End of May

Last week or actually during the last two months a lot has changed for me. I really want to write a post about my decision to move back to Berlin, but it takes time and everything is still in flux.

To avoid not publishing anything for weeks, I will skip this topic for now and share some of my favourite posts from May.

Headless Chrome

If you have used phantom.js for acceptance tests or other things, you might know that it isn’t really a headless modern browser. It’s slow and lacks a lot of features, especially support for the latest ECMAScript specs.

That’s why the Chrome team started working on a headless version of its browser a long time ago. With version 59 it is finally available on Mac and Linux. Windows support will be enabled in version 60 too.

Eric Bidelman has written a blog post about using headless Chrome to do things like:

📃 Eric Bidelman’s introduction: Getting Started with Headless Chrome

Apple killed the value of software

With the App Store Apple created a huge market for developers. At the same time they also taught people the economics of what to expect when they buy software: How much does it cost? How long can I use it? What about updates?

Matt Gemmell just wrote up the rules of Apple’s App Store, which shows what people now believe is true about software. As a developer it makes you really sad about what expecations they’ve put into people heads.

📃 Our race to the bottom: Damage by Matt Gemmell

Software Mental Modals

As a regular reader you might know, that most of my weekly summaries include a post by Jessica Kerr.

This time she wrote about the components of the sociotechnical system that a software team and its software are. The post is short and to the point. Its few words were enough to give me a new perspective on how to look at software engineering.

📃 Jessika Kerr about the Confirm and Conflict Loop: Code and Coders: components of the sociotechnical system

Why Elm

This is where the Elm part of this post starts.

The number of people explaining why you should try Elm is growing, but often these are blog posts or talks. In case you prefer reading a short book about why trying Elm is worth your time give this one a read.

📚 PDF by Matthew Griffith Why Elm

SPAs with Elm

Maybe you have already concluded that Elm is a great choice, but you cannot imagine how a full-blown singe page application would look like. This is where Richard Feldman’s open source repository comes in handy.

It is an implementation of the TodoMVC app according to the realworld example apps spec.

📃 4000 lines of Elm by Richard Feldman: Tour of an Open-Source Elm SPA

Make beats with Elm

Last but no least Ableton has created an amazing introduction website/app about creating electronic music. All of the little drum machine, synthesizer and loop interfaces are built with Elm, which talks to audio JS libraries via ports.

🎵 Ableton’s interactive guide to creating music: Learning Music