Hello fellow developer, fixing things is a wonderful feeling. A lot of things are broken right now, so here are some ideas how you can play your part.

News and Articles

Let's start with mixed news, AI assistants might not be as useful as we thought for developers and may even make you a bad programmer. People wonder what the point of online conferences is and a former Nvidia engineer discovered a 41-million-digit prime number.

In security news, if you blocked horrible people on X, they can now still see your posts. You can learn what not to do in your products by looking at over 100 vulnerable apps and APIs. Another excellent place to learn from other people's mistakes is the HTTP Archive's Web Almanac. Always check the names of packages you use, as there are hundreds of typosquatting packages containing malware in NPM. Furthermore, the Lottie Player package contained crypto wallet theft malware. Google has a project called "Big Sleep" which uses AI to check products for vulnerabilites and it discovered a problem in SQLite. And, if you buy a domain name, make sure it is not haunted.

In accessibility land, Mozilla works on an alt text AI generation model and are looking for feedback, the deadline of the the  European Accessibility Act is in half a year and WebAIM celebrates its 25th birthday with 25 Accessibility tips.

Win free tickets!

We are raffling off three streaming tickets for c’t webdev next week. If you want to participate, please send us an email at help@wearedevelopers.com. Tickets will be selected at random on Monday, 11.11, and you will be notified via email.

Disclaimer: Raffle is for promotional purposes only and may be subject to change.

Code and Tools

Things are not good right now, so why not spend a chill day just HTML-ing and CSS-ing? And while we're at it, you can host your website using solar power and remember that static websites are tiny archives. You can also check out what people learned from running Windows11 on an unsupported PC for 3 years. With lots of people migrating from X, here's how to use the Bluesky API, how to post RSS feeds to it and how to use it to create Mastodon bots. Cloudflare has a good round-up explaining what HTTP/3 is about and Adam Argyle shows Amazing CSS in 2024. You can create an HTTP Tunnel and Proxy in pure JavaScript, generate mazes with it and if you like to dive deep, you can have a go at Re-implementing ==. If you don't want to pay for a calendar booking app, you can use Google Apps Scripts to create your own. Incidentally, we also used these scripts lately to track who unsubscribed from this and other newsletters. If you like a reading challenge, ternary operators may be your thing. And, if you interview people, do your homework first. 

Some tools for you: 

• Piclooks - AI generated avatars
• shell.how - Explain shell commands
• SVG.js - library for manipulating and animating SVGs
• youtube.js - A JavaScript client for YouTube's private API

Cool code demos

Gravity Game

Flower of hearts

Talks and Videos

In the last issue we reported on how Microsoft shrunk their monorepo Git size by 94 percent. So we sat down with Jonathan Creamer who has all the details. Turns out, the reason was a limitation in Git's code! Learn how to shrink your own repo size.

Other videos and talk write-ups of note:

• Förtsch,Endres - The AI Elections: How Tech Could Shape Public Sentiment
• Ines Akrap - Introducing the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines
• Jason Miller  - Scaling Vite at Shopify

Work and Jobs

In a landmark change, New York Times Tech workers went on a union organised strike and promptly Perplexity AI offered to replace them. Jen Looper thinks right now is the time to welcome more girls to CS in Middle school. Mozilla have advice on how to land your first developer job, Gilad Naor explains what it is like to be an engineering manager at Amazon and Jon de la Motte what it is like to why he left Stripe. Gourav Khanijoe has 5 hard-learned lessons from 10 years of being a software engineer. Hackernews has an interesting discussion on which companies are only pretending to be hiring and you should stop using the word just in conversations about your work.

Some companies to check out are:

dmTECH - NDT Global - Riese & Müller - SAP LeanIX - Projektron

Events

Advanced Technology Days returns to Zagreb on November 28th, 2024, bringing together top professionals and influential speakers who push the boundaries of IT innovation. Join a vibrant community of tech leaders and enthusiasts for two days packed with insights and transformative networking opportunities. Explore the future of IT and elevate your expertise — secure your place now!

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

• Turing Machine – Working Lego Computer
• Google Street View Business in the Middle of the Ocean
• One Million Screenshots

And even more events!

Are you a Vue.js & Nuxt enthusiast? Our friends at Vue School are combining two major events this year: Nuxt Nation 2024 x Vue.js Forge Ep5 on 12-14/11!

What's happening at WeAreDevelopers…

WeAreDevelopers LIVE, our online events. Next, on 20/11, is Accessibility Day. We always look for presenters, and you can apply here.

WeAreDevelopers World Congress returns 9-11 July 2025. Secure your ticket with a 15% discount using code "devdigest"