Reid Burke

Technology

  • Uncommon Observations about the VESA Studio Display

    I have used a Studio Display with a VESA mount and nano-texture glass for a bit over a week. Here are some uncommon observations about this particular model coming from an LG UltraFine 5K and two Intel MacBook Pros.

    macOS rotates the screen for you when the display is rotated into portrait. This works perfectly and automatically. In addition, the built-in camera will also rotate the image at the same time, which allows you to rotate the screen mid-call if you wish.

    Automatic rotation to portrait mode

    The screen is much faster to wake the computer than the LG UltraFine 5K. I normally use my computers in clamshell mode. I used to have to pop open the lid on my computer every so often because I could not wake the computer from the keyboard. This never happens with the Studio Display.

    I use wired Ethernet using a Belkin USB-C adapter sold by Apple (an older black one) and have a gigabit connection to the internet. This adapter technically did work when connected to an LG UltraFine 5K; however, the speed would be limited to a max of under 400 Mbps due to LG weirdness. When this same adapter is connected to the Studio Display, I get the full speed of my connection at around 940 Mbps. This means I can truly use a single cable from my computer to the display for everything.

    Belkin Ethernet adapter in black connected to the rear of the Display

    I ordered this display sight unseen and opted for the nano-texture without looking at an example of the texture in person. I dislike the texture.

    I work in a room with a lot of natural light; however, the texture is less desirable than any minor glare I had with the UltraFine. I miss the image quality of the UltraFine; however, I have grown to dislike the texture a bit less after several days of use. Given it takes 8-10 weeks to get a replacement display, I’ll keep this one, especially since my wife is now using the UltraFine 5K for her work.

    The polishing cloth is a perfect fit inside a Ziploc snack sized bag.

    Apple Polishing Cloth inside of a Ziploc snack bag

    You cannot clean the screen with anything except this cloth. We have the best cleaning lady who helps us keep our home clean, so I made a note which I printed out, put inside a sheet protector, and tape to the top of the screen while cleaning since it’s such an unusual requirement to remember.

    Cleaning NoteDownload

    I have yet for “Hey Siri” to work correctly. This might be an Intel thing. Setting up “Hey, Siri” when my computer is in clamshell mode does not work — the computer prompts me to open the lid because macOS probably doesn’t understand the Studio Display’s capability during setup of “Hey, Siri.”

    Many other parts of the experience are well documented elsewhere: image quality, so-so webcam, weird Center Stage framing, superb speakers and microphones, excellent build quality compared with LG, and so on.

    Overall, I believe the Studio Display solves some quality of life issues for a true single-cable “dock” for those who want wired Ethernet and a display on a single cable. The perfect sleep wake, perfect wired Ethernet, and the automatic screen and camera rotation on the VESA model make it the model to get.

  • Node.js and Yahoo

    I kicked off NodeSummit today with a short talk about where Yahoo uses Node, why we continue to use Node, and the practices that help us use Node effectively.


    First talk of the day.

    I spoke a bit about a project I’ve spent the last year on: using Node to handle data pushed out of Jenkins. Folks appreciated the honesty about Jenkins’ user interface.

    https://twitter.com/phirephoenix/status/565199071044853761

    Jenkins is the solution that we trust, but nobody loves using it. At Yahoo, we use Node to help us make Jenkins a bit better to use:

    • scripting job creation, editing, deletion
    • handling log messages
    • displaying information about builds with a web interface

    https://twitter.com/JeremiahLee/status/565232111171289088

    Noted.

    During the talk I mentioned something called RDL.

    Nope, not the Romanian Deadlift. It’s something we call “Resource Description Language”, a machine-readable spec for web APIs. We started using it for some internal deployment APIs we worked on last month. This spec is transformed into hapi route configurations that contain detailed joi validators.

    What’s great about this is that when you change the RDL, it changes the validators and comments which we present using the lout module. We do this by merging together existing hapi route objects using the RDL spec as the source of truth, so the hapi routes we have in code are validator-free and require the RDL as the source of truth. This has worked very well and our spec always matches the reality. This works a lot better than other systems that actually generate source code from RDL, which is not ideal because it cannot stay in sync as your code changes.

    It’s been fun! I’ll also be on the “Scaling Business Critical Node.js Applications” and “v0.12 and Beyond” panels tomorrow, so check those out if you’re attending NodeSummit.

  • Eran Hammer’s Response to Netflix’s “Node.js in Flames”

    Eran Hammer on Node.js web framework design tradeoffs and why there is no “best” framework:

    If you haven’t read Netflix’s Node.js in Flames blog post you should. It is a great deep dive into debugging a node performance problem. The post includes useful tips that can help you solve similar problems.

    That said…

    My feedback from the perspective of a framework developer is quite different. I found the tone and attitude towards express.js to be concerning and somewhat offensive. Here was a developer blaming the framework he chose for poor architecture when they never bothered to actually learn how the framework works in the first place.

    Recommended for understanding why Express works the way it does, what other frameworks do differently, and why none are superior to the other without considering your own requirements.

  • Cross-Browser Testing at DeveloperWeek

    The fine folks at Sauce Labs invited me to speak at DeveloperWeek San Francisco about browser testing at Yahoo scale. We test YUI on IE 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, & 11, iOS 6 & 7, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, which runs over 120,000 tests on every push.

    We’ve learned a lot about how to spend our time and the challenges of CI testing with multiple browsers. I began with a introduction to Yeti, the easy way to get started with web testing, which also drives over a million automated tests every week for YUI.

    Check out the slides from my talk. If you were there, thanks for being a great audience! There was a great turnout with smart questions.

    If you are interested in working on our unique frontend to CI testing with me at Yahoo, get in touch.

  • Infrastructure as force multiplier

    Steve Klabnik considers “Is npm worth 26MM?”:

    If you want to repeatably manufacture an open source ecosystem, you need capital to do so. And a firm that’s progressive enough to understand the indirect payoffs of investing in infrastructure is poised to have a huge advantage.

    npm’s CEO: