Weekly Links: February 16th

JavaScript And The Web

Promises are not neutral enough | André Staltz - This is a pretty good dissection of the downsides of Promises as JavaScript’s default async primitive. I’m glad that Promises have replaced callbacks as the default async method for most JavaScript code, but it does have the downside of making it harder for anything better to come along.

Direction Aware Hover Effects | CSS-Tricks - As a relatively pedestrian CSS user, I always am fascinated by the cool things people can do with it. These demos were no exception. (Hat tip to Ponyfoo for this one)

Tech Tools

Slack is the opposite of organizational memory | Abe Winter - This is a fun rant that makes some good points. I have a love/hate relationship with Slack. It’s a fun tool that I enjoy using, but I’m not at all convinced that it’s really making me more productive. I definitely feel the pain of normalizing crazy short reply times, even though I thrive on that on some ways and love the dopamine hit of being instantly helpful to somebody. Slack makes it easy to mistake noise for productivity, and I definitely agree that it is more ephemeral than it pretends to be. But for all that… I’m not sure there’s anything better out there¹, especially for teams that work partially or completely remote.

Cryptocurrency Craziness

Advertising Screens Hacked To Mine BitCoin | Terence Eden - This is just nuts. Bitcoin seems to be enabling a whole new malware economy.

Salon’s Monero mining project might be crazy like a fox | TechCrunch - At least some folks are giving you an ad-free malware experience though.