Weeknotes 2024.10

Last week I did some major changes to my general workflow. I’m coming to grips with Obsidian and its quirks and already mapped the most important workflows to how it works.

The other major change in how I work is Arc. It took over my browsing, because it has enough novel ideas that make information work better. More than the novel concepts that require you to rethink how you browse.

Changelog

• 🔬 Research
  • D3, Svelte and SvelteKit dominated my week for various reasons and will for some time, since they are central technologies for client work and a few projects of my own. I will probably write about this at some point.
  • Played around with federated deploys a bit more. The concept won’t work for every type of application, but if you can slice and dice your users in independent cohorts, it can simplify many things… hopefully. I guess, I won’t know till I try in production.
• ✨ New & Added
  • Mainly tasks on the todo list 😂

Elsewhere

Node.js community discusses Corepack and npm. The debate is heated for some, luckily we have this article by Sarah and Theo’s video, the latter of which pointed me to this in the first place. I had never heard of Corepack, but then again, I’m not deeply invested in the Node.js ecosystem. I have to agree that some of the arguments are pretty weak and the discussion showed some fundamental design errors that make the path forward harder. It’s easy to make the mistake of “why not just…” and have a myriad of unintended consequences. There won’t be a resolve that will please everybody, but it's a great learning lesson for product managers on how to deal with a change in an environment that needs to be somewhat stable.

Endatabas is a “SQL document database with full history”. The concept sounds wonderful The license makes it a non-starter for me, but I get why they did it. Fortunately the docs, the why and the bibliography are goldmines if you dig data technology. (via)

An Introduction to Isolation in Swift. In which Matt Massicotte will reassure you: “You probably do understand a lot about how isolation works, you just don’t realize it yet.” 👍 (via)

How we engineer feedback at Figma with eng crits. I love when companies tell a little bit about their inner workings. Not everything might be applicable to your case, but you sure get some interesting nuggets out of it.

Apple changes course, web apps stay the same in the EU. While alternative browser can pin web apps to the home screen, such apps will still run with WebKit as the browser engine. I think Apple wanted to do that from the start, but since many will be cross even with this mechanism, it now seems not so bad after all. Cheeky!

Meta will not further pursue claims of unauthorised forms of scraping and data collection from their platforms. The theory is that their AI ambitions take priority and being successful with those claims may bite them later, when the questions will eventually come up, how they trained their AI models. (via)

GitHub has to deal with thousands of malicious repos. So we have PR spamming, fork spamming and malicious forks. This is why we can’t have nice things.

The Apple Car is no more. Hardly surprising and sure sending a signal to the players in electric automotive and autonomous driving. My worry would be less about the commercial viability of an electric car from Apple, but that they might have hit a wall with something on the autonomy side of the equation. Unfortunately we’ll never know.

I hope there is still an option for Apple to invest in a boutique brand like Fisker, which might not make it for much longer. Apple could use a partnership like this to show other car makers what Apple Car Play is capable if you let them.

That’s all for this week!