This Week I Learned (2020-10-18)

  1. There’s a new kid on the web image format block. It’s called AVIF and it’s derived from the AV1 video format. I’m quite impressed with the size and quality of compressed images compared to other formats like JPEG.
  2. JavaScript’s Number.MIN_VALUE is actually the smallest possible non-negative float value, not the smallest (most negative) possible number.
  3. Chrome Dev Tools has an awesome screenshot tool as well as many other cool features I was already familiar with. And did you know that you can style console.log output?
  4. SQL Server for Linux is a thing. Probably not a thing I would recommend for a production app, but it will be useful for dev work for a project I’m working on where my app needs to connect to a standalone SQL Server instance on Azure.
  5. There is a new HTML element called <portal> in the works. It seems to be a new improved variation on the old <iframe>, and has interesting potential to replace the current fad for making everything a single-page app.