I recently had the pleasure of attending Kathleen McMahon’s talk on Accessibility-flavored React components make your design system delicious!. Accessibility on the web has been a big topic in our office for a while. It’s a part of the web development skill set that often goes overlooked and it is something we can all work on being better at. Kathleen’s talk was two-fold. She showed us examples of what the web is like for users with adaptive needs and how we (designers and developers everywhere) are failing these users. It’s good to note that accessibility is not just screen readers. There are font sizing, zooming, contrast, and other issues to keep in mind. Then she gave us a look into good methods for constructing reusable react components with a focus on keeping the final output properly accessible. This was a refreshing glimpse into the problem and path forward with making the web usable for everyone.
Author: Mike Hickey
Hacktoberfest 2019
Hacktoberfest is here to help make it easier to give back to the open-source projects and communities that help power our digital lives. To get started you need to register on their site, then start submitting quality PRs to any public GitHub repository. The first 50,000 participants that meet their four-PR threshold in October get a free t-shirt.
Our phones aren’t safe
This isn’t news or a panicked overreaction, just a reminder that our phones aren’t inherently safe and we can’t pretend they are. The years of thinking phones aren’t as vulnerable as a computer or one brand is safer than another are over. Google’s Project Zero has recently posted about sustained targeted attacks against iOS devices over the past two years. A flood of 0-day iOS exploits for sale has pushed their market price below that of 0-day android exploits. A popular app on the Google Play store with over 100 million downloads contained malware that scams advertiser clicks.Image by Thought Catalog, downloaded from Flickr/stockcatalog.
Celebrating the Software that made the Apollo 11 mission possible
Fifty years ago a crew of three astronauts rocketed out of our atmosphere with the goal of landing on the moon. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and command module pilot Michael Collins are immortalized for landing on the moon. Numerous technological advancements helped NASA achieve its mission, but the work of hundreds of thousands of engineers on the software to control the command and lunar modules was the foundation that made this fantastic adventure possible. Their 145,000 lines of code is surprisingly terse compared to modern software projects. The abort routines written by Margaret Hamilton became one of the more important sections of the code. Aldrin and Armstrong encountered the 1202 “system overloaded” error while attempting to land on the moon. This error nearly stopped their mission short, but the astronauts and command crew back on Earth trusted their software and let the on-board computer reset itself and ignore non-essential routines so all available resources could be focused on the landing.The moon landing was as much a software engineering project as it was a rocket flight. Happy 50th anniversary to the Apollo 11 mission and everyone that helped all of mankind take that giant leap.
HT WSJ
Thrones traffic straining Dragonstone filming location
If you’ve had the opportunity to work on an app or website with a big push on TV then you’ve probably had the fun of dealing with the resulting traffic surge. Good planning, a focus on availability and scaling in your platform, and a responsive hosting provider can help a team cope with that type of visibility. But what if instead of an app or a website, the sudden traffic growth is at a small 10th century church on an islet in Spain?
The Basque islet of San Juan de Gaztelugatxe’s chapel in Bermeo, Bizkai which serves as the filming location for Game of Throne’s Dragonstone castle has seen a dramatic and possibly overwhelming increase in tourists this past summer. According to EL PAÍS at least 75,000 tourists visited the site in July, averaging out to 2,419 people per day that scaled the long slender stairs to reach the top. Local officials are dealing with plans on how to handle the increase in visitors while supporting their tourism economy, preserving the historical significance of the site, and maintaining the unique biotope that extends from Bakio to Cape Matxitxako.
This isn’t a new problem for the TV and film industry though. Other fan favorite locations such as Luke Skywalker’s island from the end of The Force Awakens or the Walsh family house that almost got sold off for a country club expansion have drawn similar attention.
Open Sourcing Mental Illness
Starting in 2013 as a speaking series by Ed Finkler, Open Sourcing Mental Illness is the largest 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated to mental health in tech. They help to help shine a light on problems that have too long been a taboo discussion topic in the workplace. Since its inception Ed has given over 50 talks at conferences, meetups and corporate events spreading the message of OSMI. In addition to the talks, OSMI conducts research by polling the tech community to help gauge the attitudes towards mental health in the workplace and produces documentation to improve the workplace for those that suffer from mental health disorders.
Their 2017 fundraising campaign recently kicked off and they’re goal is to collect $50,000 to continue and expand their work.
Giving back with 24 Pull Requests
In the spirit of giving back that accompanies the end of the year, a new project named 24 Pull Requests has launched with the goal of helping developers give back to open source projects. To use the site you login with your GitHub account and choose the languages you’re proficient with, then 24 Pull Requests provides you with a list of suggested projects that you can contribute to on GitHub.
So much of our, or at least my, digital life is made possible because of OSS. Whether it’s an act of good will or an effort to pad your résumé, contributing to the projects that make our professional and personal lives better is a great way to give back to the developer community.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton
