Monthly Digest - September 2020

Hey folks, welcome back to our monthly digest! This time, September was pretty slow with everything except the articles. As always, feel free to skip ahead to your preferred content by using the quick links provided above to jump to your the section.

Article of the month

There’s a whole lot of great articles this month, it’s crazy! You should definitely check out the other mentions below because this month has some insanely good articles.

This is actually a written version of Chris’ talk from Jamstack Conf London in 2019. Although it’s been a year since then, the material is still (or dare I say even more) relevant right now considering the rapid evolution of front-end JS frameworks and web development in general.

It’s discussing on how JS is slowly taking back-end stuff for the front-end to handle. Stuff like site-level architecture / routing, state management + getting and mutating data, and a bunch of other tasks. That, in addition with needing to know Git, writing tests, caring about performance, making sites accessible, setting up basic deploy pipeline, etc.

You’re Gosh Danged Right I’m a Full-Stack Developer!

Honorable article mentions

• [CSS-Tricks] Thinking About Power Usage and Websites

If you do this in HTML it will consume 3× energy but if you do it in JavaScript it will consume 10×

Another amazing article from Chris Coyier about the digital costs on the planet and website energy consumption. It links an article that discovered a a statistically significant negative correlation between performance scores and the energy consumption of mobile web apps, implying that an increase of the performance score tend to lead to a decrease of energy consumption.

In other words, we as developers could contribute to the effort of decreasing global pollution from our energy consumption and help reduce global warming. There’s a lot we could actually do, like use or build a more efficient web application and serve a smaller bundle to our users, or write and use a more efficient algorithm to reduce power consumption from computing tasks, or just simply use dark mode and reduce the display power draw.

• [CSS-IRL] Why I Don’t Have Time For Your Coding Challenge

A great article by Michelle Barker explaining why she doesn’t do coding challenges from the perspective of an interviewee. The article describes why it’s a waste of time and counter-productive, and instead offered alternatives other than doing coding challenges.

• [CSS-Tricks] How CSS Perspective Works

I was quite certain that this would be the highlight for the article of this month, but man there’s really a lot of good ones that come out midway through the month. But, it doesn’t mean that this is less than the others mentioned. This article by Amit Sheen really opened my mind on how perspective in CSS works, it taught me a lot to come up with a new layout I’ve implemented in Reviews.

It’s a well-written article with good examples for me to learn and understand how it works, enough to implement it on my own. You should definitely check it out, especially if you’re a front-end developer. It might not seem important right now, but you never know what ideas might pop up in your mind after you’ve learned about this, or you might finally figure out how to do that one layout you’ve been meaning to try since forever.

Content of the month

The God of High School just aired their final episode for Season 1 on 28th of August and it was amazing. A manhwa adaptation with full-throttle action-packed episodes. I need to compare this to Tower of God, since they’re both a webtoon turned anime, and because it was quite a letdown for me. Although the story is where it shines, there’s really no action in Tower of God and when there is, it ends in with just a move. It left me unsatisfied even though I still enjoy going through the story.

Meanwhile, The God of High School seems to fill in all the missing pieces Tower of God left me and felt like the complete opposite of it. It’s as if this show was made just to flex on their fighting scenes, each punches and kicks feels like it’s taken straight from a real martial arts fights, and every fight scene is so well choreographed and beautifully animated. I’m not saying the story is bad, but it might seem too fast for some people’s taste. Anyways, it’s still an amazing show nonetheless, regardless of the story’s pace.

Honorable content mentions

Other shows that aired their final episode this month too, just in time for the new shows and seasons starting this fall in October. It’s not inclusive of all shows, I haven’t watched some of the popular ones as well, and I won’t mention shows that’s still ongoing. So, here’s some of my favorites from this summer

• [Alchemauss] The Misfit of Demon King Academy
• [Alchemauss] Sword Art Online: Alicization
• [Alchemauss] Deca Dence

Music of the month | Spotify Playlist

Uploaded near the end of the month, Ticking Clocks by Jnel came through the demo submission on Proximity, can you believe it?! It was a pleasant surprise to see new artist releasing such a good song with amazing vocals. Go listen to this and give them a chance, you’ll never know what new things you might like if you’ve never tried it.

Honorable music mentions

I just started watching Fire Force season 1 and their ED was that good and so catchy that I didn’t notice I’ve added it to my playlist before I even watched it.

Pegboard Nerds & More Plastics returning once again to Monstercat with an amazing Instinct release for their Manifest/Together album.

Even after a month, I really can’t stop listening to these beautiful songs by Minami. This was the first single and the first video uploaded to YouTube. Its lyrics feels like an actual person expressing themselves at their hardest times, I’m sure some of you would agree.

Video of the month | YouTube Playlist

I was thinking about showing how we can perform a brain surgery without a scalpel these days, or how complicated it is to stop climate change, or even looking at the new neuralink by Elon Musk that might make those episodes from Black Mirror come true.

But, I did follow these guys from LLS for quite some time and I’ve enjoyed their discussion lately. I won’t spoil what they discuss in this video because you should really watch it for yourself. A little tip from me if you’re easily bored watching videos longer than 10 minutes is to speed up the playback rate to 1.5x - 2.0x.

Honorable video mentions

The man, the myth, the legend, he’s back and danker than ever. It’s been 3 years since the last upload, I’ve waited patiently for the return and he’s actually back when we needed him the most.

MikeMav was one of the first few YouTuber I’ve looked up to in terms of its editing skills. I’ve enjoyed more DotA content from him than the game itself. I’m certain you’ll enjoy this if you’ve played DotA before, a bonus if you love memes too.

What a great video explaining the various database paradigms that’s available right now. I’ve known most of them, but there’s some other paradigms that I’m not aware of, and some other that I’m only interested in but haven’t quite spared any time to get into, until I watched this.

If you still think everyone is overreacting about the new series from Netflix, watch both videos above. There’s clearly something wrong with everyone who allowed this to happen.

Headlines of the month

Turn impostor syndrome into an advantage

Impostor syndrome is something we’ve likely experience, especially as a Software Engineer, Developers, or someone working in the technology field. But, worry not, everyone worries about this just like you did some time ago (or perhaps are still). Have you ever seen this meme?

[Reddit] When do I stop pretending?

Truth is, even after years of experience most of the veterans or senior programmers still doesn’t know what they’re really doing.

Who’s gonna question your code if everyone is faking it?

Of course, it’s just a meme and some people really do know what they’re doing. But, everyone starts the same and it really takes practice and consistency, you’ll need to be resilient and there will be constant pressure for you. But, once you get over it, it will be your advantage.

Source(s): [Article]

Facebook accused of watching Instagram users through cameras

Note the word “Accused”. But, doesn’t mean that they’re not spying on you, even right now.

Source(s): [Bloomberg]

That’s it for our recap of September 2020, folks! Stay safe and have a great October 👋