** week notes **
I’ve been experimenting. I’ve been concocting a recipe for vegan kugel, and rediscovering little features and edges of my website I’d forgotten I baked in. Like chocolate chips hidden in an oatmeal raisin cookie.

One chip most recently re-discovered: support for per-page custom styles?! All I gotta do is include an optional bit of meta data, bespoke-css, that points to a style sheet. I may play with this feature more. I do love myself some css. I can tell exactly when in my life I added this feature because th … ⌘ Read more

Ignite Realtime Blog: New: Openfire MUC Real-Time Block List plugin!
A new plugin has been made available for Openfire, our cross-platform real-time collaboration server based on the XMPP protocol. We have named this new plugin the MUC Real-Time Block List plugin.

This plugin can help you moderate your chat rooms, especially when your service is part of a larger network of federated XMPP domains. From experience, the XMPP community has learned that bad actors tend to spam a wid … ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Can’t Live with It, Can’t Live without It
I’d like to share some thoughts about Elixir’s with keyword.  with is a wonderful tool, but in my experience it is a bit overused.  To use it best, we must understand how it behaves in all cases.  So, let’s briefly cover the basics, starting with pipes in Elixir.

But like all tools, you should think about when it is best used…

Pipes are at their best when you expect your function … ⌘ Read more

ICYMI: CodeQL enhancements
Learn about CodeQL’s improved user experience and enhancements that let you scan new languages, detect new types of CWEs, and perform deeper analyses of your applications. ⌘ Read more

🌠 Git plugins & OCR improvements
Improved inbox experiences, more better backlinks, gems of the year voting, & a new scifi theme based on Cyberpunk 2077. ⌘ Read more

📰 On Famines: why and how they happen. To who?
Agrarian societies experience famine for a variety of reasons, including poor governance, war, and weather. ⌘ Read more

🌠 Plugin graphs & academic tools
Tasks now supports custom statuses, table experiences are enhanced, & there are new tricks for emacs users. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net vultr pricing is low. But it can be lower if you shop the less fancy admin ui sites like virmarch or ovh. There are some bare metal that cost way less.. Though the experience is less than optimal.

Washing Machine Settings
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Washing Machine Settings
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**RT by @mind_booster: Save the date! Feb 13th.

Upcoming webinar: Flexible exceptions - the next step for Europe?

Focus:Open norms and civil law jurisdictions in Europe + a look at the experience of civil law countries in E Asia who have introduced them.

Chair @Senficon

👇🏻
https://www.knowledgerights21.org/news-story/upcoming-webinar-13-february-flexible-copyright-exceptions-the-next-step-for-europe/**
Save the date! Feb 13th.

Upcoming webinar: Flexible exceptions - the next step for Europe?

Focus:Ope … ⌘ Read more

GitHub Availability Report: December 2022
In December, we did not experience any incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services. This report sheds light into an incident that impacted customers using GitHub Packages and GitHub Pages in November. ⌘ Read more

My 2022 in Review
2022 is over, welcome 2023! A year full of unexpected events, many personal changes and a lot of new experiences… But since I wrote a review every month, I just want to highlight the highlights here. ⌘ Read more

Ignite Realtime Blog: Help us translate Spark and Openfire!
We have started to experiment with an online tool that facilitates the process of translating Spark and Openfire. Both already have a bunch of translations, but none are complete.

I’m looking for people wanting to test the tool and/or provide translations. The aim is to make providing translations become so easy that little technological know-how is required.

If you’re interested, please sign up to [Ignite Realtime localizati … ⌘ Read more

Creating an accessible search experience with the QueryBuilder component
GitHub’s search inputs have several complex accessibility considerations. Let’s dive into what those are, how we addressed them, and talk about the standalone, reusable component that was ultimately built. ⌘ Read more

Experiment: The hidden costs of waiting on slow build times
How much does it really cost to buy more powerful cloud compute resources for development work? A lot less than you think. ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Advent of Code 2022 – Every Puzzle Solved in Erlang

Christmas is getting closer and with that, the annual Advent of Code begins. For those who do not know, Advent of Code is a fun and inclusive event which provides a new programming puzzle every day. The fun is that these puzzles can be solved in any programming language and are accessible for varying levels of coding experience and skills. The real test is in your problem-solving. This year, we’ll be solving each of the problems in … ⌘ Read more

JMP: Writing a Chat Client from Scratch
There are a lot of things that go into building a chat system, such as client, server, and protocol.  Even for only making a client there are lots of areas of focus, such as user experience, features, and performance.  To keep this post a manageable size, we will just be building a client and will use an existing server and protocol (accessing Jabber network services using the XMPP protocol).  We’ll make a practical GUI so we can test things, but not spend too much time on p … ⌘ Read more

Protecting Internal Web Resources

TL;DR: This blog post is a write-up of the process I went through to setup a set of internal web resources and apps for a small company I am running in my spare time ( providing a Single-Sign-On / SSO experience for internal users with web applications protected by flexible access policies including single and multi-factor authentication / two-factor authentication or 2FA).

As I mentioned in the TL;DR above, I run a small software/technology com … ⌘ Read more

Unboxing fork improvements and unwrapping fork docs
We’re always trying to improve the GitHub developer experience in meaningful ways, and we love learning from our customers. In the last several months we released several new fork capabilities, and we’re publishing revised fork documentation that gives more details with clearer explanations to make fork concepts easier to understand. ⌘ Read more

Improving navigation for GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions changed how developers automate workflows with GitHub. Today, we’re introducing a new navigation to manage your GitHub Actions experience, improving discoverability and accessibility as well as opening up future feature opportunities. ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Learning functional and concurrent programming concepts with Elixir
If you are early in the process of learning Elixir or considering learning it in the future, you may have wondered a few things.  What is the experience like? How easy is it to pick up functional and concurrent programming concepts when coming from a background in languages which lack those features? Which aspects of the … ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Pair Programming
As a junior software developer, finding the right tools and techniques to help you learn a new language or technology can make a huge difference. While spending the last few months learning Erlang and Elixir, one of the techniques that I have found really helpful is pair programming.

I will be breaking down the concept of pair programming and my experiences with it so far, including the benefits and different ways of utilizing this programming style.

Working on a creative project? Unleash your originality and start to tinker with the Aspiring Creatives Experience
Develop your design and collaboration skills to get your clever intentions off the ground. ⌘ Read more

Two ways you can experience GitHub Universe
GitHub Universe is back and more robust than ever, with two great ways to engage with everything this global developer event has to offer. ⌘ Read more

The Cosmic Voyage motd is honestly one of the coolest terminal experiences I’ve ever had, and it’s almost entirely generic information.

Tigase Blog: Tigase XMPP Client Apps

Web based, JavaScript, React and so on app are great… for developers.

We do care about users and we understand that the only way to provide users with great experience is through native apps.

Therefore we have put a lot of effort and dedication to develop native client for each platform separately. Each of our
apps is tailored for the best experience and native feeling. Plus they are optimized for each platform, so they are
lightweight but also powerful and take … ⌘ Read more

Meet the GitHub Campus Experts selected for the fall 2022 MLH Fellowship Cohort, powered by GitHub
Three new Campus Experts are joining the fall 2022 batch of the MLH Fellowship to work with open source maintainers and get real-world experience. ⌘ Read more

analog circuit debugging is a transcendental experience. every.single.time. #electronics

Meet the GitHub Campus Experts selected for the fall 2022 MLH Fellowship Cohort, powered by GitHub
Three new Campus Experts are joining the fall 2022 batch of the MLH Fellowship to work with open source maintainers and get real-world experience. ⌘ Read more

Research: quantifying GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness
When the GitHub Copilot Technical Preview launched just over one year ago, we wanted to know one thing: Is this tool helping developers? Our research, using a combination of surveys and experiments, led us to expected and unexpected answers. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah I am not one of these people who just have a twtxt file and end up posting a few things but not interacting with anyone. I do want to interact with the people of twtxt and yarn users. And not just twtxt users but I do care somewhat about the yarn users because really yarn is twtxt but with additions to make the experience better and a webui and the such like multi users. On top of that yarn and the twtxt clients add things like threads that are even helpful for twtxt users.

I should have attended the Homebrew Website Club London / Europe in June, after all they talked about maps, a topic I have some experience with. James uses Leaflet to create maps with his visited coffee shops. 👍 ⌘ Read more

I should have attended the Homebrew Website Club London / Europe in June, after all they talked about maps, a topic I have some experience with. James uses Leaflet to create maps with his visited coffee shops. 👍 ⌘ Read more

Streamline virtual hackathon events with the new Hackathon In The Cloud Experience
Attention all students! Make managing your virtual hackathon events even easier with the new Hackathon In The Cloud Experience. ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de From my limited experiences in two companies I can anedoctic tell you, that what we developers told our support work mates after analyzing things and what they replied back to the enquirers was not always the same. That also happend when we gave them answers in written form. Always super nice support folks, no a single doubt, but their basic technical knowledge was pretty much non-existent. And plenty of them didn’t even really know the softwares they’re supposed to support. Granted, those were not easy programs, one was indeed super complex. But if they use them on a daily basis for years one would expect that they know them quite well. At least the main features and workflows. We also often had to tell them basic stuff several times, which was quite a bit frustrating for both sides.

But, I was super glad, that we had them in the front row. You wouldn’t believe what crap queries they had to deal with and what utter bullshit they kept off our shoulders. Sometimes people wrote really offensive e-mails for no reason. Holy moly. I wouldn’t want to trade with them, not in a hundred years. Lots of my developer work mates, however, didn’t value our first level support at all. I mean, I totally understand, that after telling the same things over and over and over and over again it pisses you off, but treating them in a way they feel like shit, doesn’t help either. It only makes things worse. I had the impression that there was a slight war between development and support.

One thing that was totally stupid, is that the POs didn’t listen to improvements and suggestions on how to make things easier for the support team and also all our users. I mean, support has to deal with this software all day long and also get the same questions about workflows and stuff that’s too complicated or unintuitive. So a lot of things were really low hanging fruit to improve everybody’s live. But when they suggested anything, the POs always declined it, nah, it’s the support’s job. Period. A few times I teamed up with the support work mates and told the POs the same, the support team was suggesting and then it was accepted without hesitation. So that clearly shows there really was a two-tier society.

In my current project we don’t have a support team, so we need to handle all the support queries ourselves. In that regard I miss the old project. But luckily, it’s basically just other developers who are needing our help, so that’s fairly okay.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hahahaha, great typo, I had to laugh! Shot probably doesn’t feel too much different in your situation right now. :-D Jokes aside, get well mate!

Maybe call in sick and have a good rest. Sleeping most of the day and drinking a whole lot of tea and/or water sometimes makes a big difference for me when I’m knocked out. I’m convinced that reporting sick a day even speeds up the recovery and is a clear win in the end. Considering the reduced productivity when being ill and all the additional errors one is going to make for several days and the time spent afterwards to fix them or rework stuff, one’s better off to don’t to anything for one or two days and then take that time to really rest and give the body the time to get things sorted. At least in my limited and biased experience. Your mileage may vary, of course might be different for other folks.

Introducing even more security enhancements to npm
New npm security enhancements include an improved login and publish experience with the npm CLI, connected GitHub and Twitter accounts, and a new CLI command to verify the integrity of packages in npm. ⌘ Read more

Tips & tricks for using GitHub projects for personal productivity
GitHub Issues is a core component of how developers get things done and, as we built more project planning capabilities into GitHub, we’ve found some fun and unique ways to use the new projects experience for personal productivity. ⌘ Read more

Managing a game dev community with GitHub Actions
A Little Game Called Mario is an open source, collectively developed hell project. Anyone and everyone is welcome to contribute their unique talents to make both the player and developer experience more enjoyable. Find out how the collective leverages GitHub Actions to manage this wonderful little community. ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Gaining a Competitive Advantage in Fintech From Your Choice of Tech Stack
In our recent white paper ‘Technology Trends in Financial Services 2022’, we explained the importance of software engineering for gaining a competitive advantage in the industry. Since the start of the year, a lot has occurred on a macro level strengthening our belief that modern financial services must be based on a solid technical foundation to deliver the user experiences and business rel … ⌘ Read more

The XMPP Standards Foundation: On-Boarding Experience with XSF (Converse)
Hi, I am PawBud. I will be working as a GSoC Contributor with XSF. To know more about my project kindly read this blog. Feel free to contact me through my email to ask me anything you want!

Before I start, I feel that some things that I am going to write in this blog might offend someone. **Kindly … ⌘ Read more

Coronavirus Hong Kong: hospitals experience uptick in Covid-related admissions as city logs over 1,900 cases
Hong Kong records 1,917 cases, comprising 1,799 local and 118 imported infections, and no additional deaths. ⌘ Read more

Regina Ip is the right choice to steer Hong Kong’s comeback as Exco convenor
Given her qualifications in the political arena and personal experience in overcoming setbacks, she is more than capable of shaping the terrain of Hong Kong’s political landscape. ⌘ Read more

Following Friends in Fitness Apps is Associated with Higher Levels of Physical Activity
[Sponsored Article]

The past few years have seen huge growth in mobile fitness apps globally. Expecting increased revenue to be generated from this category, app designers strive to add features to enhance the user experience and motivate better performance.

Dr HUANG Guanxiong, Dr Crystal JIANG Li, and doctoral student SUN Mengru from CityU’s … ⌘ Read more

Changing the World for the Better
A passionate educator in social work with profound experience in the field, there are few who are as dedicated to teaching the next generations of students in social welfare in Hong Kong as Dr Sylvia KWOK LAI Yuk-ching ⌘ Read more

Senior Beijing official with over 30 years’ experience in Hong Kong affairs appointed to deputy role in nation’s top advisory body
Zhang Xiaoming, former executive deputy director of state-level Hong Kong office, made deputy secretary general of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. ⌘ Read more

‘Glocalised’ school-based curriculum at Caritas Wu Cheng-chung Secondary School empowers innovation and inspires students from nearly 20 countries and regions
Caritas Wu Cheng-chung Secondary School (CWCC) embraces ‘glocalisation’ to optimise its students’ learning experience as well as their personal growth and character building. ⌘ Read more

How to play the first text adventure game… in style.
Everything you need for the ultimate Colossal Cave Adventure experience – including maps and walkthroughs. ⌘ Read more

How J.Y. Pillay helped Lee Kuan Yew turn Singapore Airlines into a global giant
With no domestic market and limited aviation experience, Singapore’s dream of owning a world-class international airline seemed far-fetched, but Pillay believed it was achievable. ⌘ Read more