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Aileen Rae
Aileen Rae

Posted on • Originally published at aileenrae.co.uk

Bookmarks: January 2023

Please enjoy some curated links to online content I have enjoyed this past month. ๐Ÿ˜Š

Tech and Web

A Debugging Manifesto - Julia Evans

An image panel from Julia Evan's "A Debugging Manifesto".
A friendly approach to reframing software bugfixing as a learning activity.

If something is breaking, itโ€™s often because thereโ€™s something wrong in my mental model

A CSS challenge: skewed highlight - Vadim Makeev

A CSS skewed highlight effect by Vadim Makeev.
A really nice highlighter effect with modern CSS. It achieves the slant using gradients, rather than separate elements or pseudo-elements. It also leverages a little-known CSS property for getting the effect to work across line breaks.

Clever Code Considered Harmful - Josh W. Comeau

A screenshot of complex, unreadable haskell codefrom Josh W. Comeau's blog.
A well-articulated case against complex and overly "clever" code. The most compelling takeaways for me are:

  • consider whether your code can be understood by a junior dev,
  • when complexity is necessary, encapsulate it to prevent it bleeding all over your codebase.

Unicorn Icons - Kushmeen

An GIF of gorgeous animated icons by Kushmeen.
๐Ÿ‘๐Ÿป I love these. And I immediately want to start a project where I can use them.

The 12-Bit Rainbow Palette - Kate Rose Morley

A well-designed 12-colour rainbow palette by Kate Rose Morley
This pleases me a lot. In fact, I have half-formed plans to implement a similar rainbow palette on this here blog. Stay tuned.

Career

Lessons learned since posting my salary history publicly - Jamie Tanna

A screenshot of Jamie Tanna's published salary history.
This is really interesting to consider, and something I would love to do later in my career. Being a woman in tech means I'm statistically likely to be underpaid for the work I do, and that's some heavy baggage to carry. I appreciate this transparency and I hope it can become a norm in the industry.

Miscellaneous

How to Do Laundry When You're Depressed - KC Davis

A TED talk video thumbnail of KC Davis.
A poignant TED talk on the burden of daily caretaking tasks. It's focussed on shifting your self talk from one of punishment to one of compassion. As someone with a chronic health condition that can affect my functioning, this was tearful and healing.

Care tasks are morally neutral.

Anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.

Wonders of Street View - neal.fun

A Google Street View screenshot of a skier jumping over two other people high in a snowy mountainscape.
A sometimes hilarious, sometimes awe-inspiring collection of the weird and wonderful snapshots that can be found on Google Street View.

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An Animated Guide to Node.js Event Loop

Node.js doesnโ€™t stop from running other operations because of Libuv, a C++ library responsible for the event loop and asynchronously handling tasks such as network requests, DNS resolution, file system operations, data encryption, etc.

What happens under the hood when Node.js works on tasks such as database queries? We will explore it by following this piece of code step by step.