Forem: Antti K. Koskela

Another year, another Hacktoberfest (2019)!

Antti K. Koskela — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 11:28:07 +0000

October 31, 2019 Antti K. Koskela

Reading Time: 4 minutes.

I generally work in proprietary – that is, non-open-source – projects. Whenever I do have some time to dabble in OSS, it's usually for a hobby. To me, Hacktoberfests are a great diversion from that, and kind of an opportunity to find an excuse to do something a bit different.

This time around, I've been really struggling to find the time to contribute to open-source projects. Last year I had just had a baby – so it's not like I was sleeping anyway. I was able to submit a few useful scripts, bugfixes and documentation improvements during the small hours, or sometimes during the day since I wasn't working, either (both Canada and Finland have decent paternity leaves).

This year, I was working for the whole month – and it's been pretty hectic! While I could luckily contribute a couple of small pull requests to an open-source library we use internally, even that was mostly on my own time. A lot of people simply don't get paid to do OSS :)

On a related, absolute but temporary tangent, this means anytime someone suggests a GitHub profile is a sufficient, or even a good way to measure someone's worthiness as a programmer, I get rather annoyed. It's such a privileged, narrow-minded point of view, that just betrays how little the person actually understands anything outside their little bubble.

Anyway – I took a few days off work, and actually had the time to submit a few pull requests! For someone, that is STILL not really taking part in Open-Source, or even used GitHub that much, I'm happy to limp through once again 😅

And yeah, the irony is not lost on me: being financially so stable, that I'm able to take some time off just to have hobbies and take part in a coding challenge is also pretty darn privileged!

But, then again, the joke's on you – it's time-in-lieu, so I actually still got paid, I just had to work overtime for the whole September to accrue the hours... Anyway, enough with checking the privileges, back to the topic!

My pull requests this Hacktober

I'm just returning to (almost) daily programming work after a couple of years of DevOps-by-proxy debugging, figuring out why Azure AD isn't letting users log in, and managing backlogs on the side. I did code 60 hours per week for the whole September to make a deadline – and that was a great crash course back to programming!

This year I could grab some of the tiny features and bugfixes we've implemented internally to MatBlazorand modify them to actually work for the library that's available publicly – and that produced a few small Pull Requests:

Date	Topic of the PR
October 10, 2019 18:31	You submitted Implements #293 to SamProf/MatBlazor
October 14, 2019 12:41	You submitted Implements SearchTermParamName without ApiUrl (#300) to SamProf/MatBlazor
October 24, 2019 18:58	You submitted Workaround to enable MatAutocomplete to work inside EditForm to SamProf/MatBlazor
October 24, 2019 19:01	You submitted Fixes issue #315 (MatAutocomplete's clear-button submits forms) to SamProf/MatBlazor

However, I wasn't quite happy with just that – during the hectic and somewhat painful project that's kind of still going on, a major pain point was getting the Azure DevOps pipelines to work the way we wanted to – and that was in part due to misleading, outdated or just not comprehensive enough documentation. Luckily, it's almost all open-sourced nowadays – so I could try and fix it myself! :)

Ok, ok – admittedly, I did take the chance to post a few blog articles myself, too! But everything generic enough to share on docs.microsoft.com, I submitted as a Pull Request. See below:

Date	Topic of the PR
October 27, 2019 07:51	You submitted Fixes #1340 by updating the Chrome & ChromeWebDriver versions. to microsoft/azure-pipelines-image-generation
October 27, 2019 19:15	You submitted Fixes #6038 (example uses vstsFeed, should use publishVstsFeed) to MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs
October 28, 2019 08:47	You submitted Fixes the broken line breaks on NuGet task's documentation (issue #6154) to MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs
October 31, 2019 16:35	You submitted Improves the documentation for nuget pack -action to MicrosoftDocs/vsts-docs

Ok – stop laughing at the "fixes the broken line breaks" already! That stuff really bothers me, so of course I'd fix it. 🧐

So, once again – huge thanks to DigitalOcean and DEV for the challenge. I appreciate the little bit of extra encouragement to make people (myself included) contribute whatever they can!

As a side note – really looking forward to the T-shirt! Having participated in a few different hackathons and challenges, the only organizer that ever actually DID send me the t-shirt was DigitalOcean! 😂 Appreciate it, folks.

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The boring version of browser wars is upon us!

Antti K. Koskela — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 04:01:40 +0000

The next browser war is upon us, and this time it isn’t fought on the battlefield of proprietary API implementations and badly implemented CSS and JavaScript standards, but rather it’s different ecosystems battling it out with their respective variants of Blink, which itself is a part of open source Chromium.

Sounds boring, right? And to some extent it really is. No Firefox fanboys, no Opera elitists and Internet explorer normies keeping to their respective corners of the public space, each group looking down on the others. No crazy public services, where a government customer demanded the website to be visited only with IE5, and all other browsers to be blocled. And no ActiveX or Flash (thank heavens).

A lot has changed, mostly for good. But you know what never changes?

War. War never changes. And even a browser war is still a war. We’re still seeing different parties stabbing each other in the back, stealing innovations, blocking others off their web properties (especially Google is getting notorious because of this) and some of the most visible frontmen engaging in Twitter spouts. And this has led to the market being almost monopolized and split into competing niches at the same time.

But before diving deeper, let’s see how we got here, shall we?

The fortress of solitude has fallen

The browser market saw an interesting development since late 2000s to 2013-2014, when the market that had long been really stagnant (most of the people using Internet Explorer, on one hand because it’s there already and on the other because all enterprise apps require it anyway) was quickly split into 3 big portions of almost equal size for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.

Google Chrome now accounts for close to 70% of web traffic (and Chromium variants of course way more) – close to the same percentage Microsoft held with Internet Explorer, when the market was at the most stagnant point.

http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#quarterly-200901-201902

But that wasn’t made to last. While IE kept creeping further and further to irrelevancy, Chrome slowly captured a very commanding position on the market.

After Microsoft defecting to use Chromium to power their only browser, Edge, there’s basically only Blink (the browser engine behind Chromium), Gecko (Firefox) and Webkit (Safari) left. Of all browser sessions, over 80% are using Chrome – and even bigger part are using Blink. Gecko + Webkit together count only for about 13% of all usage.

Okay – perhaps Trident earns a (dis)honorary mention for its longevity – while it’s still powering Internet Explorer, nobody should use it as a browser – its a compatibility tool for legacy applications, not a web browser.

This development seems to be bringing a new, boring era, upon us. An era, where there’s mostly just one browser, branded in 10 different ways. An analogous situation has slowly developed in smartphones, where in a lot of markets there’s primarily Android phones available – there’s an Android by Samsung, an Android by Sony, an Android by LG, another by Huawei (for now, at least), a crippled Android by Amazon and at least three of varying approaches by OPPO. And each of them are worse and more invasive than running “stock” Android, since if everyone is selling the same product with similar prices, you have to make the extra money by gobbling up user data or accepting bribes by crapware vendors.

It’s truly a market for lemons. Really boring and uninspiring lemons.

It’s not all bad, though

However, all this boringness is not only bad. I mean, everyone knows what everyone says the Chinese use to curse their enemies?

“May you live in interesting times“

“Chinese curse” – as coined by JFK himself. It’s actually more like “bad translator’s curse”, but let’s not go there now.

Interesting times are not necessarily good. Indeed – what we learn in school about the World Wars – those are definitely interesting time periods, but not good times to live! Similarly, if there has to be another browser war (okay, that’s quite a comparison, but you know what I mean!), I’d rather hope it’s a boring one.

For a developer, world with (basically) just one web browser isn’t that bad. Well, as long as that browser is the one said developer prefers! But that’s less standards to support.

In all seriousness, while the overconsolidation of any market is ultimately bad for pretty much all the parties, at least we still have behemoths like Google and Microsoft duking it out, just both with their own Chromium variants! And if Microsoft has to be participating in yet another wave of browser wars, I’d hope to see them do that in a fairly constructive manner – which I think we’re seeing with Edgium now.

Why do I think that? Well, the recent communication and some of the edgier back-and-forth between Microsoft and Google makes me hope that Microsoft will still be aiming to be a big player in the browser market – just this time, they’ll be concentrating on the innovation in the browser instead of trying to keep up with the evolving standards when maintaining the engine. Since they now finally get an engine that respects web standards (more than Trident ever did, anyway), they can spend the expensive development resources on bringing features like timeline and web notes, and hopefully optimize the implementation better than Google has :)

And then there are the small players.

Chromium as the catalyst of innovation?

The well-maintained and stable Chromium project has been a catalyst for growth in the small but interesting market of “alternative browsers”. I’m including a full list of current Chromium-built alternative browsers in the end of the post.

When the engine is stable, more room is left for other development tasks, so even smaller organizations can implement their own browsers. And this means that there’s a bunch of interesting implementations out there!

Out of all the smaller ones, I’m a huge fan of Brave. I’ve written about them before, but their approach – one, where they try to solve the advertising issue in a more user-friendly way than Google – is enticing enough to warrant another short mention.

And Brave is definitely not the only one. While the approaches are different, there’s a number of interesting projects out there.

Enter the BRAVE new world of Chromium forks!

What does the future hold?

Whereas we will suffer from a stagnant market in regards to browsers, unless something meaningful happens eventually, for now it at least makes life easier for developers and makes it possible for tiny players to design alternative browser implementations, where their innovation happens outside the rendering – which is a good thing.

We’re already seeing the field of Chromium browsers being split in regards to things like limiting APIs AdBlocking extensions can use (Opera, Brave and Vivaldi, for example, are going to find workarounds even if Google removes the APIs from Chromium). Google’s hegemony in the Chromium space is hopefully being slowly chipped away by niche competitors, and hopefully Microsoft with Edgium as well. There’s even hinting of actual Chromium forks happening.

At the same time, let’s hope Apple gets their stuff straight with Safari, and Mozilla continues their interesting work with Firefox – which right now is being re-positioned as a privacy-focused browser. But I’m hopeful: even if most of the competition would happen inside the Chromium space, there’s still room for innovation, as long as Google is not too dominant.

And when Google gets too cocky with Chromium, we will see a pushback from the community – perhaps in the form of a group of some of the niche players stealing the leading role of Chromium development with a competing fork in the future?

References

This post has been tweaked from the original post on
koskila.net.

Original references:

Web browser usage stats
- https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/
List of Chromium-forks
- https://www.zdnet.com/pictures/all-the-chromium-based-browsers

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Latest posts by Antti K. Koskela (see all)

The boring version of browser wars is upon us - June 13, 2019
Extending Microsoft Teams is now officially awesome - June 12, 2019
How to resolve “Error initializing application. Error: ***Manifest not found for component id [guid].” when adding an SPFx webpart to Teams? - June 4, 2019

Enter the BRAVE new world of Chromium forks!

Antti K. Koskela — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 12:56:09 +0000

Reading Time: 6 minutes.

I’m trying out a new, more long-form format for my content – tell me what you think about it in the comments section below!

This article explains one of the only cryptocurrency initiatives I find to be kind of level-headed – Basic Attention Token – and the browser that’s pretty tightly coupled with it, Brave. It's not a very technical post - rather, it's a practical overview from a user's perspective coupled with some borderline political chitchat.

Note: If you just want to skip all the banter and download the hecking browser, click this.

Preface

As far as different cryptocurrencies go, there have been quite a few downs and lows in the last few years. The crazy bull market that saw tulip mania -like rush to invest into anything that was called an ICO (short for Initial Coin Offering), mostly by laymen who understand much about cryptocurrencies, but are greedy enough to chase a quick buck and not educated enough to vet the projects. I don’t intend to delve deeper into the behavioral science or the economics, but I admit to being disgusted enough by the trend that I blocked dozens of “cryptohustlers” and members of #HODLGANG.

Anyway, let’s not get political – I find cryptocurrencies fascinating, but not many of the projects have seemed sustainable and/or convenient enough to spark my interest. My small positions in a few major currencies shouldn’t be enough to make me too biased – but my stance has been, that most bandwagons in this caravan have been just headed off the cliff instead of rocketing to the moon.

One big reason for my disinterest has also been the Finnish tax law, which seems to hate cryptocurrencies, making owning and trading them legally a pain… But let’s not get there either – that’s another political tussle waiting to happen!

Are you starting to see a pattern here? Because this is something unfortunate I’ve noticed about cryptocurrencies: even if we completely forget about all the opportunistic self-seekers, a lot of the topics in the crypto space are highly divisive, extreme and non-conformational. While this does provide for some extremely interesting debates and very entertaining podcasts, it’s not that constructive. It doesn’t build up… Anything. Or anyone.

That’s why I’ve decided to step away from the debates about the principles and politics around the crypto space, and focus purely on the practical values.

And this brings me to the actual topic of this post (took me a while, eh?): The Brave browser, and BAT, the Basic Attention Token.

What’s BAT?

BAT is a rare example of a cryptocurrency project that makes sense. It’s not the only one (not even close), but it does have a untypically high number of redeeming qualities – and I’m going to quickly go through them here.

What’s BAT then? It’s an open-source, decentralized ad exchange platform built on the Ethereum platform. The token aims to value and reward user attention within the platform. In short: Advertisers pay BAT to website publishers for the attention of users.

The BAT ecosystem includes Brave, an open-source, privacy-centered browser designed to block trackers and malware. It’s built on Chromium, the open source engine Google Chrome is built on as well. However, while Chrome is built to gather as much info about the users as possible for advertising purposes (like most Google products), Brave is built privacy and a sustainable ad business model, where consumers have active role as well, in mind. This is in sharp contrast to some other platforms out there, to whom the consumer is just cattle.

It leverages blockchain technology to anonymously and track user attention securely and rewards publishers accordingly. In the end, the project seeks to address fraud and opaqueness in digital advertising – while making advertising commercially viable for all parties.

What’s Brave like to use?

The browser is sleek, relatively fast, and has a great ad blocker built-in (they did that before Google did, and do it far, far better). While Google hides a few competitors to cement its status even more, Brave removes everything equally – and recently, Google is removing the APIs most adblocker extensions use, so the difference between the browers’ ad-blocking capabilities seems to just grow.

Well, that’s all cool, but none of that is that interesting, admittedly. There needs to be something cooler to make the browser a viable option, right? Some actually useful gimmick that sets it apart from other Chromium-forks?

Well, luckily there is!

What’s interesting about Brave is the built-in tipping system: based on the time you spend on we websites and your manual actions, you can tip content creators and websites using the built-in cryptocurrency, BAT.

An example of the Brave Rewards tipping menu – you actually never need to access this unless you want to, as the process is pretty much automatic!

While the browser is a pleasure to use in general (it has the pros of Google Chrome, plus better performance, BATs, and ad-blocking), the tipping is very easy and it’s a nice addition as well.

Using BATs is easy and the onboarding has been done well – you do need to create a local cryptocurrency wallet, but the browser will guide you through the process.

I also signed up as a publisher – another straightforward process – to receive tips from people accessing my site. And it works: while there aren’t that many Brave users yet, the ones that do use the browser seem to tip liberally!

That all said, the biggest bonus to the browser is the fact it’s (fairly) independent from other vendors. Google already rules a big enough share of the internet, so we don’t need them snooping on us any more than necessary.

Brave’s performance is impressive

How well does the browser fare against competitors, then? Well, see a few test scores below…

Html5test gives Brave 535/555 points in its HTML5 capabilties – just like it does for the latest version of Chrome. Now differences there, then, https://html5test.com/index.html

Before getting started, I read up on other people’s experiences. Sites like Verge seem to confirm my initial thoughts: even if they’re built with the same core, the implementations are different enough for there to be performance differences between Brave and Chrome:

Brave is tangibly faster than Chrome, and because it otherwise behaves like Chrome, it’s the fastest browser for my use. – – Chrome and Vivaldi are similar, though Vivaldi takes longer to launch, which, in my case, is important because I often quit my browser to get rid of a big pile of tabs and then restart it afresh. Firefox continues to feel like the slowest option from the bunch, and it performs worst on benchmarks – – .

Verge

I then tested performance with speed-battle.com. To be fair, the results varied greatly, so I’d call this fairly unreliable – but in tests performed back-to-back, Brave never got worse results than Chrome, rather besting it with the overall score being 30-300 points higher (depending on the run, a 5-30 % difference).

Brave gets better performance rating than the most recent Chrome build. Testing with this site: http://www.speed-battle.com/speedtest_e.php

Compare this with the latest Chrome:

Latest Chrome build (Version 74.0.3729.169 (Official Build) (64-bit)) scored constantly 30-300 points worse than Brave. http://www.speed-battle.com/speedtest_e.php

Please note, that tests like this aren’t going to be very conclusive. Anyway, in practice and daily use, Brave is slick. I guess that’s what matters.

Try Brave?

Brave is pretty cool – and if you want to try it out, you can download it from here: https://brave.com/kos048

If you download the browser from the link above, and actually start using it, I get a few BATs as a referral bonus. Great way to support the site as well – as the traffic has multiplied within the last few months, my hosting is becoming more expensive as well. So, thank you for considering it! :)

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The post Enter the BRAVE new world of Chromium forks! by Antti K. Koskela appeared first on #SharePointProblems.

This post has been automatically grabbed from Koskila.net's RSS feed and then modified to better work in this channel - all pretty experimental.

"Hi - I'm new here!"

Antti K. Koskela — Mon, 20 May 2019 21:41:01 +0000

This is my first post on dev.to - Hi everyone, and thanks for checking it out!

I wanted to take the opportunity to not only plan what I'll be writing about, but also to already compliment the platform, its founders and the community on your job so far. In a sense, I wanted to rationalize why this platform seems like THE community for the software craftsmen and -women of all trades.

Background

A short introduction first: I'm a software developer and escalation engineer working mostly on Azure & Office365 -related stuff. I have my own small consulting business, but I spend most of my patching, tweaking and deploying internal communication solutions with our partners around the world. Pretty enterprisey stuff.

I currently reside in Montréal, Canada, but have lived in Wisconsin, USA (in 2017) and Finland (my whole life before 2017).

I've been a member of dev.to since early 2017, but never got around to writing an introduction, let alone an actual blog post. While I've liked the approach and the design of the platform from the get-go, it's always been an issue for me to find the time to contribute.

Dev.to is one of the media I follow frequently, though. There's so much quality content related to tech, tech culture and programmers personal development that it would be crazy not to follow it! And I think now is the right time, to try and become an active member of this awesome community as well.

But.. Why do I find dev.to so awesome and promising? Well - I think this platform has the potential to foster a friendly and powerful technology agnostic technophile (in the best possible meaning of the word!) community. That's a potential I think only a few other platforms had, but completely wasted, whereas Dev.to is taking all the right steps to form a community that builds its members up.

Wait - which platforms, you ask? That might be a topic for another time! There's plenty of publishing platforms online, and I've tried a few - and now's time for dev.to!

Oh - and the retro aesthetic of the CMS seems cool, too :)

But what will I write about?

To me, dev.to seems like a warm community I'd love to be a part of. Despite a typical member perhaps being a bit cooler, trendier and hippier than yours truly still programming mainly in C# (not Go, Rust or Ruby, and I'm not even using Node, Angular or Docker!), I think there's great value in reading about technology that's outside your usual comfort zone. I've seen brilliant articles about programmer / team productivity and dealing with issues like time management and team dynamics!

Whereas very few people want to leisurely read content like "How to fix your app authentication when you run into error AADSTS65001" (one of my most popular articles! Catchy title, right?) and it's only found when you encounter a problem and google for solutions, I think dev.to is the perfect platform for technical tutorials and more long-form, topical texts. I'll try and venture out of my comfort zone and develop my skills as a writer somewhere along those lines - this should be an interesting journey!

Looking forward to chatting with you all!