Today, I came across something which quite frankly shocked me. The AFP Tweeted out the following Tweet. On the surface, this might seem like a harmless attempt to tell people about efforts to notify and help those affected by the bushfire, but this singular Tweet truly masks a horrifying truth of an allegedly impartial agency that investigates serious crimes Tweeting about a matter, not in their interests whatsoever.
I love a good conspiracy theory. Some of my favourite conspiracy theories include the Royal Family being shape-shifting lizards, part of some global reptilian elite controlling the world or Alex Jones’ famous rant where he claims the government is putting chemicals into the water turning frogs gay. The late-2019 Australian bushfires which have burned into 2020 have attracted some crazy individuals claiming all kinds of crazy things. People have lost their lives, thousands of homes destroyed, towns completely wiped, millions of hectares burned, over 1 billion animals estimated to have been killed.
I have the weirdest and sometimes most profound thoughts about the most useless stuff. I actually asked myself this question whilst in the shower this morning: is there going to be a USB-D? Do we need a successor to USB-C or is it good enough for the time being? When these types of questions pop into my head, I have to Google them. I actually stepped out of the shower and before reaching for a towel, I grabbed my phone and had to find out. With the water dripping onto my phone screen and floor, I set out to find the answer.
Every so often thought-pieces will go around proclaiming that you are writing code the wrong way and that you should be writing your code this way instead. One such opinion I have seen (and will not link because this isn’t a takedown) is recommending the use of Ternary Operators in Javascript over if statements. While ternaries can make your code look cleaner in some cases by replacing multi-line if statements with one-liners, there are instances where they fall apart quite quickly. Ternary operators exist in all programming languages and the problems they can introduce into a codebase are universal.
Recently, the BBC published an article titled Why we’ve never fallen in love with virtual reality in which they discuss virtual realities lack of mainstream consumer adoption. The article then goes on to talk about one VR segment that is thriving: group entertainment. Specifically, virtual reality arcades, theme parks leveraging virtual reality in rides and offering an affordable means of immersing yourself without getting into debt. Truly immersive virtual reality experiences in 2020 are amazing. In countries like Tokyo, they have numerous public places where VR is employed for fun experiences. Disneyland has been showcasing the power of virtual reality for some time now.
When it comes to Firebase for newcomers, the first point of confusion in what is quite a simple platform is what should you choose for your database: Firestore or Realtime Database? As someone who has been using Firebase for quite a few years, there was a time when Firestore never even existed. Initially, it used to just be Realtime Database and that was that. A couple of years ago, Firebase introduced the Firestore database which is the next evolution of databases on Firebase.
All signs are pointing to yes. System of A Down frontman Serj posted an image of himself in the studio working on what appears to be music for a System of A Down. Many might be quick to say this could just be Serj working on more solo material, the hashtags tell a different story at the end, using the band’s name as a hashtag. For years there has been rumour and speculation a new album is happening. Then various members speaking out about the band’s inability to get on the same page musically, could they have found a way to work past the problems they were happening?
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.
Or is it already dead? The once-promising blockchain and beloved smart contract project seemed to be at the top of the world. From a high of $1431 in January 2018 to its current low of $126, it seems whatever hopes people have for Ethereum have faded quite a bit. Despite the fact that Ethereum still holds the number two spot on Coin Market Cap Ethereum has fallen out of the limelight somewhat with developers. On State of The DApps, Ethereum accounts for only three of the top ten applications. Klaytn accounts for four of them, Steem accounts for two and NEO just one. In the top five, Ethereum only has one DApp.
Here is a nice bug-not-bug to close out in 2019. One of my Trello cards detailed what sounded like an error: When toggling between two options (yes and no) in a dropdown, entering “y” changes to yes and quickly entering “n” does not switch to no. However, waiting a second you can change between them. Some initial debugging suggested this was not actually a bug in our application. But, I knew if I was going to get the ticket closed off as not a bug, I had to have an explanation.