Zoom Doom - Dev Finds Friday

This was originally published in my free weekly newsletter, Dev Finds Friday. It's like having that cool friend who sends you all the best links on the internet (but better).

Onto the the links!

We all live in Zoom, now, and people are starting to feel the Zoom doom brain drain.

Daily active usage has gone from around 10 million people to 300 million.

And maybe that's the problem. Even those of us used to virtual meetings from being remote find ourselves in Zoom after hours. Church is done in Zoom, birthday parties in Zoom, our kids' school is in Zoom, get togethers with friends done in Zoom, and on and on.

So, if you feel like "I don't want to be in any more Zoom calls" just know you're not alone.

And maybe take the night off.

Links:

Dev of the Week: Josh Comeau

I love checking out other dev's personal sites, and Josh's is one of the best. I'm always inspired whenever I check it out, and also a little bit jealous because I'm nowhere near as creative.

Link to his site: https://joshwcomeau.com .

Here's a Twitter thread where he talks about some of the little details that went into it: https://twitter.com/JoshWComeau/status/1232022395365535750

A few articles to read:

Cool Tool of the Week: Excalidraw

Link: https://excalidraw.com/

There's a spectrum of diagrams I create for my coding.

They range from drawings on a whiteboard that will be erased as soon as I'm done to more serious diagrams done with Draw.io that will live on in documentation to be updated over time.

Excalidraw falls somewhere between those two extremes. It's a web app that allows you to create whiteboard like diagrams that feel hand drawn.

Check out the story of how it went viral.

Other Links of Note

Informal Communication in an all-remote environment: GitLab is well known for being a thoughtful company. This is how they think about "informal communication."

For all-remote companies, leaders should not expect informal communication to happen naturally. There are no hallways for team members to cross paths in, no carpools to the office, etc.

How do recover some of those hallway connections when there is no water cooler or break room to cross paths in?

The most unique option if you and up to 4 other teammates can stay at the CEO's house in Utrecht, the Netherlands for free.

Not every company has an AirBnB to stay in together, but they have a bunch of other suggestions on how to use video conferencing to build connections outside of work: social calls, virtual lunch tables, scavenger hunts, and more.

Career advice for people with bad luck: What do you do if you find yourself stuck in a company going nowhere fast?

Most career advice on the internet is from people who had some sort of meteoric success. Why read advice from someone who’s had a mediocre career? But there’s massive sampling bias. All this advice will try to draw grand, sweeping narratives and also typically fails to sufficiently factor in luck.

Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22960225

Engineering code quality in the Firefox browser: What does it look like to keep a massive 21 million line multi-language project from becoming a big ball of mud?

Covers

static analysis
linting
coding style
code coverage

Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?:

"VSCode, and/or Sublime Text have probably saved me a hundred hours I would have spent waiting for Eclipse to start."

"Fuzzy file search in your editor. You know you want to open src/components/user.js so you type "cu" and it appears."

"Removing as much advertising from my life as possible. (Ublock origin, deleting social networks when possible)"

98.css: A Windows 98 style design system.