Cool Links Vol. 6: December, 2024

Happy Holidays! I have four new links to read while you recharge your batteries from dealing with end-of-year stress or recovering from overeating.

They’re either introspective or retrospective, as is the theme this time of year.

Deep Reads

Care Doesn’t Scale, by Steven Scrawls

This is such a good article that resonated very deeply with me. As someone who wished could do more to help the world and as a software developer who thinks about scalability, it’s a hard realization when you get older and don’t see yourself as someone who’s made a big difference.

But turns out that caring for someone or something doesn’t scale. It can’t, otherwise it’s not care anymore.

Self-guaranteeing promises, by Steph Ango

A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone.

Steph Ango is the lead developer behind Obsidian, and I’ve mentioned him before on my Owning your stuff is pretty cool, actually post earlier this year. On this article he talks about how the only way to guarantee ownership of your data is if the service can never access it in the first place. Terms of service guarantees are based on trust that the company’s priorities will never change, and that trust has been broken again and again.

Dev

State of JavaScript 2024

It's always fun to see these "State of..." surveys. Noteworthy thing being Astro completely dominating the framework numbers (except for usage, but I can totally see it becoming #1 soon).

CSS Wrapped 2024

A really well-designed post from the Chrome team showing the coolest new things that were introduced to CSS in 2024. A lot of the things in there are really cool! The sad part is that, unless you're running an up-to-date Chromium browser, you might not be able to see them in action. I initially saw this blog post on my iPhone (which only has access to Safari) and almost none of them worked.

Wrapping up

With 2024 over and done, I want to thank you for following me along over here, and I hope you stick around for 2025.

See you next year!