Week 02 of 2022

Weeklies are my notes of things not big enough for a blog post but worthy of being mentioned and linked to. Find all of my Weeklies at /weeklies.

• Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2021 refresh

  Lynn Fisher has done it again. For years, she's done amazing annual refreshers to her website, turning it into an interactive piece of art and this year is no exception. Combining the parallax effect style made popular by Disney with the modern web technologies, her website creates quite a journey when resizing it from the smallest width outward. And what's great about this is that she writes exceptional articles about each one, you can find the earlier year's ones from her blog as well. foo

• Open Source Considered Harmful

  After the big open source cases like Log4j security vulnerability and colors.js and faker.js case, Morten Rand-Hendriksen writes about open source and why he believes the model is harmful both to contributors involved and to the communities affected. If you like his writing, I'd also like to recommend his other blog post, Blogging is dead. Long live ephemerality. which is one of my favorites from Morten.

• Raymond Hettinger - Beyond PEP 8 -- Best practices for beautiful intelligible code - PyCon 2015

  I rewatched one of my all-time favorite conference talks this week. Raymond Hettinger talks about writing beautiful code and does it in a really nice way. He walks the viewer through an example code, first cleaning it up to PEP8 style standards and then making it pythonic. And not only that but the talk is more than just an example of refactoring. He talks about why these things matter and how things end up in certain ways. I could listen to Hettinger talk for hours.

• How to tame the devDependencies of your project?

  Managing dependencies in Javascript projects can be quite an undertaking as the project grows. In this blog post, Juho Vepsäläinen writes about one solution, using mrm to keep your projects' dependencies in sync.

• How to mentor software engineers

  Mentoring (and being mentored) is something very close to my heart. When I was studying at the university, I got very lucky to find a great mentor. I didn't seek out for a mentor and we never called our relationship "mentorship" but that's what it was and I think that's why it was so successful. I've tried participating in a few mentorship programs but they often feel so distant and artificial which is bit sad. My mentorship was more about becoming friends with someone who shared my world view but was more experienced in the industry. So he was able to push me forward by mentoring more than I could have achieved alone. I have since had the pleasure to be a mentor to a varying cast of juniors in my career and it has been fruitful and fulfilling. In this post, David Golden gives good tips for mentoring for those who are, or want to become, mentors for engineers. He also links to a couple of good other resources worth checking out.