SPW #16: Facebook of Judgement

Serverless deployment, Capiche's Twitch for audio, Chrome is Bad, WebAssembly DevTools + more

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SitePoint Weekly #16
Facebook of Judgement

🍓 The freshest resources for web developers, designers, and makers.

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The Loop
Just published on SitePoint

A Guide to Serverless Deployment with Express and MongoDB

Erik Kückelheim Self-taught developer, creator of JSchallenger

In this tutorial, we’ll deploy a basic web app written in Node.js and Express. Eric shares his favorite workflow for deploying database-driven web apps, meant for developers who want to go full-stack on their side projects without having to set up and maintain a complex multi-service infrastructure. We’ll use GitHub Actions to create a CI/CD workflow that deploys our app on AWS Lambda.

A Guide to Positive Reinforcement in UX Design

Michiel Mulders Engineer and UX copywriter

Michiel Mulders explains the meaning of positive reinforcement in terms of UX, and offers practical tips for improving the experience of website visitors.

The Best Free Monospace Fonts for Developers, Compared

Daniel Schwarz Designer and UX Tricks founder

Daniel Schwarz compares the best free monospace fonts designed for developers. Get maximum legibility with minimal eyestrain by picking the right code editor typeface for your needs.

CSS with SVG: Real World Usage
Craig Buckler

Craig explains how to add CSS styles to SVGs when used as static images, inlined backgrounds and HTML, sprites, HTML content effects and portable files.

How to Translate from DOM to SVG Coordinates & Back Again
Craig Buckler

Mix DOM and vector interactions in SVG, translating from SVG to DOM coordinates and back, and translating to transformed SVG coordinates.

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The Rundown
Top technology stories from the last week​

The Federal Trade Commission and over 40 U.S. states filed antitrust lawsuits against Facebook this week. It's been clear that Facebook would join Google in this position for a while. But the show of force has been saved for Facebook, which is widely considered to have brought about far more nefarious outcomes than Google in its pursuit and abuse of market power.

As you'd expect, the suit revolves around the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, which have been well-established via records from Facebook's internal communications as acquisitions made for the purpose of eliminating competition. The New York Times:

"Federal and state regulators of both parties, who have investigated the company for over 18 months, said in separate lawsuits that Facebook’s purchases, especially Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion two years later, eliminated competition that could have one day challenged the company’s dominance."

For further commentary, we're recommending...

Between the House antitrust report and the suits against Google and Facebook, it has been surprising to see elected officials seemingly working for the people and pursuing this antitrust problem with both vigor and some intellectual rigor. How this plays out will have a significant impact on what our working lives as tech professionals look like on the other side (to say nothing of our lives as users). Creating new antitrust approaches for the digital era is fraught with the potential for well-intentioned missteps. It's necessary, and could also make things worse. Let's hope that this standard sets the tone for what's to follow.

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U.S. schools are buying phone-hacking tech that the FBI uses to investigate terrorists. And with few measures in place to protect students from the professionals in their lives who might not think much about privacy issues, it could happen anywhere.

This has been a troubling and insufficiently unaddressed area for some time. If you're a parent, you have reason to be concerned almost anywhere. Here in Queensland, high school admins fishing for useful footage regularly suspend students who refuse mobile access, even if staff are certain the student was only a witness or bystander and not a participant. If you have teenagers or kids with phones, don't delay the discussion where you tell them never to hand over their device — regardless of the threats that might be made to scare them into revealing a passcode before a parent call inevitably shuts it down.

If you happen to think handing gift-wrapped access to your child's every conversation, thought, photo, and investigatory picture of that weird nipple mole is okay, please feel free to do the same with your camera roll (for fairness). Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide." Cyberbullying is a destructive problem. To me, far scarier than even that are the likely well-intentioned but reckless education professionals creating a privacy nightmare because the usual way of investigating things is so much more inconvenient than access to your child's mind.

And nudes. Because no matter what you've said in warning, past a certain age they are taking them.

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Matthew Panzarino has a first impressions not-review of the AirPods Max up. This is an unusual product, at least from Apple. It seems to be entering an established competition without a high-impact differentiator lined up. At AU$900, these headphones are more expensive than some of the best entry-level audiophile open-backs and some very good closed-backs, will last only as long as Apple remains willing to service the battery (some still use cans in this price bracket from the 70s), and they're heavy enough for Panzarino to recommend upright seated use only.

Buttons and wires are annoying, but convenience features on recliner cans won't make the product cohere into something worth buying. Unless Apple can really deliver on sound at a price point where impressive audio is the cost of entry, these will sell more like HomePods than AirPods. The HomePod doesn't sell because, despite great sound for a smart speaker, it's outclassed by a decent stereo pair, a Dot, and an aux cable. Panzarino knows what he's doing — impressive is the careful descriptor he uses, since high-end diminishing returns mean metering equipment and a rigorous approach will be required to answer that question. Great sound for the seated listener and a pair of AirPods can fit within the same budget readily right now. Only full reviews will tell if Apple is actually competing from the front on entry-level audiophile sound or just hoping that status symbol power will get it over the line, but it'll be a noteworthy strategic shift if so.

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Cool Tools!

Capiche.fm has some real momentum gathering under it, and it's easy to tell this will be a big one. It's like Twitch for audio, allowing you to stream to an audience without all the gear overhead and performance. (From the makers of the excellent community over at similarly-named Capiche.)

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Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

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The Roadmap
Product, strategy, and execution

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Logic Flow
Computing, automation, productivity​, and tools for thought

Unless...

Apparently you can put that purchasing decision off for a while longer if you already own a Mac that has inexplicably aged five years. The 2018 MacBook Pro I am typing this from definitely has, and I hope it can read this. The culprit is not going to surprise you.

Aptly named Chrome is Bad shares the tip:

Short story: Google Chrome installs something called Keystone on your computer, which nefariously hides itself from Activity Monitor and makes your whole computer slow even when Chrome isn't running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone makes your computer way, way faster, all the time.

This is knowledge from 2009, apparently, but I was not paying attention that day and perhaps you were goofing off with me. This one's for you. I had assumed the latent install came with spyware, but not a sleeper CPU destroyer. Note that apps like AppCleaner and CleanMyMac do not deal with the library files for you, and it's a moderate-Hydra situation.

Ah, Google, the good adtech company.

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Setup of the Week
Good setups, set up well

All that Mac talk has scared off the hardcore ricers, so our setup of the week is our first iOS 14 rig. It certainly pales in customizability compared to... well, anything else at all, but we can all enjoy a ✨ Prime Aesthetic ✨.

I'm digging Just the essentials by Michelle062 for the tranquil, anti-hijacking design. I dare the apps to try and override my use intention! We'll see who wins when I do it all by myself.

You can find the wallpaper here, and the rest of the widgets and icons are listed in Michelle062's comment.

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Great remote jobs in tech
From our board to yours

Looking for a gig that'll stay remote after your friends are stuck in the office again? Check out some of our remote job board's listings...

... and hundreds more on ⚡ SitePoint Remote.

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Connect with the community

That's it for this week's issue. We'll see you in the next one — in the meantime, connect with us for a chat through our various communities:

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Until next time,

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Joel Falconer
Managing Editor