Notices by Nicholas C. Zakas (nzakas@fosstodon.org)

Ultimately, I think Mastodon will remain the choice of those for whom a truly federated solution matters. That fundamentally limits its growth potential as only the tiny minority that really care will put up with the friction.

Bluesky has far less friction and has the benefit of convenient sign up, discovery, and usage model. It’s much better suited to a general audience.

The Open Source Pledge is such an important endeavor. We need companies to start paying for the value they're extracting from open source software. Please share everywhere, including with your manager.

https://opensourcepledge.com/

I’m interested to see what happens with JSR. npm has had remarkable resiliency against alternatives, proving once again that “good enough” technology can win against superior features and performance.

Even GitHub’s own package registry couldn’t compete.

JSR 👀🍿

What I want: To write JavaScript tests once and be able to run them across Node.js, Bun, and Deno.

Problem: Bun and Deno have built-in test runners you have to import from to run tests. I use Mocha. This doesn't work.

Solution: ???

For humanfs, I'm using a kind of TypeScript-JavaScript hybrid setup for the first time, and I'm kind of loving it.

Interfaces are written in TypeScript files, while the functionality is written in JavaScript files with JSDoc type annotations.

One of my big complaints about TypeScript is when people mix type/interface definitions with functionality. When 75% of a file is long type definitions, it's maddening for me.

This way, I'm writing mostly clean JavaScript, but still get type checking.

JavaScript tip: Number.isNaN() is not the same as isNaN().

Number.isNaN() checks if the value is exactly equal to NaN:

Number.isNaN(NaN) === true;
Number.isNaN("foo") === false;

isNaN() checks if the value isn't a number:

isNaN(NaN) === true;
isNaN("foo") === true;

Part of your job as a technologist is to stay up on the latest tech. Your employer knows this and expects it. That's why it's okay to carve out time at work for exploration and learning. It *is* part of the job.

@functionalscript if I’m targeting the platform, then no extra dependency to manage.

I find the .only behavior of the Node.js built-in test runner maddening. Not only do I need to include --test-only on the CLI, but I also need to .only each "describe" and "it" all the way down to get a test to run?

🤬

One of the most impactful pieces of feedback I ever received was from my manager at Yahoo who said (paraphrasing): “People know you are usually right. But you could be nicer about it.”

How you treat people matters. It *does* affect your career. I’m grateful for that feedback.

Repeat after me: Blocking paste on a form textbox is not a security feature.

I’m still of the mind that AI-assisted programming is more like streamlining the typical Google or StackOverflow searches we all do throughout the day.

I don’t see it as a paradigm shift that fundamentally changes how code is created.

Yet.