Monthly Digest - December 2020

Hey folks, welcome back to our monthly digest and Happy New Year!! 🥳🎉

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

When people talk about code reviews, they focus on the reviewer. But the developer who writes the code is just as important to the review as the person who reads it.

Code review isn’t just about the reviewer’s work and job, it is the whole team’s job. The post mentions to value your reviewer’s time, but this applies to everyone and not just the reviewer. By improving your code that are being reviewed, you’re also improving yourself as well as your experience overall.

TL;DR review the code yourself first and automate stuff that can be automated, that way your reviewer can give you high-quality feedback to improve yourself and reduce the workloads for both of you (and probably the whole team waiting for that PR to merge).

Honorable article mentions

• [PrivacyTools] Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide”

The idea of hiding is fundamentally flawed, and we should strive to revive everyone that privacy is a human right. Having it breached everyday shouldn’t be a norm. To quote from the post…

We all care about our privacy, though we might not know it. It is why we lock the door when we go to the toilet; or why we close the curtains to stop people looking into our homes.

There shouldn’t be an argument for protecting our privacy in the first place anyway! Next time someone asks why they should care, asks them back if they want everyone that passes in front of their house to look inside the glass windows? There’s nothing to hide in the house, right? Yet, there’s curtains to cover the windows.

• [UX Collective] Creating randomness with pure CSS

Another mind-blowing technique using pure CSS. I can’t of anything useful to use this other than for simple online games, in the meantime. But, just knowing that this is possible is so amazing and fun.

• [Swizec] Computer science is not software engineering

Wow, college was such a waste of time … when did you ever invert a binary tree outside of an interview?

Honestly, please tell me if you really did. On the other hand, this post is a fair assessment, perhaps a little too much on the rambling. But, you should know what it’s talking about, especially as someone who studied Computer Science. Others who took the software development track on college would probably understand too.

Content of the month

I’m such a sucker for SOLs, and this might just be the best one, so far. A story about a group of high-school girls that leads to Antarctica. It’s pretty slow-paced early on, but that’s what makes slice of life so good. I can’t really describe how good this is in a paragraph, but this is definitely the best one on my list, placed first when anyone asks for a slice of life anime recommendation.

Honorable content mentions

• [Alchemauss] Fire Force Season 2
• [Alchemauss] Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle
• [Alchemauss] Akudama Drive

I think Fire Force is just unlucky with its timing. The first season comes out around the same time as Demon Slayer and its second season is also overlooked by other anime, especially the second season of Re:Zero. But, it is definitely a good series with amazing actions, some of the best (memorable). I really hope this doesn’t obstruct the third or upcoming seasons.

Sleepy Princess on the other hand is the comedy that keeps me going in the middle of the week every Tuesday. It a type of slice of life as well but purely comedic. It rivals KonoSuba’s in its voice actings (seiyuus) and absurd adventures. Even without knowing KonoSuba, this is still a really nice and cheerful comedic series.

Last but not least is Akudama Drive, the actual underdog of this Fall 2020 anime season. This is a short 12 episode, single series anime that manages to deliver its story to the audience while still having some character development in the cramped episodes. It’s worth the watch just to see its action and the story it has to give, not to mention it has banging OP.

Music of the month

Another amazing release from YOASOBI! This was an unexpectedly welcomed release to close the year. I love the vocals so much and it has a catchy beat too. I might be a little bit biased at this point, but if you love the previous releases, you’ll definitely love this as well.

Honorable music mentions | Spotify / YouTube

Ultramarine finally got an official MV! I might’ve only mentioned it before but this is worth checking out again.

Another YOASOBI release, yes I know. This might seem excessive and it’s not even a full song. But, I’m really interested in watching the series just from this OP. It’s only one and a half minute, go check it out for yourself.

Might just be another bias, but every Slippy release are always a banger. While we’re on the topic of Monstercat, the OG artists are back with banger remixes. Even PBN did a remix of another song, which is unheard of.

Video of the month

I’m not sure how I’ve just discovered this, but wow is it such a nice series to watch. I probably won’t always remember this, but when you do stumble upon it again, it really gives off a nostalgic feeling as when you first watched it. This is the complete series as one video, if you prefer to watch by parts, go search it for yourself, I think it’s complete in YouTube.

Honorable video mentions | YouTube

Veritasium ending the year with a crazy illusion anyone absolutely needs to see! I really tried to focus and it works, but man is it tiring and my brain will immediately see the illusion again if I lose focus for just a bit. Definitely worth the watch!

Yes. Yes. Yes. For you who hasn’t opened your mind (and eye) that animation is not for you (or only for kids), please treat yourself by watching this. I might make a dedicated post for this too, but in the meantime MB has explained it pretty well and convincing in this video. I used to be on the denial-train that I don’t need to watch animations, but once I learn and actually tried it for myself… I’ll explain it more thoroughly in the post. ^-^

Considering we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic, there’s no harm in understanding how a Coronavirus spreads and attack its host. I feel this video has explained it nicely, even for those who didn’t study science in high school to understand it well. It also explains how the vaccine is made, and how it works.

Headlines of the month

Attack on Titan Final Season is MyAnimeList’s Biggest Premiere Ever

With 144,668 people watching the premiere of its first episode, it broke the previous record holder from My Hero Academia Season 3 by a margin of nearly 40,000. Keep in mind that this is only the recorded amount in MyAnimeList, the actual viewers watching all around the world are way higher.

MyAnimeList Biggest Premieres Chart

If you haven’t watched or caught up with the series, there’s still time to catch up with the ongoing final season. If you’re not convinced yet by the number of people watching the first episode, maybe Crunchyroll servers collapsing would.

Source(s): [Crunchyroll | Reddit/Twitter]

Cloudflare has joined the battle

After releasing their privacy-first Web Analytics to the world early this month that would compete heavily with Google analytics, they released another product later on called Pages. With Cloudflare Pages, they will competing with Netlify and Vercel head-on to provide an alternative to build Jamstack apps, especially with their well-known worldwide servers for minimal latency and heavy Workers integrations for serverless functions.

Source(s): [Blog/Analytics | Blog/Pages]

Google worldwide outage causing multiple services to go down simultaneously

On 14th, Google experienced a worldwide outage that results in their whole services going down simultaneously. It mostly affects account related services so using incognito mode (not logged in) still works. All services including YouTube, GMail, Play Store, and many more are also affected. Some can’t even turn their lights on (obviously a joke, don’t take it seriously).

I didn’t notice at all until I saw all the posts and tweets. At that moment, I’m glad I’ve degoogled (see the third source) myself quite a bit to not be affected by this outage. This teaches the importance of a differentiated ecosystem and how it’s generally not a good idea to trust everything you have to a single monolithic company.

If you’re brave enough and have the resources, I suggest you look into r/selfhosted for an alternative to everything that can be self-hosted.

Source(s): [Reddit/Technology - Mirror | Reddit/Android - TechRadar | Reddit/Degoogle - TechCrunch]

Facebook and Instagram are cancer to our privacy and society

I don’t think I can explain it better than the quote I’m about to show you (see the first source for a more detailed explanation). In simple terms, if you use Instagram under the new terms you give up any and all rights or expectations you ever had to any and all forms of privacy.

Instagram updated their terms and conditions with new clauses which pretty much allow them to do whatever the fuck they want. They can check your call logs, your SMS history, they can do live analysis on your camera, they can copy your address book and much more since the terms are pretty loosely defined.

In addition to those changes, Facebook ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone location just by having it installed on your phone. I’m quite certain this also applies to Android users, but we’re pretty secured since newer phones will sometimes only allow services usage ONLY WHILE opening the app.

Also! another one that involves both Facebook and Instagram is a bug that exposes users’ personal email addresses and birthdays. To quote from a comment made by a redditor

So apparently the users email and and birthdays were sent as a reply when they were DM’d by another fb business user… I’m sorry but how in living fuck does a bug occur in “direct private messages” where it automatically sends a response that includes your email and birthday???

Being a programmer myself and studying Computer Science, I can assure you that this “bug” is definitely NOT a bug. It would have to explicitly grab that info, enter that information into the messenger (which is in a PRIVATE MESSAGES section), and SEND that information. Bugs don’t act like this, that’s not something you can do by accident, EVER.

Source(s): [Reddit/OutOfTheLoop - TL;DR Legal | Reddit/PrivacyToolsIO - Forbes | Reddit/Privacy - TheVerge]

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

I’ll publish another post to recap the year, be sure to check it out to get the best bits!