#233 – October 15, 2017
The whole web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank
The Firefox Quantum release is getting close. It brings many performance improvements, including the super fast CSS engine that we brought over from Servo. But there’s another big piece of Servo technology that’s not in Firefox Quantum quite yet, though it’s coming soon. That’s WebRender, which is being added to Firefox as part of the Quantum Render project.
The Absurdly Underestimated Dangers of CSV Injection
I’ve been doing the local usergroup circuit with this lately and have been asked to write it up. In some ways this is old news, but in other ways…well, I think few realize how absolutely devastating and omnipresent this vulnerability can be. It is an attack vector available in every application I’ve ever seen that takes user input and allows administrators to bulk export to CSV. That is just about every application.
Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds your new music
This Monday — just like every Monday— over 100 million Spotify users found a fresh new playlist waiting for them. It’s a custom mixtape of 30 songs they’ve never listened to before but will probably love. It’s called Discover Weekly, and it’s pretty much magic.
The World’s First Middle-Out Compression for Time-series Data
Middle-out compression is no longer a fictional invention from HBO’s show Silicon Valley. Inspired by both the TV show and new vector instruction sets, we came up with a new lossless compression algorithm for time-series data. Compression is always about a compromise between speed and ratio and It is never easy to balance these trade-offs, but the whole middle-out concept allows us to push Weissman score even further.
How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human
Lately, I’ve been reading articles about best practices for code reviews. I notice that these articles focus on finding bugs to the exclusion of almost every other component of a review. Communicating issues you discover in a constructive and professional way? Irrelevant! Just identify all the bugs, and the rest will take care of itself.