The buzzword of 2021 was unmistakenly Web 3.0. Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, Twitter: Web 3.0 dominated the discourse. Investment funds were flocking to invest in any company loosely affiliated with the hottest new trend on the web. Depending on who you spoke to or what you read, Web 3 would kill Facebook, Twitter and every other popular website and application. In its place, Web 3 decentralised alternatives would take their place.
After raising a $4,900,000 seed investment back in March 2021, Deno has just announced quite a substantial round of Series A investment of $21 million. The funding round led by Sequoia brings its total investment to $26 million to date. Deno will mainly use the cash to build their commercial offering Deno Deploy. Admittedly, I shamefully wrote Deno Deploy off as a Deno-specific Heroku. Still, after the announcement, I looked deeper at Deno Deploy, and it’s so much more than that. While the name might sound like a continuous integration tool, it’s a Runtime As A Service (RaaS) platform allowing you to run scalable code.
As much as I love WordPress, there are some fundamental flaws in how it works. For the average user, WordPress out-of-the-box will do everything you want and can be run on affordable hardware. For the project I have been working on, scaling considerations have reached a code level. I needed to speed up some WordPress REST API endpoints in my use case. Between the core heft, plugin weight and size of the database causing some queries to be slower than your average site, I had to look for a solution that functioned like a cache.
Over one month ago, the DJI Mini 3 Pro drone was launched. Those who got on the order bandwagon right away, fortunately, got their units without delay (like I did). However, one thing that DJI has botched about the launch is the availability of accessories. Most notably, the Fly More and Fly More Plus kits. The Fly More Plus kit features the extended-range batteries that many who plan on using the Mini 3 Pro for photography or travel purposes want.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are no stranger to meteoric price drops. In the blink of an eye, a coin can increase hundreds of percent and plummet to near zero. Cryptocurrency is an emotional and monetary rollercoaster. Coinbase has just announced it is laying off 18% of its workforce immediately. Although, it is apparent Coinbase executives didn’t seem to have as high hopes as the wider crypto community, selling off $1.2 billion in shares since it was listed.
After seeing the Flipper Zero was finally shipping, I tried to get one. Unfortunately, in Australia, getting the Flipper Zero officially was impossible. There seems to be a lot of demand for this little gadget. Fortunately, there were a few on eBay. The original Kickstarter campaign is here if you want to read about it. As you can see, it was behind schedule, missing its delivery deadline by about a year. But, to the credit of the team, they delivered on every single promise (which is rare).
This is another of those particular posts that might help one or two people out. If I can save you some time working with the News Industry Text Format in PHP, I’ll be glad that you didn’t experience my frustration. While working with the Associated Press API, I recently ran into a situation where ingested content from the NITF format they supply was being stripped out in PHP. The code in question looked like this:
I have always been fascinated by and loved drones but at a distance. Like many reading this, I resisted the temptation to spend $1k+ on a drone that I knew would crash into a tree or into a body of water where it is doomed to rest for eternity. With the DJI Mini 3 Pro, many of those valid concerns have been alleviated by releasing one of the most beginner-friendly drones, which also offers pro features. While this is not the first small-sized drone DJI has released, it is one of the best.
WordPress ships with a bunch of neat core Gutenberg blocks. However, there may be situations where you need to change the output of a Gutenberg block. In my use case, I needed to modify the core/image block to add an image credit field I created using Advanced Custom Fields. Like most things in WordPress, this is possible using an action and a few lines of code. Some solutions around on the internet make you call register_block_type to override the registration of the core block (which is wrong, in my opinion).
When performing intensive or long-running operations on a WordPress website, the admin panel is terrible. Have you tried to delete 100 posts from the posts screen? It’ll time out and delete maybe 10-20 if you’re lucky. This is one example of many. Naturally, I opted for the WP CLI (WordPress CLI), which allows you to perform operations on your WordPress site from the terminal. I needed to delete custom post types from within a date range in my use case.