Developer Links Season 2, issue 1

6th April 2020 – 894 words

In this new (revived) bi-weekly/monthly section, where I want to share web-developer links that I found interesting or particular helpful or that came up in our company’s monthly developer chat. This is a good way, to clean my bookmark list and maybe there are some interesting bits here and there for you as well.

Ruby & Rails

igorkasyanchuk/rails_performance: Monitor performance of you Rails applications.

Self hosted, free alternative to New-relic, Skylight and related. Considering to use for future side projects.

Rails Authenticity Token and Mobile Safari

This month we registered a increased number of InvalidAuthenticityError in our Sentry. After trying to find out, what customers are affecting, turns out, some browsers are caching sites to long and let the CSRF token go stale. Post describes counter measures.

ddnexus/pagy: The ultimate pagination ruby gem.
by my collegue Wolfgang

Flexible replacement for will_paginate and consorts which supports all kind of collections

Ruby URI / MailTo valid Regexes included in Stdlib
by my collegue Vincent

No need to make up a (broken) regexp, just ask URI to give you, e.g. for http uris: URI.regexp(%w[http https]. Another useful regexp for full mail-address validation is also included in modern Rubys: URI::MailTo::EMAIL_REGEXP

hendrixfan/triangle
by my collegue Wolfgang

Dynamically generate beautiful triangle background patterns using delaunay triangulation

Create simple, yet beautiful svg backgrounds for your projects with this Gem by Wolfgang.

(Dev)Ops, Hosting & Servers

nushell/nushell: A modern shell written in Rust.

Interesting iteration on the whole zsh fish thing. Especially for better handling, sorting/filtering of table outputs from ls and ps.

Ansible 101 by Jeff Geerling - YouTube streaming series

Geerling, a well-known name in the Ansible module universe, has created a youtube series for using Ansible.

Google Postmaster Admin Interface

After running mail servers for 10 years, I missed the Gmail postmaster interface, where you can register your mail sending domains to check spam rate and stuff. For one of our company’s App, more than 50% of the users use Gmail …

Software (Desktop & CLI)

Elastic App Search

Elastic App Search: A free product for building great search experiences: Elastic App Search is a free product that runs alongside Elasticsearch and simplifies the process of building rich search experiences for your apps and websites. It comes expertly tuned and provides out-of-the-box implementations for fast autocomplete, typo tolerance, faceting and filtering, and highly relevant results.

Promising desktop app that can help to build a satisfying ElasticSearch search experience by rapidly trying out different index types and queries.

chmln/sd: Intuitive find & replace CLI (sed alternative).

Was looking for mass replacement with special chars, and sed regex replacement (“/”) is frustrating to use. Luckily here a tool which reduces to a simple sd FROM TO **/*.js with perl regexes.

Frontend, JS & UX

MVP.css - Minimalist stylesheet for HTML elements

MVP.css - No classes, no framework. Just semantic HTML and you're done.

Like the name says: A simple css without classes, just pimps existing semantic html.

Web Skills: A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer

Web-Developer is no more, there is now a broad spectrum from Frontend Engineer, UX/UI, Backend, Performance Frontend, Accessibility concerns etc. This map gives a overview with resources to start which does a better job than others IMO

HTML attributes to improve your users' two factor authentication experience

Learn how to use the HTML autocomplete, inputmode and pattern attributes to improve the user experience of logging in.

tota11y – an accessibility visualization toolkit by Khan Academy
by my collegue Wolfgang

tota11y helps visualize how your site performs with assistive technologies

Accessibility toolbar, as a JS plugin to “convince” all developers to have a look, not only those with a browser plugin.

Process Improvment

Remote, but not alone: Working remotely is easy to learn but difficult to master.

Take on remote work by Justin Searls