GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces

If you haven't yet, try hitting . while viewing a repo in GitHub.

That will launch a Codespaces instance, GitHub's online IDE that runs VS Code in your browser (with all of your user settings synced). It's quite impressive.

GitHub's engineering team has now doubled down internally on Codespaces as their default development environment, a testament to their commitment to it. A couple months ago I suggested that online IDEs might be the future of development, but this is a lot sooner than I'd imagined.

Introducing yourself without saying your title

I appreciated this short post on introducing yourself using your role rather than your title. Of the good reasons the author cites, I liked this one most:

It flattens the conversation. To me, it's important to make sure everyone else has a voice, regardless of what level they are at or how many years of experience they have in their resume. Sometimes the best ideas come from people who are able to think fresh — and the last thing I want is for people to hold their thoughts because they don't feel "senior enough" or "as senior as the other folks in the room".

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021

Stack Overflow recently released their annual developer survey results for 2021. Plenty of interesting insights in here, but to highlight a few:

1. What do you do when you get stuck

   ~90% of devs start troubleshooting with a Google search.

2. Web frameworks

   Svelte beat out React as "most loved" web framework.

3. Integrated development environment

   VS Code is by far the IDE of choice.

4. Salary by developer type

   Across the board, engineering managers, SREs, DevOps specialists, and data engineers tend to receive the highest salaries.

Twitter's new font and Last of Us 2: an accessibility lesson to be learned

Great analysis by Anna Mészáros on Twitter's recent design changes. The new Chirp typeface is reportedly giving some people migraines. 😬 What I found more interesting though was that Twitter may have amped up the contrast ratios for text too high to the point where it can actually be harder to read for some people (e.g. those with photosensitivity).

Apps Getting Worse

Tim Bray on software that seems to degrade with each update. Bray places the blame squarely on product managers—which I find a bit unfair—but the overall problem is very real and disheartening.

Aligning a Button Label Vertically

Despite the title, this post is more about vertically aligning text in general with CSS (not just in buttons). Still, it's a useful technique that certainly beats applying uneven padding.