WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

Issue 125 - Duck and cover

Hello fellow developer, I'm right now live at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin, but this shouldn't mean you don't get some hot resources. Hopefully I can meet some of you in person, come and say hi if you see me roaming the grounds today!

News and Articles

Let's start with AI news: Google and Microsoft consume more power than some countries, Gemini AI is accused to scan Google Drive files without user permission, Dropbox adds AI-powered answers and summaries to file previews and Goldman Sachs already dismisses Generative AI as not profitable. And on the weirder side of things, a UK politician is accused of being an AI.

In security news, updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma silently enables iCloud Keychain, there's a long post on the six dumbest ideas in computer security, and on the A to Z of password breaking.

An FTC study finds ‘dark patterns’ used by a majority of subscription apps and websites and there is a Dark Patterns Hall of Shame to cross-reference.

The BBC released an excellent guide on writing ALT text for images and the W3C outlined Ethical Web Principles. One last thing to discuss is if GitHub is starting to feel like legacy software and that's also part of this week's interview further down…

Code and Tools

The Microsoft Edge team introduces SVG copy-paste on the web, Node.js includes a built-in sqlite module and can run multiple commands in parallel. In CSS land, the selector guide is a great resource to optimise your selectors and you can learn about the m agic of clip path . Stoyan Stefanov has a detailed write-up of his “Your app crashes my browser” talk and by using fuzzy redirects you can design a website without 404s. React has some sneaky memory leaks. GitHub Copilot now allows for extensions so go and build some. Another thing I learned is that you can host a locally built site on GitHub pages by generating the plumbing using Makefile. Wordpress released Studio which also allows you to build locally. For people happy to deep-dive into code things, there are long articles on the state of text rendering in 2024 and the history of CI tests. And to end with a bang, you can create the THX "Deep Note" in JavaScript.

Some tools for you:

Youtube Summaries watches YouTube videos for you and summarises them.
Scroll Reverser for people switching to Mac…
CodeFlattener Node.js tool turning a codebase into a single JavaScript file.
nlUX is a conversational AI javaScript library
Local AI Stack - 100% local document Q&A with AI for free.

Videos

We met with Scott Chacon, CEO of GitButler and Co-Founder of GitHub at the Merge festival to talk about growing pains of the company and what the future may hold for version control. Check out the video here.

Work and Jobs

Some job news - there's a Hacker News thread on how people go about finding a job, an interesting research showing that quite a few job offers out there are ghost jobs that don't exist and that the open source community needs fresh blood.

Are you looking for opportunities or fancy a change? How about these?

More jobs here: Remote positions - Germany - Austria

Some companies to check out are:

ASFINAG - VEGA Grieshaber KG - Schleupen SE - ZEISS Group - MIC

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

Cat Herder - virtual cat Tamagotchi.
Open and Shut - type Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut
The history of Neko.exe - remember the tiny cat?
Paint spin - like paint, but rotating.
On the origins of DS_store - the #1 code base annoyance for Windows users.
tixiland - creative code golfing.

What's happening at WeAreDevelopers…

WeAreDevelopers LIVE, our online event series. Next is Java Developer Day. on 11th of September. We are always looking for presenters, apply for LIVE days here.