TLDR Web Dev

TLDR WEB DEV 2023-12-20

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01GENERAL

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02ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

HOW META BUILT THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THREADS

This article details how Meta's infrastructure teams successfully supported Threads' rapid growth, hitting 100 million users in 5 days. The article highlights the roles of ZippyDB, a scalable distributed key/value database, and Async, a serverless function platform, in managing the high user influx and workload demands. These components demonstrate Meta's robust infrastructure and engineering culture, enabling fast product launches.

engineering.fb.com8 min read

WHAT VUE’S CREATOR LEARNED THE HARD WAY WITH VUE 3

Evan You, creator of Vue, recounts some of the challenges the release of Vue 3 unveiled and the lessons he learned with each one. One key lesson was minimizing breaking changes and adopting a deprecation cycle to ensure smoother transitions for users. Another lesson was recognizing the importance of collaborating with ecosystem library authors to address issues before releases and discouraging the use of internal APIs to prevent difficulties in upgrading. Embracing TypeScript and the composition API was crucial for a better developer experience.

thenewstack.io9 min read

WHAT IS A DISTRIBUTED DATABASE AND WHEN SHOULD YOU USE ONE?

Distributed databases are recommended when you need geographical distribution of data, scalability, high availability and data resilience, and routing traffic for lower latency. However, distributed databases also come with challenges such as efficient routing, maintaining data consistency, handling complex ACID transactions, cost considerations, and provisioning.

fauna.com7 min read

03OPINIONS & ADVICE

THE DAY I STARTED BELIEVING IN UNIT TESTS

Initially skeptical about the value of unit tests, the author was assigned to create and run them for embedded software. After a year of successful runs, the tests suddenly started failing due to a race condition in the test framework's threading abstraction. This experience led the author to recognize the importance of unit tests in uncovering hidden defects, improving code quality, and adopting new development methodologies when necessary.

mental-reverb.com5 min read

BIGGEST PRODUCTIVITY KILLERS IN THE ENGINEERING INDUSTRY

The top productivity killers include external distractions such as social media, email, and meetings, as well as poor time management and a lack of clear goals or expectations. Strategies for addressing these issues include setting boundaries around technology use, prioritizing tasks, and establishing clear communication channels.

open.substack.com8 min read

04LAUNCHES & TOOLS

TSDOCS

TSDocs is a platform that allows you to browse type reference documentation for JavaScript packages. It even works for packages that aren’t written in TypeScript or for packages that re-export types from another package.

tsdocs.devTool

RE:DOM

RE:DOM is a small UI library built to create DOM elements and keep them in sync with live data. It doesn’t use the virtual DOM and therefore uses less memory than other virtual DOM-based libraries. Developers can use pure JavaScript if needed, eliminating the need for complex templating languages.

github.comGitHub repository

KANBAN-PYTHON

Kanban-python is a terminal Kanban board built in Python with the help of pyscaffold. It comes with features like custom column creation, automatic scanning, and a customizable config file, all created to help you be more productive.

github.comGitHub repository

05MISCELLANEOUS

FOUR TRENDS THAT CHANGED AI IN 2023

2023 was an exciting year for AI. We witnessed many impactful changes and unanticipated shifts including product releases, policy changes, and boardroom coups. This article summarizes 4 trends that shaped the trajectory of AI in 2023 and may continue to do so into 2024. Although we’ve discovered a lot this year, we still have so much to learn about AI.

technologyreview.com9 min read

SAYING GOODBYE TO THIRD PARTY COOKIES

Web privacy continues to improve with the latest announcement from Chrome: third-party cookies will be deprecated in 2024. Chrome joins its browser counterparts Safari and Firefox with this change. This article explains why third-party cookies pose a privacy risk, how Chrome will incrementally deprecate them in 2024, and how these changes will affect web developers and general product users.

developer.mozilla.org8 min read