TLDR WEB DEV 2023-11-09

⚒️ Start building with Clerk's Next.js Quickstart!

WHY YOU WANT REACT QUERY

React Query is a library for managing asynchronous states in React applications. While simple data fetching can be done without React Query, there are five potential issues when fetching data using the traditional approach with useEffect and useState. These include race conditions, lack of loading and empty states, data and error state not resetting when the category changes, and the useEffect firing twice in StrictMode. This article shows how React Query is able to fix these issues by simplifying data fetching, improving code quality, and handling these issues more efficiently - with code examples.

THE ULTIMATE INTERACTIVE JQ GUIDE

JQ is a powerful tool for processing JSON data efficiently. This article demonstrates how JQ is used with various practical examples, such as working with JSON responses from APIs, converting data to or from JSON format, managing JSON configuration files, parsing JSON data from websites, analyzing server logs, and monitoring data. It also provides basic examples of JQ operations, including selecting values, filtering arrays, mapping arrays, combining filters, splitting strings, using conditional logic, and handling null values.

AN INTUITIVE INTRODUCTION TO TEXT EMBEDDINGS

Text embeddings are representations of text in high-dimensional spaces for various NLP tasks like search, spam filtering, content moderation, and conversational agents. The preservation of distance is a key feature of embedding spaces. This article goes through the evolution of sequential models in NLP, including fully-recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory, and the transformer architecture, which uses attention mechanisms to better capture the context and dependencies between words in a sequence and has become essential in large language models.

10 HARD-TO-SWALLOW TRUTHS THEY WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT SOFTWARE ENGINEER JOB

This article talks about the harsh realities of working as a software engineer and provides valuable insights for newcomers to the field. It emphasizes that college education may not adequately prepare students for the practical challenges of the job and encourages them to gain real-world experience and develop a portfolio. The article also underscores the importance of soft skills, as they can often be more valuable than technical skills for career growth and success in the industry.

MICROSERVICES AREN'T THE PROBLEM. INCOMPETENT PEOPLE ARE

Microservices themselves are not inherently problematic, but there are issues that stem from a lack of engineering competence and care within companies. It is important to hire competent individuals, provide proper education and mentorship, and maintain a focus on simplicity and code quality. Take ownership of services and don’t let external teams interfere too much.

Read the full guide here — no registration required 😉

SSHX

Sshx is a web-based collaborative terminal. Users can easily share their terminal by running a single command, manipulate terminal windows on an infinite canvas, observe real-time cursor movements of collaborators, and connect to a distributed mesh of servers for optimal performance. The terminal is end-to-end encrypted, with real-time latency estimates and predictive echo for faster local editing.

LOSSLESS-JSON

Lossless-json allows developers to parse JSON without risk of losing numeric information. It works similarly to the native JSON parse and stringify functions except it preserves information of big numbers.

APPLE'S TRADEMARK EXPLOIT

Apple protects its trademark by placing its logo on every internal component of its devices, even if those components are not visible to consumers. This practice allows Apple to enlist the help of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) in enforcing trademark protection at ports of trade. Apple participates in CBP's e-Recordation Program, which grants it special enforcement privileges and even allows the company to train law enforcement personnel. This system has been criticized for enabling Apple to abuse trademark law to stifle competition and hinder third-party repairs, with CBP seizing legitimate products from competitors and independent repair shops on Apple's behalf.

STOP USING LAMBDA LAYERS

Lambda layers are a popular solution for managing dependencies in AWS Lambda functions. Layers themselves are nothing more than a zip file, but they have a few interesting properties that prove useful in some cases. Unfortunately, Lambda layers are also difficult to work with as a developer, tricky to deploy safely, and typically don't offer benefits over native package managers. These downsides frequently outweigh the upsides. This article examines Lambda layers and native package managers in detail.

HOW TO AVOID PROP DRILLING IN REACT

Prop drilling is when you pass props to children components that do not consume the prop, but also only pass down the prop to children components. This article explains prop drilling in detail and ways to avoid prop drilling through component composition and moving states.

BUILD A LIGHTWEIGHT CODE GENERATOR WITH TYPESCRIPT AND JSON IMPORTS

A quick tutorial on building a code generator, which is useful when your software interfaces with external systems and depends on information structures provided by that system.

BUILDING AI APPLICATIONS WITH LANGCHAIN AND NODE.JS

This blog post takes a look at how to build a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application using Node.js and LangChain. Specifically, it shows how you build a tool for asking technical questions about the content of YouTube videos.