🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #99

A very good Friday morning to you! Let's wrap up the week with a bang.

#FlappyBird - For those unaware, Flappy Bird was a mobile game that went viral in 2014 and at its peak, made $50,000 per day to its developer. For unknown reasons, the app was pulled off by the developer. Now, it’s making a comeback. Flappy Bird will return to iOS and Android as native mobile apps in 2025. The team is planning to bring the game to other platforms, such as desktop and the mobile web, starting this fall.

#TechLayoffs - So, it looks like Microsoft sent out an email to Xbox employees saying they're laying off over 650 people in the gaming division. They are saying it's because of changes after all those recent acquisitions, but I heard the games aren't selling like they used to.

#Valve - Valve’s new Steam Families feature is now available for everyone. With Steam Families, parents are able to share games with their families, manage parental controls for their kids, and approve requests from their kids to buy Steam games. Each member of a Steam Family will have their own save games and earn their own achievements.

Amazon and Flipkart Violated Indian Competition Laws
Amazon and Flipkart, two of the largest e-commerce companies in India, have been found to have violated local competition laws by the Indian antitrust regulator. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) launched a probe into the companies in 2020 after claims that they favored specific vendors and prioritized certain product listings. The investigation found that each of the anti-competitive practices alleged were true, with favored sellers getting preferential listing placement and services at nominal fees.

Samsung India Workers Unite
Workers at a Samsung Electronics plant in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu have been on strike since Monday. They are fighting for wage hikes, better hours, and an end to a no-union policy. The plant, located in the Kanchipuram district has been in operation for 16 years and employs 1,700 workers.

Bluesky Brings Video to Its 10M Users
Bluesky, the social networking startup, will now allow users to share videos of up to 60 seconds in length on its platform. Users will be limited to uploading 25 videos or 10GB of video per day as the feature first launches, though these limits may be adjusted over time.

Google Under EU Investigation Over AI Model Data Practices
Google is facing an investigation by the European privacy watchdog over its handling of personal data in the development of an AI model, raising questions about the processing of citizens' personal data in the EU.

Microsoft 365 Goes Down Hard
Microsoft 365 was down for thousands of people, according to outage tracker DownDetector. At the peak at around 9 AM ET, more than 24,000 people had reported issues attempting to access the site. The site and related Microsoft online services all appear to be back up at this point.

SpaceX's Private Spacewalk: A Historic First for the Commercial Space Industry
Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis briefly ventured outside their Dragon spacecraft on Thursday morning. This marked the first time that a private company, SpaceX, conducted a spacewalk. The mission spurred a frenetic two-year period of spacesuit development, testing, and simulations by the California company.

Transport for London Confirms Customer Data Stolen in Cyberattack
Transport for London, the urban transportation agency that manages London's public transportation system, has confirmed that customer data was stolen in a cyberattack that occurred on September 1. The affected data includes names, contact details, and home addresses, as well as bank account information and Oyster card refund data for approximately 5,000 customers.

Google Partners with Wayback Machine
Google has announced a new partnership with The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It will make it easier to scan for previous versions of a website, and find older, potentially removed content.

Style Observer | MutationObserver for CSS. Get notified when the computed value of a CSS property changes.

App Flowy | Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI. AppFlowy is an AI collaborative workspace where you achieve more without losing control of your data. The best open source alternative to Notion.

Typography Mastery for Web Developers
This guide explains how to make text look good by default in web apps and websites. We'll go over key typography settings and learn how we can manipulate them with CSS. This tutorial is for developers that want to get 80% of results with 20% of efforts.

Boolean Considerations in Software Engineering
Engineer's Codex writer warns of the dangers of using booleans as parameters in functions or APIs, citing confusion and potential future extensions as major issues. Instead, they recommend using enums for binary states, providing examples of maintainable and readable code.

Database Gotchas
New programmers, beware of common pitfalls in database design, including ACID compliance, network reliability, and data consistency. Learn from Jaana Dogan's experiences and insights with Google's Spanner database.