TLDR WEB DEV 2023-10-09

THE ULTIMATE LOW-QUALITY IMAGE PLACEHOLDER TECHNIQUE

This article discusses the importance of Low-Quality Image Placeholders (LQIPs) in creating a better experience for users waiting for the images to load. LQIPs can even enhance core web vitals like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) if you make it meet the requirements for consideration of LCP. The article goes into any nuances to be aware of when using LQIP, along with how best to implement a solution.

HOW LINKEDIN ADOPTED PROTOCOL BUFFERS TO REDUCE LATENCY BY 60%

LinkedIn deals with billions of daily requests, so the data serialization protocol it chooses can be very impactful. This post dives into how LinkedIn switched from using the JSON serialization format to Protocol Buffers, reducing p99 latency by 60% for big payloads and throughput by 6.25%. This is mainly because JSON uses a textual format, which requires more network bandwidth and more compute to compress data. One downside of protocol buffers is that they can be hard to debug and update.

HOW TO CHOOSE A CLOUD DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

Choosing the right cloud development environment for your team is an extremely important and difficult decision to make. This article lists and discusses the considerations software development teams should be making in order to choose the best option for them.

HOW HEALTHY ENGINEERING TEAMS INVEST THEIR TIME

Successful engineering-led growth can only happen if the engineering teams can focus on building and the teams are doing work that aligns with company goals. There are many existing metrics and playbooks to measure a team’s efficiency, but team and company alignment tend to be more subjective and hard to measure. This blog introduces 4 business metrics that attempt to measure this alignment by showing how teams allocate time across initiatives. The 2,000 engineering teams studied tended to spend 55% of their time on New Value initiatives, 20% on Feature Enhancements, 15% on Developer Experience, and 10% on maintenance tasks.

STRONG STATIC TYPING, A HILL I'M WILLING TO DIE ON…

Strong static typing is not just a good idea, but also almost always the right choice. It leads to fewer bugs, a better development experience, and clearer contracts between different pieces of code. Strongly typed projects are typically developed slower due to a higher learning curve and more boilerplate code. Not using types often leads to more time spent documenting and testing. Strong static typing lets you catch more errors at compile time rather than run time, which prevents bugs from ending up in the hands of customers.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Navigating a career in software development can be tough. This article outlines 10 tried and true lessons on what to do to advance in a technical career based on technical expertise valued by the industry.

LITE-YOUTUBE-EMBED

This is a Lite Youtube embedder that works similarly to Youtube’s original embedder, but with 224x faster visual performance.

YALC: WORK WITH YARN/NPM PACKAGES LOCALLY LIKE A BOSS

Yalc simplifies the process of publishing yarn/npm packages locally. Users can try packages before publishing to a remote and potentially public registry.

An AutoGPT agent that controls Chrome on your desktop. With the ability to interactively scroll, click, and input text on web pages, the AutoGPT agent can navigate and manipulate web content.

WHY AREN’T THERE MORE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES STARTUPS?

Jean Yang, CEO of Akita and an ex-Carnegie Mellon professor in programming languages, shares her thoughts on the challenges faced by startups in the programming languages domain. Yang emphasizes the disconnect between what developers desire and their actual needs. Some key challenges include the slow adoption of deep tech from research to industry and the importance of tools integrating seamlessly into existing workflows. Yang calls for tools that prioritize real-world developer needs over complete technological innovation.

HOW WE MANAGE 200+ OPEN SOURCE REPOS

7 lessons learned by Turbot in managing 200+ open-source repositories. Some key lessons are to keep project milestones transparent since contributors’ ideas might not align with project goals, use age reports to keep track of old PRs because long standing issues and PRs can create bottlenecks, maintain consistency in technical practice and high-quality documentation across all repos, and treat contributors like your team members!

THE HIDDEN PERFORMANCE COST OF NODEJS AND GRAPHQL

NodeJS and GraphQL are popular technologies for building web applications but they come with certain scaling and performance tradeoffs to be aware of. GraphQL's modular structure generally leads to code that instantiates excessive promises, which degrades request performance. Benchmarks show a 2-3x latency increase.

DEPENDENCY INVERSION PRINCIPLE IN JAVASCRIPT

A quick explanation of the dependency Inversion principle, the last principle of the SOLID design principles.

10 PROGRAMMING PRINCIPLES EVERY SOFTWARE DEVELOPER SHOULD KNOW

Learn the fundamental programming principles that allow software developers to write cleaner, more maintainable, and scalable code.

5 BEST DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHMS PROJECTS FOR YOUR RESUME

Explore five impressive data structures and algorithms projects that can make your resume stand out.

AWESOME-VSCODE

Awesome list of vs-code themes and extensions, most of them with screenshots and gifs so you can quickly scroll through