October is the longest month in Q4. This is somewhat cursed knowledge.
You only know that if you’ve been on a tight deadline as the end of the year approaches, and if you ever bother to count the work days, excluding the holidays. Close to 20 in October. Less in November and even fewer in December because of the holidays.
So it’s only fitting that I completely blew it and am doing this a few days late, having made sure that my October was as jam packed with work as possible, an unconscious reaction from years of quarterly grinding, but I am not complaining. Here are the links from October 2023.
I’ve been reading Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, a book I remember starting but never finishing. I picked it back up after reading The Ghost Forest by Greg King, which had reminded me of Vineland in some key details.
Front End
- Why I Won’t Use Next.js
- https://chriscoyier.net/2023/10/17/a-couple-of-new-css-functions-id-never-heard-of/
- https://lp.jetbrains.com/javascriptday2023/
- https://sockets-api.proposal.wintercg.org/
- https://benv.ca/blog/posts/the-story-of-third-party-javascript
- https://github.com/rafunderscore/Layers
- https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-part-5/
- The Three Cs: 🤝 Concatenate, 🗜️ Compress, 🗳️ Cache
- Wait, what’s a bookmarklet? - The History of the Web
- https://webkit.org/blog/13813/try-css-nesting-today-in-safari-technology-preview/
Software (other)
- The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023
- I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars
- Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we’ve learned - PostHog
- Reorient GitHub Pull Requests Around Changesets – Mitchell Hashimoto
- Fermat’s Library | Ancient Babylonian Algorithms annotated/explained version.
- https://cra.mr/work-life-balance
- What Every Developer Should Know About GPU Computing
AI
- Using Simon Willison’s LLM Package to Extract a Knowledge Graph
- microsoft/autogen: Enable Next-Gen Large Language Model Applications. Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/pAbnFJrkgZ
- Agent Protocol Description - Agent Protocol
- Unbundling AI
- https://river.maxbittker.com/?id=7304306
Misc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk-9Fd2mEnI
- Look, I’m not in the Steve Jobs cult. But it’s hard to deny the impact his work has had on the world. I’m typing this into a Macbook. And the content on display in this MIT Lecture he gave in 1992 is first rate.
- hardware churns every 18 months
- software churns much more slowly. 9 years for Microsoft to ape the Mac.
- going further: 20 years for NEXT to become the default OS for most software dev (1990-2010), 10 years for Microsoft to flip the dev market back to them by giving up on Windows hegemony (2012-2022)
- Look, I’m not in the Steve Jobs cult. But it’s hard to deny the impact his work has had on the world. I’m typing this into a Macbook. And the content on display in this MIT Lecture he gave in 1992 is first rate.
