48 / My Favorite npm Commit

Hey, hope your week was great ✨

Tweet of the Week

malloc "may" return null in the same way that I "may" get my act together someday and act like a real adult — @zhuowei auf Twitter

Culture

• How to pay professional maintainers (words.filippo.io)

  Filippo Valsorda shares some advice to companies that want to sponsor individual open-source maintainers.

• 7 Mental Models For Great Engineering Leadership (athenian.com)

  Eiso Kant explains where to spend your time at different stages of the company, based on 7 models.

Software Engineering

• My Favorite npm Commit (blog.izs.me)

  isaacs about their favourite npm commit: Setting the time to the 26th October of 1985 to work around a tar limitation. If that date doesn’t ring a bell, it’s a reference to the Back To The Future movies.

• Introduction to Apple Silicon (github.com)

  The developers behind Asahi Linux explain how Apple Silicon (i.e. M1 and later) works.

• Chapter 1. Why You Should Give it a Try (nixos.org)

  A Nix Pill that explains the raison d’être of Nix.

• Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid (joshwcomeau.com)

  Josh Comeau about a good way to implement a full-bleed layout in CSS.

• Writing out large arrays in Go: binary.Write is inefficient for large arrays (lemire.me)

  Daniel Lemire about ways to make Go’s binary.Write method faster or more efficient.

• What does it mean to listen on a port? (paulbutler.org)

  Paul Butler explores the concept of ports on an operating system via a fictional story.

• Panics vs cancellation, part 1 (smallcultfollowing.com)

  Niko Matsakis about panics and cancellation in async Rust.

Cutting Room Floor

• War-prompted Disaster Planning (jefftk.com)

  Jeff Kaufman about the steps he takes to be ready for disaster.

• Down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole (fowlie.github.io)

  Fowlie shares their experience with different mechanical keyboards and layouts.

• Smart Home components (michael.stapelberg.ch)

  Michael Stapelberg about some smart home components he used and how he likes them.

• How our free plan stays free (tailscale.com)

  Avery Pennarun explains the pricing model of Tailscale and why the free customers are not the product.

• A retrospective look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard (morrick.me)

  Riccardo Mori compares Mac OS X Snow Leopard to macOS Big Sur from a visual standpoint.