David O'Trakoun davidosomething

What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn

Disclaimer: This piece is written anonymously. The names of a few particular companies are mentioned, but as common examples only.

This is a short write-up on things that I wish I'd known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I'm not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would

Stuff I wish I'd known sooner about service workers

I recently had several days of extremely frustrating experiences with service workers. Here are a few things I've since learned which would have made my life much easier but which isn't particularly obvious from most of the blog posts and videos I've seen.

I'll add to this list over time – suggested additions welcome in the comments or via twitter.com/rich_harris.

Use Canary for development instead of Chrome stable

~~Chrome 51 has some pretty wild behaviour related to console.log in service workers. Canary doesn't, and it has a load of really good service worker related stuff in devtools.~~

What forces layout / reflow

All of the below properties or methods, when requested/called in JavaScript, will trigger the browser to synchronously calculate the style and layout*. This is also called reflow or layout thrashing, and is common performance bottleneck.

Generally, all APIs that synchronously provide layout metrics will trigger forced reflow / layout. Read on for additional cases and details.

Element APIs

Getting box metrics

elem.offsetLeft, elem.offsetTop, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight, elem.offsetParent

The purpose of this document is to make recommendations on how to browse in a privacy and security conscious manner. This information is compiled from a number of sources, which are referenced throughout the document, as well as my own experiences with the described technologies.

I welcome contributions and comments on the information contained. Please see the How to Contribute section for information on contributing your own knowledge.

Moving to ES6 from CoffeeScript

I fell in love with CoffeeScript a couple of years ago. Javascript has always seemed something of an interesting curiosity to me and I was happy to see the meteoric rise of Node.js, but coming from a background of Python I really preferred a cleaner syntax.

In any fast moving community it is inevitable that things will change, and so today we see a big shift toward ES6, the new version of Javascript. It incorporates a handful of the nicer features from CoffeeScript and is usable today through tools like Babel. Here are some of my thoughts and issues on moving away from CoffeeScript in favor of ES6.

While reading I suggest keeping open a tab to Babel's learning ES6 page. The examples there are great.

Punctuation

Holy punctuation, Batman! Say goodbye to your whitespace and hello to parenthesis, curly braces, and semicolons again. Even with the advanced ES6 syntax you'll find yourself writing a lot more punctuatio

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

	# Go to Colemak

	kwriteconfig6 --file kxkbrc --group Layout --key Model pc104awide
	kwriteconfig6 --file kxkbrc --group Layout --key LayoutList us,bg
	kwriteconfig6 --file kxkbrc --group Layout --key Options grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp:win_space_toggle,caps:backspace,lv3:ralt_switch_multikey,compose:menu
	kwriteconfig6 --file kxkbrc --group Layout --key VariantList cmk_ed_dh,colemak_dh
	dbus-send --session --type=signal --reply-timeout=100 --dest=org.kde.keyboard /Layouts org.kde.keyboard.reloadConfig

	# Back to QWERTY

	# The Zshell function will display the given message under-prompt (as a kind of notification).
	# It has an optional delay first argument: "@sleep:<secnods with fractions>". If given, then
	# the message will wait in background before showing for the specified time.
	#
	# Usage:
	# deploy-message @msg "Hello world"
	# deploy-message "Hello world"
	# deploy-message @msg 1234 # I.e. the "@msg" is needed for number-only messages, otherwise optional
	# deploy-message @sleep:5.5 "Hello world"

	function sync() {

	var id="XXXXXXXXXX"; // CHANGE - id of the secondary calendar to pull events from

	var today=new Date();
	var enddate=new Date();
	enddate.setDate(today.getDate()+7); // how many days in advance to monitor and block off time

	var secondaryCal=CalendarApp.getCalendarById(id);
	var secondaryEvents=secondaryCal.getEvents(today,enddate);

	" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
	" vimawesome.com
	" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
	function! VimAwesomeComplete() abort
	let prefix = matchstr(strpart(getline('.'), 0, col('.') - 1), '[.a-zA-Z0-9_/-]*$')
	echohl WarningMsg
	echo 'Downloading plugin list from VimAwesome'
	echohl None
	ruby << EOF
	require 'json'