An explanation of those new GitHub social media images:
[…] our custom Open Graph image service is a little Node.js app that uses the GitHub GraphQL API to collect data, generates some HTML from a template, and pipes it to Puppeteer to “take a screenshot” of that HTML.
Jason Etcovich on The GitHub Blog in “A framework for building Open Graph images”
It’s so satisfying to produce templated images from HTML and CSS. It’s the perfect way to do social media images. If you’re doing it at scale like GitHub, there are a couple of nice tricks in here for speeding it up.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink
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Late last year, Amazon launched support for two-way calling that worked with its Fire TV Cube devices. The feature allowed consumers to make and receive calls from their connected TV to any other Alexa device with a screen. Today, the company is expanding this system to enable support for two-way calling with Zoom.
Starting today, Fire TV Cube owners (2nd gen.) will be able to join Zoom work meetings or virtual hangouts via their Fire TV Cube.
To take advantage of the new feature, you’ll need Amazon’s Fire TV Cube, its hands-free streaming device and smart speaker that has Alexa built in, as well as a webcam that supports USB Video Class (UVC) with at least 720p resolution and 30fps. But for a better experience, Amazon recommends a webcam with 1080p resolution and a 60-90 degree field of view from 6 to 10 feet away from the TV. It doesn’t recommend 4K webcams, however.
Amazon suggests webcams like the Logitech C920, C922x, C310, or the Wansview 101JD, for example.
You’ll then connect your webcam to your Fire TV Cube using a Micro USB to USB adapter.
For best results, you’ll want to attach the webcam above the TV screen, Amazon notes.
Once everything is set up and connected, you’ll need to download and install the Zoom app from the Fire TV Appstore. When joining meetings, you can either sign in as a guest or use an existing Zoom account, per the on-screen instructions.
Thanks to the Alexa integration, you can join your meetings hands-free, if you prefer, by way of a voice command like “Alexa, join my Zoom meeting.” Alexa will respond by prompting you for the meeting ID and passcode. Alternately, you can choose to use the remote control to enter in this information.
An optional feature also lets you sync your calendar to Alexa to allow the smart assistant to remind you about the upcoming meetings it finds on your calendar. If you go this route, Alexa will suggest the meeting to join and you’ll just have to say “yes” to be automatically dialed in.
Amazon first announced it was bringing video calling support to its Fire TV platform last fall — a significant update in the new era of remote work and schooling, driven by the pandemic. However, it’s not the only option on the market. Google also last year brought group video calls to its Hub Max devices, and later added support for Zoom calls. Meanwhile Facebook Portal devices have offered video calling of a more personal nature, and last year updated to support Zoom, too.
In other words, Amazon is playing a bit of catch-up here. And its solution is a little more unwieldy as it requires consumers to buy their own webcam, while something like Portal TV offers a TV with a smart camera included.
To use the new feature, you’ll need the latest Fire TV Cube software update to get started, Amazon notes.
John Resig and I recently self-published our book on GraphQL. There are tons of how-tos for self-publishing a book, or even online classes, but very little in the way of why you would want to, or whether it’s even worth your while. I’m going to share my experience and revenue numbers with you in this post, as well as those from others who have self-published material. I’ll go specifically into the pros and cons of self-publishing books and courses in tech.
This is probably what you’re most curious about, right? When I originally started working on our book, I sent a book proposal to publishers. But by the time John and I joined forces, we were both set on self-publishing. He had written two popular JavaScript books and a blog post about traditional publishing for programming books, which includes:
On the topic of traditional publishing revenue, Randall Kanna says: “Nothing comes from a tech book. Just the credibility.” A book can make significantly more, but it’s rare. Martin Kleppmann’s book on machine learning was O’Reilly’s second most popular seller in 2019, and he made $478,000 in the first three years (with 108,000 copies sold, a 10% royalty on print sales, and a 25% royalty on digital sales).
The Pragmatic Bookshelf is the outlying publisher when it comes to royalties: it gives authors 50% of gross profit. In their first 10 years operating, 42% of their authors made more than $50,000, and 12% made more than $100,000.
That said, self-publishing has much higher royalty rates:
This gives authors the potential to make more money. Discover Meteor was probably the most successful self-published programming book of its time, with around $500,000 in sales (9,000 copies) between 2013 (when they launched) and 2018 (when they made it available for free). The authors Sacha Grief and Tom Coleman put a lot of effort into marketing it (described in their Gumroad case study), and it became the recommended learning resource in the Meteor community. The current best-selling book is Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger’s Refactoring UI, which I believe passed $2 million in 2020! 🤑 Their success was also largely due to their ability to market the book, in addition to addressing a significant need for a broad audience (practical user interface design for front-end developers).
That’s books. Looking at publishing video courses, there are a few options:
Like self-published books, self-published courses have a lot of potential. Level Up Tutorials, Kent C. Dodds, and Wes Bos don’t share revenue numbers for their courses, but I’m assuming they have made considerable sums. Wes, for example, has sold his courses to over 140,000 people at the time of writing!
Those are the outliers, of course. The majority of resources out there make significantly less. Take, for example, the self-published books in the GraphQL space that we were entering:
| Title (Author) | Sales | Price | Estimated Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Production Ready GraphQL (Marc-André Giroux) | 3,000 (this is a guess) | $49–$79 | $147,000–$237,000 |
| The Road to GraphQL (Robin Wieruch) | 2,250 | $30–$80 | $67,500–$180,000 |
| The GraphQL Guide (John Resig and Loren Sands-Ramshaw) | 1,000 | $30–$279 | $78,000 in sales; $68,000 in sponsorships |
| Advanced GraphQL with Apollo & React (Mandi Wise) | 200 | $30–$45 | $10,000+ |
| Fullstack GraphQL (Julian Mayorga) | 100 | $39 | $3,000 |
So, yes, the potential is big. But it’s not a guarantee.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Potential for more revenue. You get to set the price, sell different packages, and receive a larger cut. | It’s much harder. A publisher does a ton of things for you: editing, gathering feedback from technical reviewers, the build toolchain, translating, an online store, getting it on Amazon and other bookstores, customer service, tracking errata, etc. Doing all of these things yourself takes a lot of time, especially if you also decide to build a Gatsby site to display the text online. 😜 |
| Flexibility. You get to decide what goes into the book as well as how it’s formatted and sold. | No built-in marketing or distribution. The success of your own book completely depends on your ability to market it. This is hard, as you can read in swyx’s notes on the topic. Books published traditionally usually sell more copies. |
| Updates. You have the email addresses of your readers, and can send them updated versions of the book. | No print edition. While you can print on demand with some services, like Kindle Direct Publishing, most people don’t put in that effort. |
These pros and cons are for books. If you’re wondering about a breakdown of pros and cons specifically for self-published courses, they’re very similar because they face the same opportunities and challenges.
This is the big question. And while I wish I could give you a definitive answer one way or the other, it’s always going to be the same answer we love to give in tech: it depends.
Why would you want to self-publish a book or course? Here are some reasons:
X amount of resources to create, and you distribute it to a thousand people who each gain Y amount of utility from learning with it, you’ve produced 1000 * Y utility in the world, which can be much larger than X. For more on this, I recommend Kleppmann’s post on the topic.Those are the reasons why you might want to self-publish material. But whether you should actually do it depends on:
For me, while writing a book had an opportunity cost of lower income (compared to doing more consulting work), I’ve made a positive impact, increased my knowledge on a subject I care about, gained reputation, and enjoyed the process. And it also feels great when someone goes out of their way to tell me they’re “blown away” and appreciate reading my book. 😃🤗✨
Thanks to Chris Coyier, Geoff Graham, Sacha Greif, Robin Wieruch, Mandi Wise, Sebastian Grebe, Julian Mayorga, and Rachel Lake for providing input for this article.
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I’d wager to say that most websites that are business-minded have accounts. A way to log into them. Social media sites, eCommerce sites, CMS systems, you name it, having accounts people log into is at the heart of them. So… make it good. That’s what Magic does (great name!).
Have you heard that language used in a sign-in system like “email me a magic link to sign in”? Well, now you know what can power it. But Magic isn’t just that, it’s all types of auth, including social logins and WebAuthn. Magic is a developer SDK that enables passwordless login in all these methods.
Magic is for teams of any size. Upon signing up, you’ll get $85 in credit which covers 10,000 logins, and each login is $0.0085 after that. That kind of pricing makes it extremely affordable for apps of any size. Small apps will have tiny (or no) bill, and by the time you have tens or hundreds of thousands of users, the cost will feel negligible. Especially considering all the time you saved by not rolling auth from scratch.
Magic appeals to developers because:
I really like all those, but especially #3. I think of it like image CDNs that offer optimization. The world of images is always evolving as well, and a good image CDN will evolve to support the latest formats and optimization techniques without any work on your end. So too with Magic and Auth.
The “J” and the “a” in Jamstack originally referred to “JavaScript” and “APIs”, which is exactly what Magic offers. Magic fits the Jamstack model very nicely. No server? No problem. Even though Magic absolutely has server-side offerings, and Jamstack could use things like cloud functions, you can get auth done entirely client-side if you’d like. Here’s a great (quick!) tutorial on that.
Here’s the most important thing though: Great UX. Users really like it when the auth of an app feels easy and is never a blocker for them using your app. That’s gonna help your conversion rates.
First, you need an account. I found it satisfying, of course, that they dog food their own auth signup process, giving you a taste for what you can have right away.
From here, you can scaffold an app out super quickly. The great DX continues here as they offer a way to scaffold out a working app right off the bat:
That’s a web-based starter, for which they have docs, examples, and live demos.
I was able to port a demo over to CodePen Projects super quickly. Check it out!
That’s just a client-side web version. The core of it is really this simple:
import { Magic } from 'magic-sdk'
const m = new Magic(API_KEY)
m.auth.loginWithMagicLink('user@email.address')They’ve got server-side support for Node, Python, Ruby, PHP and Go. Magic is for apps of any scale, including incredibly security-sensitive apps. For example, you can even use client-side auth but then use AWS services, with their Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) and all.
Magic has SDK’s for React Native, iOS, Android, and of course native web. Then in addition to the email magic link style signup, they have social login support for Google, Facebook, Apple, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Linkedin, Twitter, and Discord. Phew! That’s a lot of support for a lot of things. Magic has you covered.
While I was plucking away with this and logging in myself, I could see all the action on my dashboard.
It’s notable that with Magic, there are literally no passwords. Magic email link flow means users need no passwords, and with social logins, users only need to be logged into that other service, not remember/save a password unique to your app. That’s the Magic thesis, which they spell out clearly in Passwords Suck:
Using passwords is a nightmare. No one wants to memorize yet another passphrase when our heads are already filled with them. Passwords are a huge vector for security breaches precisely because they place the burden of choosing unique and secure secrets on the user, who just can’t be bothered. We end up having one password for all the important stuff like banking, work, and school, one for the social-medias, and one for all the miscellaneous one-off services we don’t care too much about. The result is that a whopping 59% of people reuse their passwords across services, which means a leak anywhere quickly becomes a liability for the whole web.
Going password-less is good for users and good for the web.
I’d encourage you to check it out. You can sign up for free, no credit card required, and if you do that today you’ll get 10,000 free logins on your account to try out. If you love it, and you have fellow industry folks you refer to Magic, you get 3,000 bonus logins — up to 90,000 in total.
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Earlier today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company will require employees to be vaccinated before returning to work on-site. It was part of a larger letter sent to Google/Alphabet staff that also noted the company will be extending its work-from-home policy through October 18, as the Covid-19 Delta variant continues to sweep through the global population.
In a message to TechCrunch, Facebook’s VP of People, Lori Goler, confirmed a similar policy for the social media giant.
“As our offices reopen, we will be requiring anyone coming to work at any of our US campuses to be vaccinated,” Goler writes. “How we implement this policy will depend on local conditions and regulations. We will have a process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons and will be evaluating our approach in other regions as the situation evolves. We continue to work with experts to ensure our return to office plans prioritize everyone’s health and safety.”
The statement is worded similarly to the long letter penned by Pichai, which carved out an exception for “medical or other protected reasons.” The comment doesn’t offer an adjusted timeline for the return, which had initially planned to go half-capacity in September and full by October.
Last week, a spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal, “Expert guidelines state that vaccines are highly effective at preventing variants of COVID-19, including the Delta variant. Our timelines to reopen our offices haven’t changed.”
Both statements offer some wiggle room for the company, based on things like local and state regulations, medical or personal concerns and, presumably, access to the vaccine, which can vary greatly based on region.
Amazon also responded to TechCrunch’s inquiry on the matter, noting, “We strongly encourage Amazon employees and contractors to be vaccinated as soon as COVID-19 vaccines are available to them.”
The company’s current guidelines don’t appear to require vaccination in order to return to its offices, though unvaccinated employees are required to wear masks. Face coverings are optional for those who have verification of being fully vaccinated.
With a high of F and a low of 50F. Currently, it's 56F and Showers in the Vicinity outside. Current wind speeds: 10 from the Northea...
