Digitalia – Page 8 – Alasdair Watson

Links for Thursday May 10th 2018

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Alasdair

Laravel Translation via Google Spreadsheet – SkyshiDigital – Medium
An interesting way to set up translations within Laravel – make it easy to give non-techical users access to edit a site's translations.
Kolide
Device/security management system that's got a free tier that might actually be worth install in my own devices to give me a central place to manage them and keep an eye out for security issues.
Laravel API Documentation Generator
Might be useful at work. Or for myself another time.
20 Laravel Eloquent Tips and Tricks – Laravel News
I knew about half of these, and want to remember the others for later.
1.1.1.1 — the Internet’s Fastest, Privacy-First DNS Resolver
This is really nice, and from a company with a pretty good track record. I'll be setting it up at home myself later, and I encourage others to do the same.
PolaPi-Zero | Hackaday.io
I would like to go a few steps past this project, but in order to do that, I need to build this project.

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Alasdair

How to Rands – Rands in Repose
This really isn't a bad guide to basic tech management – making sure your team know what the score is regarding their line manager, and what he's about.

Coraline Ada Ehmke — Not Applicable: What Your Job Post Is Really Saying
This is nice thinking about how one come up with a job description in tech, and a good write up on how to improve that process.

Black Triangles
I have wanted a term for this for such a long time. So much of what I do is basically Black Triangles – a lot of behind the scenes work in order to start building the other things that have a more obvious impact, but trying to explain this to non technical staff is murder. If I can send this around in future, that might help.

Everything Easy is Hard Again – Frank Chimero
A description of what it feels like to build web software, after 20 years building it. There was a point, a few years back where I thought I'd achieved, well, definitely not mastery, but at least a certain level of expertise. These days, I feel like I'm constantly running to keep up, and just getting further and further behind. And there's really no reason this should be the case.
Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million – The New York Times
If ever you wonder if the Oxford comma really matters, then the answer is yes, sometimes it matters very very much.

Richard Sapper’s dark, alternate universe of tech design – Curbed
Interesting thought experiment: what if Sapper, not Ive, had become the design superstar of the IT industry?

GraphQL | A query language for your API
This looks like it could be very interesting to use if it's even halfway simple to drop over/alongside a pre-existing REST API.