This Week I Learned (2020-10-11)

  1. PHPStorm has a quick definition lookup feature which pops up a window showing the source code definition of a symbol in your code when you press Ctrl + Shift + I. No more switching back to the mouse to Ctrl + Click and then losing my place!
  2. Imagine a world without targeted online advertising. I can’t be the only person who looked at a few articles about coronavirus and is now getting targeted by Southland wedding venues and cut-price tours of Italy. This Wired article explores how banning targeted ads might affect the world, from the quality of our journalism to election results.
  3. OrientDB is an open-source graph database implemented in Java. There’s a free official introduction course on Udemy which does a good job of explaining the concept of what a graph database is, although I think I’ve only grasped a fraction of the potential use cases so far. I hadn’t heard the terms “edge” and “vertex” since maths at uni so I’m glad that linear algebra paper finally came in handy!
  4. Flexbox Froggy is a fun little game to help you learn the CSS flexbox feature set. I’ve learned new properties, particularly order and flex-direction to adjust the order in which elements are displayed.
  5. A lot more about autofill and its behaviour in different browsers. These days the autocomplete property has more potential values than just on/off, and if you specify “new-password” as the value some browsers (e.g. Firefox) will help the user to generate a strong password.