Synk #12

Synk will soon be a teenager, which means our baby is growing fast and steady! Hopefully we won't get into any unruly (but always safe-for-work) shenanigans but we can't make any promises either. With all that aside, welcome to Synk #12!

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📰 The News

Someone at Slack is getting a pretty nifty bonus as the company is now set to be acquired by Salesforce for a staggering $27.7 billion. There's no real information yet on what this might mean for customers but it's likely that Salesforce will both integrate Slack into its own products and leverage their userbase to bolster enterprise relationships.

💬 Discuss: Reddit | HackerNews

PHP 8 has now been released, and it's quite an exciting or frightening release depending on where you stand. There are quite a few changes so I would strongly recommend going through the documentation. As an important side note, WordPress devs should be extra interested in reading about PHP 8 as this is probably the most breaking PHP release ever.

💬 Discuss: Reddit | HackerNews

Devs, programmers, and computer hobbyists of all kinds share many qualities, such as a sense of wonder about tech and what it can be used for. If you've ever felt a sense of wonder about GitHub's lack of a dark mode, then fret no more for you'll soon be able to enjoy GitHub without the fury of the sun blasting at your face and without even having to install an extension. Win, win.

💬 Discuss: Reddit | HackerNews

Amazon Web Services' re:Invent event (that's a mouthful!) is here and will continue on until Dec. 17. The keynote has already been delivered and several important points have been highlighted, such as the fact that you can now run any container in AWS Lambda (including languages with little support). If that's of interest to you, you'd probably be happy to know that the service is now cheaper on the whole too.

🔭 Code Discovery

If you somehow missed the original crazy of Flappy Bird, I'd first like you to email us and tell us how. Seriously, please do. For everyone else, you can now play what is perhaps the most basic version of that game by simply pasting a dataurl into your search bar (works on your phone, too). Mighty impressive stuff, folks!

💬 Discuss: Reddit | HackerNews

Want to know how to setup a local repository? Wrote the wrong commit message by accident? This repo should be your first (and hopefully last) stop for any Git-related tasks. I may or may not have shed a tear of happiness when I first saw this.

🎓 Career Development

If you think that the software you develop will forever be chugging along as nicely as it does now, or that there will never ever be any breaking changes in its environment, then you should probably reconsider that stance. Now, whether you believe in "software rot" or "company rot" is another matter entirely, and one that certainly merits discussion!

💬 Discuss: Reddit

Code reviews are quite a hot topic amongst many devs, but there's no reason for them to be a point of friction between team members. There are some simple things you can do that will instantly make both parts of the process infinitely better. Read up, and maybe head over to Reddit to ask the author a question or three!

💬 Discuss: Reddit

🤔 Miscellaneous

Listen, I don't often like to preach to people (jk, I do!) but there are some topics which are too important to ignore. One of them is how we can make ourselves and the world at large more inclusive so that we can stop looking at "limitations" and start looking at "potential benefits" in any given situation. With that said, please read this HN thread of a young software engineer who's losing his vision and how others in that same situation have not only coped but thrived using available tooling.

💬 Discuss: Reddit

Like in many other industries, game devs are often faced with unreasonable expectations and a codebase that just doesn't respond well to, well, anything. Here, we have yet another little inside look at Valve Source 1, but similar things happen across the entire dev industry.

💬 Discuss: Reddit | HackerNews