The US Justice Department has announced they are suing Google for antitrust violations. The crux of the legal matter stems from this line in the filing, “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States.”
If you don’t mind a bit of dry legal jargon and extensive reading, the full filing is available here and it is quite interesting the information they have collected during their investigation.
It is difficult to believe that WordPress’ Gutenberg editor is almost two years old (released in WordPress 5.0 in December 2018). Since then, Gutenberg has seen a plethora of development and resources thrown at it, promising a revolutionary writing experience driven by blocks.
So, two years on, has Gutenberg become the beloved new writing experience in WordPress? Have the wrinkles been ironed out? Nope.
Despite the amount of work developers have put into polishing Gutenberg and trying to make it a decent writing experience, many continue to avoid it at all costs.
I am sure you might have seen this post doing the rounds recently, titled DigitalOcean’s Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source. Despite the spicy post title an exaggerated claim of Hacktoberfest being a corporate distributed denial of service attack, it does make some valid points about Hacktoberfest.
I don’t operate many popular repos and I’ve admittedly only seen one PR come through on one of my repos which was sort-of spammish, but not spammy to the point where it was low-quality, it was just a low hanging fruit pull request.
I love StackOverflow and it has significantly contributed to my journey as a developer over the years. As the years have gone by, StackOverflow has experienced tremendous growth. More often than not, when you Google a development-related problem, a StackOverflow question (or two) will appear on the first page. However, the quality of the site has slipped a little.
Legendary programmer John Carmack said it best in 2013 about StackOverflow
If you work in tech as a designer or developer, there is a high chance the company you work for uses Slack as its internal communication tool of choice. In March 2020, Slack released an update it dubbed “significant” which cleaned up the interface and introduced a few new shortcuts.
When Slack landed on the scene, it was hot (about as hot as Zoom is now during the pandemic). Workplaces adopted it en masse, but pretty quickly Slack went from hot new thing to just another enterprise chore application that ends up overwhelming us.
This is actually brilliant. While looking to see if anyone reasonable had an NVIDIA RTX 3080 card on eBay at a reasonable price (nobody did), I came across this drawing that someone is selling on eBay and people are actually bidding on it.
Sadly, this is probably the closest that anyone is going to get to possessing an RTX 3080 for the next few months. It’s clear that it was mostly a paper launch for Nvidia to get press coverage and the scarce availability helps build more hype and result in more sales.
The last few months of Mozilla news hasn’t all been exactly positive. The once beloved company is fighting to keep its head above water as well as retain its open and anti-corporate identity.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain
Just over a month ago, Mozilla laid off 250 employees. Understandably, 2020 has been a challenging time for many companies. However, the layoffs were not due to the pandemic or any other reason, the poor executive leadership at Mozilla is to blame.
The writing has been on the wall with this one since Joe Rogan announced his $100 million-dollar multi-year Spotify exclusive deal in May 2020. The Joe Rogan catalogue if you look back far enough is all but certain to have some content that people would find offensive.
Some staff are internally are fighting against content in Joe’s back catalogue which they deem to be transphobic. There is a particular episode where Joe interviews an author who wrote a book comparing transitioning to eating disorders and self-harm, as well as comments made by Joe himself which many have deemed offensive.
After raising the prices of its premium tier last year, Netflix is now raising the prices for its basic and standard plans over the coming weeks for existing members and effective immediately for new signups. The basic plan is going up by $1 to $10.99 and the standard plan increasing by $2 to $15.99.
I do find it quite strange that Netflix would increase the prices of its streaming service during a pandemic, and furthermore, at a time when Australia officially entered recession not too long ago where the economy contracted seven per cent.
I have been solely a front-end developer for six years now and while I can still find my way around on the backend (with Node and PHP) my interest in the backend has all but faded.
This is where platforms like Firebase are a real asset for developers like me.
It is no secret the front-end has become complicated, if you’re not fighting a framework or library for control, you’re debugging confusing TypeScript error messages or trying to get Webpack configured. While the backend is a little more straightforward from a lack of new things to learn every five minutes like the front-end, it’s just another thing to worry about.