Organize your daily tasks at one place while making time tracking a lot less annoying. Super Productivity is a ToDo List / Time Tracker / Personal Jira Task Manager for Linux, MacOS and Windows aimed at reducing the time you spend with repetitive tasks and to provide you with a place to collect all the information you need to do your job.

This is a bit too much engineering for me, but perhaps you’ll like it.

This code:

from guietta import _, Gui, Quit

gui = Gui(
    
  [  'Enter numbers:', '__a__'  , '+' , '__b__',  ['Calculate'] ],
  [  'Result:  -->'  , 'result' ,  _  ,    _   ,       _        ],
  [  _               ,    _     ,  _  ,    _   ,      Quit      ]
)

with gui.Calculate:
    gui.result = float(gui.a) + float(gui.b)
    
gui.run()

Produces this UI:

Use it in your site by importing the CSS from unpkg and adding the placeholdify class somewhere. Also comes as a Chrome extension.

Jon Bodner shared a deep dive into why the world depends on simple, reliable, well-understood technologies like Go.

The one exciting thing that Go has is built-in concurrency support via goroutines, channels, and select. However, it is based on ideas from CSP, communicating sequential processes, which was first described in 1978.

This doesn’t sound like a programming language from the 21st century, does it?

And yet, Go is the 3rd most wanted and (maybe not coincidentally) the 3rd highest paying language, according to Stack Overflow. Every startup in Silicon Valley is using Go to build their infrastructure. Docker, Kubernetes, etcd, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Traefik and lots of other cutting-edge projects are written in Go. So what’s going on? Why is everyone interested in this boring language?

As a fun aside, I searched the Go Time transcripts for the word “boring” and found this gem from Kelsey Hightower on Go Time #114…

When infrastructure gets boring, something else will become exciting above it.

…which makes sense why Go being boring is fantastic, because there’s so many exciting things being built with it.

This lengthly post from Tim O’Reilly is a must read in my opinion. His perspective is that the 21st hadn’t really begun until this year, 2020, “when the COVID19 pandemic took hold.”

…when we look back, we will understand that the 21st century truly began this year, when the COVID19 pandemic took hold. We are entering the century of being blindsided by things that we have been warned about for decades but never took seriously enough to prepare for, the century of lurching from crisis to crisis until, at last, we shake ourselves from the illusion that our world will go back to the comfortable way it was and begin the process of rebuilding our society from the ground up.

Tim goes on to ask and answer questions like: “What might be gone, never to return? What might come, now completely unexpected?” He also shares insight as “news from the future” regarding the direction of trend lines.

…to understand whether a trend like work-from-home is becoming the start of a new normal, sometimes the trend just hits you in the face. First Twitter, then Facebook announcing a commitment to new work from home policies even after the crisis is an obvious sign.

This Smashing article is a nice introduction to Tauri, which was news to me as well. It tells you why you might want to use Tauri instead of Electron, how to get set up for Tauri development, and how to build a Vue-based desktop app with the framework.

In the process of moving to our ideal logging system, we constantly discussed the pros and cons of different solutions, and each of us defended the requirement close to them or changed the configuration parameters they needed, asked intriguing questions or sent us back to the original set of requirements.

I love write-ups like this one from the trenches where people share their journey to deciding on a particular solution. Every decision has a context and many blog posts gloss over that, resulting in silver bullet-y hand waving. That’s not super useful when trying to make your own decisions. What is super-useful is being able to understand the circumstances in which others made a choice. That way you can decide if your situation is close enough to theirs to make a similar decision… or not.

// In controllers/user.go
if err := database.CreateUser(); err != nil {
    log.Errorf("Could not create user: %v", err)
}

// In database/user.go
func CreateUser() error {
    if err := db.SQLQuery(userExistsQuery); err != nil {
        return fmt.Errorf("could not check if user already exists in db: %v", err)
    }
    ...
}

// In database/sql.go
func SQLQuery() error {
    if err := sql.Connected(); err != nil {
        return fmt.Errorf("could not establish db connection: %v", err)
    }
    ...
}

// in sql/sql.go
func Connected() error {
    if noInternet {
        return errors.New("no internet connection")
    }
    ...
}

The beauty of the code above is that each of these errors are completely namespaced by their respective function, are informative, and only handle responsibility for what they are aware of. This sort of error chaining using fmt.Errorf("something went wrong: %v", err) makes it trivial to build awesome error messages that can tell you exactly what went wrong based on how you defined it.

Is it time to migrate away from cron?

Like cron jobs, systemd timers can trigger events—shell scripts and programs—at specified time intervals, such as once a day, on a specific day of the month (perhaps only if it is a Monday), or every 15 minutes during business hours from 8am to 6pm. Timers can also do some things that cron jobs cannot. For example, a timer can trigger a script or program to run a specific amount of time after an event such as boot, startup, completion of a previous task, or even the previous completion of the service unit called by the timer.

Turns out DDG has been using a favicon proxy since 2018 that effectively sends all websites users visit in the app to their servers. This was first reported a year ago and shrugged off (and closed) by them because they aren’t keeping any of those requests.

At DuckDuckGo, we do not collect or share personal information. That’s our privacy policy in a nutshell. – tagawa

The issue sat dormant until it resurfaced yesterday when many other users stated their concern with the naive server-side implementation:

Yes, we already trust DDG, but only because we have to trust someone and others have proved to be untrustworthy. The issue isn’t about whether the user trusts DDG, it’s about minimizing the need for trust and maximizing the ability to verify privacy. Please consider reopening this issue. – svenssonaxel

It was suggested that this feature could/should be handled on-device and this comment on Hacker News points to Mozilla’s open source implementation that does just that. Finally, DDG’s CEO Gabriel Weinberg woke up (literally) and committed to changing the implementation.

All’s well that ends well?

Brett Cannon, writing for his personal blog:

It’s no secret that I want a Python implementation for WebAssembly. It would not only get Python into the browser, but with the fact that both iOS and Android support running JavaScript as part of an app it would also get Python on to mobile. That all excites me.

But when thinking about the daunting task of creating a new implementation of Python, my brain also began asking the question of what exactly is Python?

What follows from this point in Brett’s post is a stream of consciousness writing style of question and answer, back and forth, iteration over all the points of what makes Python be Python in an attempt to consider what it might take to “compile Python down to WebAssembly.”

This is part 3 of a three part series from Sheshbabu Chinnakonda introducing the Rust language to JavaScript developers — this one is focused on functions and control flow.

When Shesh kicked off this series he said, “I find it easier to understand something new if it was explained in terms of something I already know. I thought there might be others like me.”

BTW, here are links to the others from this series:

• Tooling Ecosystem Overview
• Variables and Data Types

A neat idea:

turven is a tiny widget that shows how many people are currently on the same page as you, for “warm fuzzy feelings” purposes. There’s something cool about seeing that there’s another soul out there, somewhere on our little blue planet, who’s reading the same thing at the same moment ✨

In practice, I’m not sure if it’ll make us feel less lonely or more lonely:

You’re the only person in the whole world on this web page right now. Why not invite a friend?

I guess it depends on which web pages you frequent…

gitqlite is a tool for running SQL queries on git repositories. It implements SQLite virtual tables and uses go-git. It’s meant for ad-hoc querying of git repositories on disk through a common interface (SQL), as an alternative to patching together various shell commands.

Mine your repo’s history for goodies. Here’s how to get commit count by author email:

SELECT author_email, count(*) FROM commits GROUP BY author_email ORDER BY count(*) DESC

Marko Saric, who you may remember as the only content marketer we’ve met who runs Linux:

Most GDPR consent banner implementations are deliberately engineered to be difficult to use and are full of dark patterns that are illegal according to the law.

I wanted to find out how many visitors would engage with a GDPR banner if it were implemented properly (not obtrusive, easy way to say “no” etc) and how many would grant consent to their information being collected and shared.

While I like the acronym so, this tool would actually be better described as se: an interface to the StackExchange network. In particular one thing that differentiates it from similar tools is that you can simultaneously search any number of sites in the StackExchange network