SitePoint Weekly – 30 July, 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

The Roadmap

Founder spotlights, advice for makers, and a place to share your early-stage projects with the rest of the community.

🎟 tickgit is a command-line tool and web application that helps developers do project management in their code via TODO comments. Founder Patrick DeVivo talks about the product he built, and why he thinks plaintext markers are a source of untapped potential.

Why focus on surfacing TODO comments in a codebase, rather than enforcing more standard project management practices?

Plenty of existing ticketing and task management systems help teams and individuals track pending work really thoroughly. Sometimes, though, using TODO comments and other markers within a codebase ends up being a more efficient way of keeping tabs on what needs to get done.

TODO comments are something developers are already using, and aren't likely to stop anytime soon – no matter what your friendly neighborhood scrum master says. Just look at the number of TODO comments in major open source codebases:

TODO comments (or FIXME, HACK, OPTIMIZE, XXX, etc.) are a common way developers indicate that an area of code is worth addressing and returning to. The Linux codebase has 4k+ of these types of comments, Kubernetes has 2k+.

Why not turn that practice into something truly useful, reduce the context-switching to speed up developer velocity, and eliminate the problems arising from forgotten TODO comments?

It's an interesting concept, and one that has turned some heads from developers during my informal polling.

DeVivo's monetization strategy is a familiar one: all features are free – for public repos. If you want to use tickgit with private repos, a subscription costs US$3/month. It's a way of supporting open source and personal projects while charging those users who really need extra support that has proven itself useful in the dev tools market time and again.

If you take tickgit for a spin, be sure to hit reply and tell me what you thought. I'll relay your feedback to Patrick. You can find out more about tickgit on SitePoint:

➤ Learn more about tickgit in our full blog post

Building something cool you'd like to see featured? We'd love to hear from you. Get in touch with us and tell us a bit about your project.

The Zoom Naughty Corner

🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web

The CEOs of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook faced a congressional antitrust hearing this week, in which:

• Google's Pichai was grilled over 'destroying anonymity on the internet',
• Amazon's Bezos couldn't promise Amazon employees don't access independent seller data,
• Documents handed over to the committee showed that Facebook's Zuckerberg drove the Instagram acquisition to avoid a battle to 'dislodge' a competitor,
• and Apple's Cook largely got off easily.

Casey Newton's analysis in The Interface should provide you with the most thorough understanding in the most timely manner. To quote the introduction:

Well, we had an antitrust hearing.

A long one, too. The House Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the market power of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google ran to nearly six hours, accounting for a handful of delays and intermissions. Alternating Democrats and Republicans asked the CEOs of those companies a combined 217 questions, ranging from pointed questions about how Facebook intimidates smaller competitors (from Rep. Pramila Jayapal) to comically self-interested inquiries into why members’ fundraising emails are going to the spam folder (thank you, Rep. Greg Steube.)

In its lunatic whipsawing between companies, issues, and conspiracy theories, today’s antitrust hearing resembled nothing so much as an endlessly scrolling social media feed. Every question shouted, every answer interrupted, nothing truly ventured, and very little learned. Polarized and polarizing. You want to look away, you can’t look away. Another day in 2020.

It was not a winning day for the tech companies, and the hearing ended with the promise that some would be broken up and all would be regulated. It'll be an interesting road ahead for the industry, but there's very little disagreement on whether action needs to be taken – only on how much.

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A Microchip Off the Old Block

• I'm not sure who needs to hear this, but Bill Gates has clarified that he has no plans to include stealthy microchips with any forthcoming coronavirus vaccines.
• GPT-3 might not be coming for your job, but if you don't think its descendants could, Elon Musk has some adjectives for you.
• Vue 3.0 has entered the Release Candidate stage, bringing greater performance without drastically outmoding your existing knowledge. 
• The new Meow attack has deleted almost 4,000 unsecured databases (as of six days ago). Secure your databases!
• There's some debate as to the market potential of no-code in this recent Equity podcast episode, hosted by my friend Alex Wilhelm and his colleagues Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas. I am bullish, but much like GPT-3, I don't think it'll be killing our jobs any time soon.
• Many devs I know are warming up to the no-code movement in a big way – not because they're throwing in the towel for Webflow, but because of all the automations they no longer have to spend time and effort coding themselves (h/t to SitePoint Head of Engineering Stuart Mitchell for this one).

Guiding Lights

• How to Develop Microfrontends Using React – learn how to start decomposing frontend monoliths into microfrontends with React.
• 10 Standout GitHub Profile READMEs – check out what other developers have been doing with the GitHub profile READMEs that have gotten everyone excited recently.
• Structuring Vue components for reuse — tips for structuring your next Vue app for more manageable development.
• Flossbank is a package manager wrapper that uses ad revenue and monthly donations to support maintainers of the packages you install. Neat concept!
• Looking to get into backend development? Here's a handy learning roadmap. 

Computing With Style

• Recursive is an impressively versatile five-axis variable font that's free, open source, and available on Google Fonts. Recursive covers all sorts of monospace, sans, casual, and linear states, and provides granular controls for weight, slant, and cursive attributes. 
• Get Palette is a Figma plugin that helps you to create beautiful color palettes using images. 
• Here's a closer look at some of the GPT-3-driven design tools that are starting to show up.

A Shortcut Home

• AuthKit is a new library for iOS Shortcut creators to add authentication to shortcuts without a helper app.
• Due is the best iOS app for nagging you to put the bins out until you do so and generally not forgetting to do things that absolutely can't be forgotten. Its Mac counterpart, which had been left behind a bit, has received a solid update.

• [openbox] bliss. via r/UnixPorn – One of the great things about this newsletter is that it provides me with a Very Good Justification for all the time I spend on the UnixPorn subreddit, particularly given how infrequently I use Linux with any form of desktop environment present. Here's one of my favorite desktop customizations from this past week, a peach pastel openbox setup named bliss.

That's it for this week – thanks for reading, and we'll see you next time!

Connect with the Community

We'll see you in the next edition — in the meantime, connect with us for a chat through our various communities or on social media:

• SitePoint forums
• Our Discord server
• On the blog
• Or on Twitter

Thanks for being part of the SitePoint community!

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