Makzan’s Dispatch #19w42: Moving to Substack

It has been months since I sent out last newsletter. I was in deep focus work and time flies. I was in New York for the Adobe Certified Associate Championship during July. And then I was in Kazan running the WorldSkills Web Technologies skill. And then I was back to Macao running the local mobile web design skill competition. And suddenly, after all those intensive work, it is Q4 of 2019. 

I moved the newsletter from Mailchimp to Substack and now all my newsletter archive are in one place. The Substack reminds me the TinyLetter service, which I used during my writings at 2014. Both give me the simplicity to write without all those distractions.

By the way, I just finished reading the book Deep work and the Make Time. I highly recommend them.

TL;DR

How do I win in a packed category?
WorldWideWeb from 1990
The Lean Web ebook — The web without the complication
Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector
The Web We Want
A Comprehensive Guide to All 120+ Settings URLs Supported by iOS and iPadOS 13.1
JSON.parse('{"foo":undefined}') — There is no undefined in JSON

Links worth sharing

How do I win in a packed category?
https://m.signalvnoise.com/qa-how-do-i-win-in-a-packed-category/

How about just making something that can sustain itself? Why do you need to win it all? Why would you ever want to make it that hard on yourself?

Start up is easy. Stay up is difficult.

WorldWideWeb from 1990
https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/

In December 1990, an application called WorldWideWeb was developed on a NeXT machine at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) just outside of Geneva.

This is screenshot of Makzan.net in the NeXT machine.

The Lean Web ebook — The web without the complication
https://leanweb.dev/ebook/lean-web-principles/

Old techniques don’t become invalid just because new ones come out. Often, the older approaches are simpler and more reliable than the new ones.

Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/10/firefoxs-new-websocket-inspector/

To use the inspector now, download Firefox Developer Edition, open DevTools’ Network panel to find the Messages tab.

This is handy tool for web socket development.

The Web We Want
https://webwewant.fyi/about/

If you end up throwing a ton of code at a problem, perhaps there’s a better way.

A Comprehensive Guide to All 120+ Settings URLs Supported by iOS and iPadOS 13.1

https://www.macstories.net/ios/a-comprehensive-guide-to-all-120-settings-urls-supported-by-ios-and-ipados-13-1/

A long list of iOS Settings x-callback-url that can be linked into particular view in the Settings app. 

Code worth sharing

JSON.parse('{"foo":undefined}')
https://stackoverflow.com/a/17648265

Do you know that there is no "undefined" in JSON. So `JSON.parse` throws error when it encounters `undefined`.

Or if you’re using `try` when doing the parse, check against `undefined` instead of `null` because null is a valid JSON.

function tryJSONParse(string) {
    try {
        return JSON.parse(string);
    } catch (e) {
        return undefined;
    }
}

Quote worth sharing

“Slow down a little, turn down the noise of the modern world, and find more joy in each day”. — Make Time book

Thomas Mak,
Until next week.

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