SitePoint Weekly – 3 September 2020

🍓 The freshest resources, stories, and exclusive content for web developers, designers, and digital creators.

Pointed Advice

🦾 A selection of our latest articles and tutorials

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A Feast for the Five Eyes

🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web

The Rundown
Technology news, society, and culture

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism: If you take time for one long read this week, make it Cory Doctorow's new book. In classic Doctorow style, it's published in full on Medium's OneZero.

Surveillance Capitalism takes an analytical look at the state of the technology industry and dissects the issues we're faced with. From the resurgence of conspiracy theories to whether our problems are caused by ad-driven mind control or the destruction of monopoly protections, this one's a perspective-shifter and sorts out a lot of the confusion that has entered this discussion.

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• Neuralink demonstrates its next-generation brain-machine interface. Take a look at the rest of VentureBeat's Automation and Jobs special issue — compelling work by the team there.
• Elliot Jay Stocks, SitePoint author from a bygone era, shared The Verge's project Capturing the Police along with a note about the origins of the headline typeface Martin.
• Mark Nadal is one of a growing number of technologists trying to right what they see as the wrongs of the internet by building a new one around decentralization.
• Now is the time to build a better internet, the coronavirus pandemic has shown we have a long way to go: There's some fervor around remaking the web right now, with Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker publishing this piece in The Independent.

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• The TikTok saga drags on. CEO Kevin Mayer resigned after just 100 days. Sources claim a sale is almost ready to announce, but Chinese export rules have added new complications.
• Facebook tests linking your Facebook account to your news subscriptions. But in Australia, it says it will block sharing of news stories if legislation that forces it to pay publishers goes ahead.
• The war between Apple and Epic came to a dramatic head, and I suspect we'll see this news story come in and out of focus as the court case moves forward. Epic moved to withhold the latest season of Fortnite from iOS and macOS. But then Apple terminated Epic's dev account altogether — you can't redownload any of the company's games.
• Apple made a small policy change to allow bug fixes to come through on the App Store while an app is in jail.
• Apple won't even let developers mention the 30% Apple tax within apps, as Facebook found out. And while Facebook is probably being opportunistic, it's more than pertinent to the debate around the App Store — and all app stores.

Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

• WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg isn't a Jamstack fan, according to Matt Mullenweg.
• Here's why CSS logical properties aren't ready for use (h/t: SitePoint veteran Louis Lazaris).
• Learn Puppeteer & Playwright with these tips, tricks, and in-depth guides from the trenches (h/t: James Hibbard, also a SitePoint veteran).
• Heroicons is a set of free SVG icons from the makers of Tailwind CSS.
• danfo.js is a high-performance JavaScript library for manipulating and processing structured data.
• Take a look at these 10 lesser-known Web APIs you may want to use
• Make your project’s code stick to a style guide with DeepSource's automated code formatting.
• Twitter developer advocate Jessica Garson shows you how to explore a user's Tweets using Twitter API 2.0.
• Is the web getting slower? A detailed analysis.
• Remotely Interesting is a new podcast from developers at Netlify.
• cheat/cheat allows you to create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command line (h/t: another one from James Hibbard).

Logic Flow
Computing, customization, automation, and productivity

• Notion now has backlinks to show which pages link to a page. It'll be interesting to see where they take this early, rudimentary version of Roam's star feature.
• Notion isn't the only one on high alert: Bear has made some improvements to its Wiki-style links.
• Mac Power Users has done a Markdown episode with plenty of great advice for beginners and power users alike.
• A guide to the history of Unix and Linux.
• Enjoy app-guided meditation but have some thoughts about Headspace's monthly fee? Medito is an app for iOS and Android that will help you get mindful for free.
• Federico Viticci shows off some custom widgets in the iOS 14 beta using the Scriptable app.
• Another entrant in the tools for thought market: Muse, a visually-oriented iPad app.
• Make working from home while cohabitating easier with Oh Bother.
• RemNote is a note-taking app geared around spaced repetition and making memorization easier. Here's a beginner's guide.

The Roadmap
Product, strategy, marketing, and business

• How Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz built an anti-Facebook in Asana, rejecting the hard-charging culture of most Silicon Valley companies for something more intentional.
• COVID-19 has changed your users. This Nielsen report clears up exactly how and why people's behaviors and preferences have shifted.
• There’s a growing movement where startup founders look to exit to the community.
• Alex Kantrowitz explains why a Slack backlash is inevitable, quoting one CEO as saying that Slack and its counterparts ‘create problems, high-school-type problems.’ Apparently cliques, not the tendency to detrain your capacity for deep focus, will be Slack's undoing.

• WorkPatterns bills itself as the operating system for high-functioning teams, with a toolkit for 1:1s, feedback, & recognition.

And we'll leave you with this one. Read the story of a gruesome discovery: that the Scots version of Wikipedia is written almost entirely by one American teenager who can't even speak Scots.

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Connect with the community

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Until next time,

👋

Joel Falconer
Managing Editor