Fabrefact

a blog by Sara Farquharson

what i'm reading: October 18

I spent all of yesterday defrosting my fridge instead of writing a blog post, but on my list of things to do both of those things count as accomplishments. I’m making a tiny bit of progress on my backlog of half-completed ideas.

I’ve been following along with the protests in Nigeria via Twitter, but don’t have any good links to share about it except the #EndSARS hashtag.

Articles

Frameworks

Commentary on tech news

  • Kat Maddox is consistently hilarious on Twitter, and that follows through into her newsletter, the most recent of which caught my attention by introducing me to an open-source project that lets you kill kubernetes pods by shooting them in Doom.

  • I saw some of Emily Kager’s satirical TikToks before reading her post about going viral as a woman in tech, and almost didn’t read it because I knew what to expect. There was a surprisingly positive twist to the story though!

  • Felienne has a great rant about why blaming Excel or its users for data problems is pointless, which became relevant again with the recent spreadsheet error that misplaced Covid-19 testing data in the UK.

Technical rabbit holes

Developer learning

Leadership

Better communication

Philosophical thoughts on computing

I couldn’t think of a common theme for these

  • This article about how free time is the key to happiness is mostly a promo for Ashley Whillans' book on the topic, but it does contain some reasonable strategies for making the most of your time.

  • Ronnie Flathers post on all the ways to store session tokens in Javascript and their security implications is exactly the type of content I wish I could have found when I was first starting to do professional Javascript development. He doesn’t go into other complications like cross-browser support or private browsing mode, and his recommended techniques have some pretty serious drawbacks (a session that can’t survive a page refresh?!), but it’s neat to see a bunch of pros and cons laid out.