Article Roundup - August 3, 2018

Logging Activity With The Web Beacon API
Sometimes your app has an error that keeps happening for the user, but you can’t figure out what is wrong. You know where the problem happens, but not what goes wrong and you can’t get the information you need from your user. Maybe that is the time to use the Web Beacon API, it’s supported by most browsers and lets you fire off a request and not wait for a reply.

Designing a GraphQL API
This is a public version of an internal Shopify tutorial and it is excellent. It’s from the point of view of GraphQL but offers a great deal of API design wisdom. Shopify has a very well designed API and this article really shows why.

Using SQS with AWS Lambda and Serverless
AWS recently added SQS queues as an event source for Lambda functions. This article runs through how to use this new feature with the Serverless Framework, not to be confused with the serverless architecture.

ESLint - Postmortem for Malicious Packages Published on July 12th, 2018
One eslint maintainer learned the hard way not to reuse passwords and to enable 2FA when available. Their password was used to publish malicious versions of packages that would attempt to send NPM credentials of anyone who installed the packages to the attacker. The problem was discovered fairly quickly and NPM has revoked all access tokens from before the attack to mitigate the damage.

BBC News on HTTPS – BBC Design + Engineering
It has taken the BBC News website a long time to transition to HTTPS, but it took a long time for good reason. BBC News is a public service used around the world, so they needed to make sure they got things right.

Kotlin on the server at Khan Academy
Until recently Khan Academy was run on Python. Thanks to the results of a Hackathon they have added Kotlin as a second supported language for their team, and started things off with changing their analytics over to collect data through a new Kotlin API.

H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index
Uber makes use of a hexagon-based grid system to group and analyze areas for patterns, such as computing surge pricing. They have recently open-sourced their grid to make it available for others to use.