Not that kind of scraping.
If you’re a developer, chances are in your career you’ve written a web scraper before. You either did it for a personal project, learning exercise or you were asked by someone else to build a scraper. My first freelancer job was a scraper on Freelancer.com years and years ago.
There is often confusion around the legality of scraping and it’s not illegal to scrape public data. This was further reinforced by the case of hiQ vs LinkedIn which ruled it is legal to scrape public data.
Well, it has barely been a day with Joe Rogan starting his new $100 million dollars multi-year deal with Spotify and already the move is already generating controversy.
Eagle-eyed fans have noticed that there are numerous existing Joe Rogan podcast episodes missing from Spotify, perhaps most notably are the infamous and highly entertaining Alex Jones episodes. A Reddit thread has compiled a list of missing names and there are some recurring guests that come up.
If you’ve been following any tech news for the last few weeks, you have probably heard about the TikTok situation unfolding in the US where Donald Trump via executive order is forcing a sale of TikTok in the US or banning it.
To say that 2020 has been a wild and unprecedented year is an understatement. TikTok has been a source of entertainment for those staying at home as the COVID-19 pandemic closes down schools, states, countries and limits movement.
As much as some people wanted to believe in Slack’s tagline that email was dead, it seems in 2020 that email is anything but dead. I observe trends in tech, I’m always looking for new ideas and startups to explore.
One thing I have noticed these past few months in 2020 is newsletters are becoming big business.
Instead of launching products, people are launching niche newsletters. And honestly, I’m sold. The past month alone, I’ve subscribed to more newsletters than I have my entire internet life.
It looks like a new hardware arms race is upon us. I am not talking about consumers rushing to buy GPU’s to mine cryptocurrencies in their parent’s basement: masks are the new hot tech (for obvious reasons).
LG has announced a yet unavailable air purifying mask that you strap to your face. They are calling it the PuriCare™ Wearable Air Purifier.
Considering 2020 is anything but normal, it seems fitting that LG would release a face mask to help continue the 2020 dystopian theme we all find ourselves embedded in. This looks like something out of Dune or a movie about a highly-infectious virus turning people into zombies.
The latest trend in web design and development is no-code. Well, it’s not exactly latest, the trend has been around for a while now. You can go back to the early 2000’s and point out numerous software apps and web offerings that would fall under the no-code umbrella.
However, it’s hard to argue that 2020 besides being dominated by a highly contagious respiratory virus pandemic, no-code has been thrown around a lot. If you visit sites like producthunt, you would know what I am talking about.
Apparently, rumours of Meteor.js demise have been greatly exaggerated. Back in March 2020, the Meteor team released version 1.10 which saw a plethora of updates to the universal app platform.
Admittedly, it has been quite a few years since I have worked with Meteor. I remember trying it in the early days and being wowed by its ability to allow you to build applications that bring the front and back-end together without needing to configure anything.
The signs have been there for a while now. Elon Musk is the eccentric real-life version of Tony Stark, who some believe will save the world with his forward-thinking investments and ideas like making electric vehicles cool or making his own rockets.
But, for all of Elon’s great and commendable achievements come some highly questionable decisions and remarks. Known for his non-corporate approach to communication, he has landed in hot water several times over the years.
If you have been watching the news of late and let’s be honest, who hasn’t given we are a part of an unprecedented global pandemic? Then you would have heard of the announcement of a contact tracing application you install on your phone which notifies you and others if you’ve been in contact with anyone who tests positive for COVID-19.
On the surface, every day Australians will hear the government say, “If everyone installs this, we can ease restrictions faster and flatten the curve by being able to control the spread” – but for those in tech like myself who are critical of the government’s ability to produce an app that won’t be a privacy nightmare, things are a little more convoluted.
When it comes to JavaScript frameworks, few can lay claim to the longevity of Ember which just turned eight years old. To give readers some perspective, Ember is about as old as AngularJS (the first version of Angular), older than React, older than Vue and many other options out there. It harks back to the days when IE6 was still a browser many of us had to support.
To the surprise of some who abandoned Ember (and JavaScript frameworks in general) years ago, Ember just released a large update which changes and improves Ember in many facets. For years, Ember has been trailing behind other frameworks and libraries. Even though updates were still being made, Ember has always felt like a relic of Web yesteryear.