The measure of a modern software engineer in our attention economy is easily calculable thanks to companies like Microsoft acting both as bastion and companion in demonstrating one s prowess.
TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make Firefox secure, fast or to try new things. On the other side, this growing cost progressively killed the community of add-on developers. Eventually, after spending years trying to protect this old add-on mechanism, Mozilla made the hard choice of removing this extension mechanism and replacing this with the less powerful but much more maintainable WebExtensions API. Thanks to this choice, Firefox developers can once again make the necessary changes to improve security, stability or speed.
During the past few days, I’ve been chatting with Firefox users, trying to separate fact from rumor regarding the consequences of the August 2020 Mozilla layoffs. One of the topi
I’ve recently been getting pretty far into the weeds about what the future of data programming is going to look like. I use pandas and dplyr in python and R respectively. But I’m starting to see the shape of something that’s interesting coming down the pike. I’ve been working on a project that involves scatterplot visualizations at a massive scale–up to 1 billion points sent to the browser. In doing this, two things have become clear: