Week 21 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.

• handcalcs: Python calculations in Jupyter, as though you wrote them by hand by Connor Ferster

  handcalcs is an interesting Python library that renders TeX-styled math formulas and equations within Python Jupyter notebooks. Math is one of those things that is difficult to translate to ASCII in easy and readable way, both when writing and when reading, so this is a big improvement.

• An Organizer's Guide to Pronoun Buttons by Fen Slattery

  Fen Slattery wrote a great detailed guide for event organizers on how to help make your event more inclusive and a better experience by providing pronoun buttons. I first encountered pronoun buttons Django Day Copenhagen and I think it's a great idea that will hopefully gain more adoption over time.

• npm security update: Attack campaign using stolen OAuth tokens by Greg Ose

  Recently we've got a few more attacks through the package registries. Greg from GitHub wrote a really nice and detailed explanation of what the NPM breach meant for them and their users and how things are being improved upon.

• Managing up by Ellen Chisa

  I've learned a lot about managing up over the past 4 years working at Futurice as I've been building a new function (developer relations) from scratch. I have to say, not my favorite thing to do at work as I'd rather always focus and spend my energy on the community initiatives but I guess in certain situations it's quite inevitable.

  Ellen Chisa wrote a great piece about different management styles and how to effectively navigate those to reach your goals more efficiently by working the management.

• Top 5 Struggles of a Developer Advocate by James Q Quick

  Measuring one's success in a role, being bit outside all traditional departments, losing touch on technical depth, having a ton of responsibilities and balancing travel are all things that many developer advocates think about at least sometimes during their job.

  I agree with many of James' notes here and kept nodding my head while reading through the article. Maybe the main difference is that I really don't like input metrics because in bad environment they can easily become gameable metrics that can be achieved without having any positive impact on the real goals.

• Building a CLI application in 2022 by JustSteveKing

  It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of command line tools, both as a developer building them and as a user using them. I feel right at home at my command line and because of its limitations, there's a lot of interesting design decisions to be made in that space.

  Steve wrote a nice article about the tools and options available for building CLI tools in the PHP, Rust and Go ecosystems.

  If you're interested in designing and building command line tools, I also recommend Command Line Interface Guidelines that is brilliant in-depth look into the topic.

• Using Screenshots in Production by Doug Sillars

  If you're taking screenshots with Mac's built-in tools and posting those to your blog or website, it's likely you're sharing huge unoptimized pictures. Doug did an experiment to see how much these default screenshots are used in the web and how much potential there is for performance optimizations.

• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

  I mentioned in my blog this week that one of my goals for the summer is to read more fiction. I've been reading Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series' first book, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet this week and it's absolutely captivating. I'm only few chapters in but everytime I travel to the distant corners of the universe with Rosemary, I can barely put the book down.