Launch Links

It was good coming back to a three day week, even if it was punctuated by a couple of huge launches. Here’s a set of links, mainly collected while on holiday. Gotta love Instapaper.

Managing Your Content Management System – No matter what you choose, you’re going to hit roadblocks. The best advice is to pick one, learnt it very well, and know when (and where) to go bespoke.

The ultimate iPhone camera comparison – I’ve finally take the leap from a 5 to the 6S and I can instantly tell the difference, especially at night.

Why Tinder-like apps are the way of the future – As an absolute rule, there are no absolute rules. But the card-ification of apps is still in an upward swing.

Let a 1,000 flowers bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots. – Everything runs on code nowadays, and it needs to be treated like a foundation and not an afterthought or last-in-a-chain.

The making of FiftyThree’s beloved Paper app for the iPhone – I love Paper, but I love more how open they are with the whole process.

How we lost (and found) millions by not A/B testing – Making any big change and not testing it is insanity. You don’t even need A/B, just watch the analytics.

Otto – Otto is magic, so I hate it. Anything that promises to work by convention-over-configuration is doomed to fail. Hopefully it’ll kick start others in the area to up their game.

Pigeon – This serves no person, but then again IPoAC didn’t until Australia.

Zube – Forget Waffle, this is the new hotness for tracking GitHub issues.

Volkswagen and Cheating Software – Imagine being arrested but you can’t face your accuser because it’s a little black box of code that the lowest bidder created. That is the future we’re heading towards.

Introducing Amazon Elasticsearch Service – This is huge. We’ve used ES, both hosted and internally, for a while but Amazon’s offering could be a big boon.

Death to Icon Fonts – It’s a horrible thing to admit, but I’d never even thought about fonts affecting users like this. Hopefully with more devs switching to SVG we can get the browser vendors to up their game.

Image diffing using CSS – As far as I can tell, this is just a nice effect, but a nice effect is still nice. Nice.

Git Large File Storage v1.0 – Store big files alongside git, not in it. Yey! My biggest worry though is it means assets are centralised and not distributed, in effect breaking the entire model of a DVCS.

Doing an HD Remake the Right Way – It’s the attention to detail that makes a remake worthy or not, and it’s a shame to see so many studios just farming it out.

Introducing the VelocityReact Library – I’ve yet to use React in anger, but the surge in amazingly well put together packages is phenomenal. This especially looks killer.

Netflix Flux – We’re creating bigger and more complex apps and the inability to see the interactions within and between them is definitely a danger. Log everything, show anomalies.

Do not let your CDN betray you – When you’re performing pen tests and SLAs that include more text on chain-protection than War & Peace, something like this is a blessing.

Stripe Open Source Behind the Scenes – A few useful little bits from Stripe, one of the best companies for open sourcing their stuff.

One Weird Trick to Write Better Code – Ignore the link bait title; the takeaway is that sometimes how something works is more important than following a standard pattern.

Why Continuous Deployment Just Keeps On Giving – Inside Intercom – We’re starting to drop tests in more projects and all of my own packages are tested (to some extent). I’d say the biggest advantage for an agency is knowing you can come back to a project 12 months later and not worry about breaking it.

Surprises in GopherJS Performance – I hadn’t heard of GopherJS until recently, but this looks amazing. Kudos to both V8 and the team.

Create the smallest possible Docker container – I’ve been continuing my foray into Dockerland and this was a fun little aside. 91 bytes to run a bit of assembly.

Functional Floppy Disks – And last but not least, remember that as fast as we’re moving forwards (web especially), there are still those dealing with the choices someone made a long, long time ago.