september.md

September 2021

What a month!

• Leslie Lamport and Markus Kuppe (2021), TLA+: Viewed from 40,000 Feet and Ground Level → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ocxczi-CvRQ
  • Video talk is happily easy to follow, and should be required viewing for anyone sincerely interested in making quality software we can be proud of.
  • Related video: Jay Parlar (2019), Alloy for TLA+ users → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZywZc04lJg

    • This talk provides a high level overview of Alloy, a modelling language for software systems, for a typical TLA+ user, and shows instances where one might choose Alloy over TLA+, and vice-versa, and more importantly, why it’s hugely valuable to know both systems.

• David Nolen (2021), ClojureScript in the Age of TypeScript → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HxVMGaiZbc
  • Video talk by @swannodette on how successful development of any program really depends on working interactively with it at runtime so you can test and make changes to it while also preserving state.
• @devbyrayray (2021), Getting Started with Storybook without a JavaScript framework → https://betterprogramming.pub/getting-started-with-storybook-without-a-javascript-framework-c2968d3f3d9f
  • "Use it with plain HTML and CSS" - that is, how to configure it to run vanilla JavaScript functions that spit out HTML and see them styled with your CSS.
• Erez Rabih (2021), 6 Years of Professional Clojure → https://engineering.nanit.com/6-years-of-professional-clojure-2b61cb6c1983
  • Joy of pure functions: Easy to read, understand, design, re-use, and refactor.
  • Values and collections and (almost) no objects.
  • JVM is a memory hog.
  • Experience (and wisdom) harder to find and hire.
• Joseph Gentle (2021), 5000x faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization → https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-go-brrr/

  • You can't make the computer faster. You can only make it do less work.

  • Instead of implementing the CRDT as a tree like automerge does...Yjs just puts all the items in a single flat list.

  • The insert function on github at https://github.com/josephg/reference-crdts/blob/fed747255df9d457e11f36575de555b39f07e909/crdts.ts#L401-L459.
• Mathias Verraes (2015), Messaging Flavors → https://verraes.net/2015/01/messaging-flavours/
  1. Informational (events)
  2. Imperative (commands)
  3. Interrogatory (queries).
• Dan North (2016), Scratching a JUnit Itch → https://dannorth.net/2016/09/03/scratching-a-junit-itch/
  • Looking at Go's testing package, "My epiphany was simply this: A failure doesn’t have to stop the test!"
  • The JGoTesting philosophy:
    • All checks run, then report. (like tape).
    • chainable: test.log(); test.check().check();
    • terminate: test.terminateIf(); test.terminate(); (like tape.end())
• Shachee Swadia (2021), How to Build a JavaScript Line Chart → https://javascript.plainenglish.io/how-to-build-a-javascript-line-chart-1258b98c632e
  • Uses AnyChart to build an interactive line chart.
  • Minified CDN release of version 8.10 of AnyChart is nearly 1MB.
  • See for yourself → https://cdn.anychart.com/releases/8.10.0/js/anychart-base.min.js
• Arek Nawo (2021), Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About WebRTC → https://blog.openreplay.com/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-webrtc

  • With the ability to both stream video and audio and exchange any arbitrary data directly between peers, WebRTC is a powerful tool for building performant, cost-efficient real-time applications.

• Adrian Roselli (2021), Embracing Design Constraints → https://adrianroselli.com/2021/05/embracing-design-constraints.html
  • Form Follows Function
  • Design is Not Art
  • Constraints Are Part of Design
• Shachee Swadia (2021), Build an Interactive Flow Map in JavaScript → https://dev.to/andreykh1985/how-to-build-an-interactive-flow-map-in-javascript-mja
  • Another tutorial using AnyChart.
  • It's pretty nice, actually.
• Jordi Cabot (2021), OCL in JavaScript → https://modeling-languages.com/object-constraint-language-ocl-in-javascript/
  • OCL (Object Constraint Language) is a typed, declarative and side-effect free specification language, for model-driven engineering,
  • this post introduces OCL.js.
  • There's even a web site with API documentation.
• Russ Weakley (2021), Accessible Forms: HTML Test Cases → https://russmaxdesign.github.io/accessible-forms/

  • A series of HTML test cases to determine how they are announced in different screen reader / browser combinations.

• Steve Branam (2021), Acceptance Tests vs. TDD → https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/1409.php
  • Long article prompted by group reading of Michael Feathers' "Working with Legacy Code".

  • untested code is by definition broken code. You can't trust it until you've proven that it works with actual evidence of working.

• Cathy Dutton (2021), Designing for the Unexpected → https://alistapart.com/article/designing-for-the-unexpected/
  • Design for content first.
  • Zeldman quote: > Your company’s survival is tied to the ability of the products it makes to work in situations you haven’t imagined, and on devices that don’t yet exist.

  • You Can’t Framework Your Way Out Of A Content Problem

• Yehonathan Sharvit (2016), A new way of blogging about javascript → https://blog.klipse.tech/javascript/2016/06/20/blog-javascript.html
  • Impressive intro to the klipse plugin for adding interactivity to your blog's code snippets.
  • Instructions for integrating klipse in your blog
• Vasyl Boroviak (2021), lil-csv, a 1k JS module to parse and generate CSV files → https://dev.to/koresar/lil-csv-a-1k-js-module-to-parse-and-generate-csv-files-471h
  • Works in browsers;
  • Samll (just over 1kB)
  • Parses deep objects.
  • Generates CSV from deep objects.