ChatGPT and Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a serious transgression for writers for the same reason joke theft is a cardinal sin for comedians - it amounts to an attack on their profession. Creative theft is so hated because it steals the fruits of our labor even more fundamentally than just office politicking or project credit-taking. It erases the identity of the original author and creates in its place a lie - that the perpetrator of the theft deserves the accolades, finacial and social, associated with it.
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Senior Developer Koans

“We need to integrate with a SOAP API that’s been deprecated for 3 years” said the Engineering Manager. And the Developer wept. A Senior Developer wanted to choose the best Node framework for his project, so he asked the Master. “Deno” said the Master. “Teacher” asked the Junior Developer, “Why doesn’t my feature work in Firefox?” “All features work in Firefox” replied the Senior Dev, “from a certain point of view.
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The Naming Game

A while ago my friends and I were brainstorming names for our then as-yet-untitled-form-side-project #1. We had a few considerations in mind that, in light of recent discussions around naming, could be fun to share. So I’ll share them. We wanted our name 1) to be simple, 2) possible to register as a .com or .io domain, 3) have a positive association, and 4) to explain the service had something to do with forms.
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A Quick Guide to Collecting Sci Fi

Over the years of avidly collecting my niche (New Age science fiction from the 60s and 70s), I’ve picked up a few germs of knowledge about book collecting, preservation, and general enthusiasm. It is an addicting hobby, and like any pursuit, something you can improve at with just a tiny bit of perfectly normal, not-clinical, garden-variety obsession. Buy your Bible Before anything else, buy the excellent Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors: A Bibliography of First Printings of their Fiction edited by L.
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Formcake - A Backend Form API

🍰 Formcake was made to solve a simple but common problem: You have a contact form, lead page, or survey, but you don’t want to spin up an entire server just to field that one form’s submissions. Enter Formcake - you sign up, create a form, and get an endpoint that looks like formcake.com/api/forms/<YOUR_FORM_ID/submissions that you can put into your <form> tag’s action endpoint. You can then configure success and error redirects if you want them, or just have the user stay on the current page - or you can incorporate an AJAX call to submit the form and display your own success / error message.
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Adding a Loading Icon in Nuxt

Today I’m going to discuss implementing a loading icon like you see in a lot of SPAs within the context of a Nuxt project I’m working on - Form Cast, a simple form backend-as-a-service. The Icon My project at the moment is pretty spartanly designed, with a plain white background. For my loading icon, I wanted something with a flash of both activity and color. After surfing around, I decided on this (it’s technically a typing activity icon, but who cares).
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Comparing Integrations in the Form Market

The form market is huge. Everyone wants to make drag-n-drop, marketing and growth hacker-friendly forms that can do everything from lead capture to payment processing. And so naturally, I asked … maybe there’s room for me? But seriously, with a lot you get less-than-stellar design, clunky widgets, and unwieldy WYSIWYGs. That’s why a few friends and I decided to dream up an MVP based on making the Stripe or Slack of form companies - something that works hard through efficient UX to reduce cognitive load and just be easier at all the things, generally.
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Junior Developer Koans

“Generate a react app without scaffolding” instructed the Master. The student could not. The old man told the young: “Python has seen 3 versions in my day”. The young man responded: “Node has 12.” “Teacher”, the student inquired, “What’s the best Javascript MVC?” The teacher replied. “It’s not JQuery.” A Junior Developer wanted the best Javascript framework for his side project, so he evaluated every option before deciding. He starved to death.
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Writing a Book with Unix

Introduction Last year I published my first book with a publisher, Hands on Bug Hunting For Penetration Testers. Going in, I was determined to set up a workflow that would allow me to: 1) Keep a backup of the book. 2) Allow me to easily track my writing progress. 3) Work on the book offline. 4) Keep my own copy of the book. What set of tools could possibly control the versioning, backup, access control, and portability of plain text?
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Three Hundred Users in Seven Weeks

Seven weeks ago, a friend and I started writing a newsletter for junior devs and strategizing about stuff like open rates and content strategies. But if you’ve followed any of this before now - or seen those link titles, you’ll notice we go from 100 subscribers in two weeks to 250 in three all the way up to… 300 users after almost two months. What happened? Why We Hit a Plateau There are a few reasons growth slowed.
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