web development

Experiments: Limited Web Experience

Smashing Magazine runs a series of articles by Chris Ashton, a senior software engineer at BBC, in which he experiences the web for one day with a selected limitation. So far he has tried the following:

Use Internet Explorer 8. This version of the browser has reached its end of life on January 12, 2016.
Use the screen reader. While accessibility of the average website has certainly improved in the last couple of decades, we still have a long way to go.
Use keyboard only. This is probably a lot easier for technical people who are used to keyboard shortcuts and custom browser extensions.
Disable JavaScript. In this day and age, I think this will render the web almost unusable.

termtosvg – record terminal sessions as SVG animations

termtosvg (GitHub repo) is a handy little tool that makes recording animated sessions in the terminal as simple as humanly possible. Instead of generating heavy graphics or video animations, this tool creates SVG files, which are a lot smaller and easier. There is also a selection of themes to choose from.

Th resulting SVG files can be used as quick demos and guides in READMEs on GitHub, or as tutorials for your application’s website.

Choose Boring Technology

I really enjoyed the “Choose Boring Technology” slides. While it might not be as exciting as yet another JavaScript framework overview, it certainly raises many good points from the wisdom of the years.

Lazydocker – a simple terminal UI for both docker and docker-compose

Lazydocker is a simple terminal UI for easier management of Docker. This is particularly useful for new Docker users, but can as well save plenty of keystrokes to the seasoned administrators.

How HTTPS Works in 10 Minutes

“How HTTPS Works in 10 Minutes” is a simple, high-level overview of how HTTPS works. It doesn’t dive into too much detail or heavy math. But it does cover the main stages of how the connection is established, verified, and encrypted. These are the stages that are covered:

You go to an HTTPS website via your browser
The Client says “Hello”
The Server says “Hello”
The Client makes sure the SSL certificate is legitimate
The Client gets the public key from the SSL certificate
The Client uses the public key to make more random bytes
The Client and Server make session keys
The Client and Server compare session keys
If the session keys match, game on