6.0 added a sporadically useful bug/feature: logging unhandled promise rejections to the console by default. In other words, the below script will print an error to the console: By virtue of the event loop, scheduling tasks in Node.js is relatively straightforward.

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April 22, 2017

Let’s Build a Web App with Vue, Chart.js and an API

Saturday, April 22, 2017 Teklinks

Data is beautiful. And with modern technologies it is crazy easy to visualize your data and create great experiences. In this quick how to, we cover how to interact with the npm ? API to get download statistics of a package and generate a chart from this data with Chart.js With Vue.

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April 20, 2017

Better Git configuration

Thursday, April 20, 2017 Teklinks

I like Git. I use it all the time. As I sometimes do, I recently took some time to really dig in, read through documentation, and review my global Git configuration. Welcome to my fourth stack improvements post!

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The Can-Do’s of CodePen Projects

Thursday, April 20, 2017 Teklinks

We just recently launched Projects, the latest big feature over on CodePen. It's quite a bit different than the Pen Editor, so let's take a look at all the things it can do! With CodePen Projects, you get a sidebar of files for you to put whatever files you like.

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How Does RAM Speed and Timing Affect My PC’s Performance?

Thursday, April 20, 2017 Teklinks

When it comes to computers, more is better. Well, sort of. Most users understand that a faster processor, with speed expressed in megahertz or gigahertz, is more desirable. Likewise, it’s fairly obvious that having more gigabytes of memory (aka RAM) is a good thing.

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React Native Performance — An Updated Example

Thursday, April 20, 2017 Teklinks

I’m working on my performance talk for React Amsterdam 2017, which is based on the post “Performance Limitations of React Native and How to Overcome Them”. I’ve decided to freshen up the example we’ll be discussing in order to walk through some exciting new API available today.

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JavaScript: What excites me in 2017

Thursday, April 20, 2017 Teklinks

The web disseminates ideas globally, instantly at zero cost. Because JS executes on the Web it has an unfair advantage over every other language. the feedback loop for collaboration is very tight. We can see code executing without compiling or building.

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Introducing ngErrors, declarative form errors for Angular

Thursday, April 20, 2017 Teklinks

I’ve been working on an open source project to bring better validation to Angular’s reactive forms. In this post we’ll take a look at how to use it, why I created it and the problems it aims to solve. If you’re familiar with AngularJS (1.x) then you’ve likely stumbled across ngMessages.

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MasterCard adds fingerprint sensors to payment cards

Thursday, April 20, 2017 Teklinks

Our fingerprints are quickly replacing PINs and passwords as our primary means of unlocking our phones, doors and safes. They're convenient, unique, and ultimately more secure than easily guessed or forged passwords and signatures.

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April 19, 2017

? Automagically Unsubscribe in Angular

Wednesday, April 19, 2017 Teklinks

As you probably know when you subscribe to an observable or event in JavaScript, you usually need to unsubscribe at a certain point to release memory in the system. Otherwise, you will have a memory leak.

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