TLDR Index
TLDR Web Dev

TLDR WEB DEV 2024-02-14

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01ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

INTRODUCING SAFETEST: A NOVEL APPROACH TO FRONT END TESTING

UI tests have traditionally been conducted through either unit testing or end-to-end (E2E) tests. Both approaches have tradeoffs. With unit tests, you have control over what to render and how the underlying services and imports should behave. However, you lose the ability to interact with an actual page. With E2E tests, you have control over the page but deal with pain points like the inability to make assertions on mocks and test segments of the app. SafeTest aims to address these issues by having a snippet of code in the application bootstrapping stage that injects hooks to run tests. It uses Playwright to run regular tests, thereby achieving ideal browser control. SafeTest also provides reports on when and how any failures occurred which include playback videos or steps to reproduce the failure.

netflixtechblog.com7 min read

HOW TO CENTER A DIV IN CSS

'How to center a div in CSS' is one of the most common questions developers google. There are various methods to center a div with CSS, such as by using text-align, flexbox, CSS Grid, positioned layout with auto margins, or a flow layout with auto margins. To choose the right method, a developer should decide if the centering is horizontal, vertical, or both, think about the number of elements being centered, and consider the layout context (flow, positioned, or grid). Flexbox is a good default choice for centering divs.

joshwcomeau.com14 min read

FINISHING TURBOREPO'S MIGRATION FROM GO TO RUST

Turborepo, a fast JavaScript build system, was ported from Go to Rust. This porting process involved several challenges, such as ensuring hash stability and maintaining compatibility with the Go version. This post discusses lessons learned from the porting process, such as the importance of using a single serialization format from the start and shipping each porting strategy faster.

vercel.com8 min read

02OPINIONS & ADVICE

ASK HN: HOW DO YOU COME UP WITH SIDE PROJECT IDEAS IN 2024? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Hacker News commenters recommend building projects for yourself to solve your own problems rather than trying to go looking for ideas. They recommend working on something that makes you personally happy so that you can return to work on it often organically without forcing yourself to. Building things and taking action often leads to better things, even if the “better thing” is not clear from the start.

news.ycombinator.com

HOW TO MANAGE ON-CALL DUTIES

An in-depth guide to what on-calls are, their benefits and downsides, and how they work in practice. It also has some interesting perspectives on whether on-calls should be mandatory and compensated. The guide offers many useful tips on how to maintain on-call runbooks, escalation processes, and creating effective on-call practices such as establishing feedback mechanisms for on-call members to share experiences and suggest feedback. It advocates for EM to join the on-call and explains why.

open.substack.com10 min read

03LAUNCHES & TOOLS

MEMORY AND NEW CONTROLS FOR CHATGPT

ChatGPT is being updated with the ability to remember information from past conversations, which will make it more personalized in future interactions. Users will have control over what information is remembered and can tell the chatbot to forget things if they want. This feature is currently being tested with a small group of users and will be rolled out more broadly soon.

openai.com4 min read

UNLAZY

Unlazy is a lazy loading library that leverages native browser APIs. It's intended for use with the loading="lazy" attribute alongside (blurry) placeholder images.

github.comGitHub repository

LINEN

Linen is a real-time thread-first messaging platform. It’s designed for deep work first, with organized channels, a centralized inbox, and personalized notifications.

linen.teamTool

04MISCELLANEOUS

A LOOK AT INTERNET TRAFFIC TRENDS DURING SUPER BOWL LVIII

This blog post explores the traffic trends from Super Bowl ads. It also looks at local traffic trends seen during the game, as well as email threat volume across related categories in the weeks ahead of the game. Some interesting conclusions: most Super Bowl ads no longer drive traffic to associated websites by including a URL in their ad. However, the DNS traffic analysis in the post shows that viewers don’t seem to have much trouble finding these sites. In-game events had a mixed impact on traffic across domains associated with multiple types of apps, as well as traffic for the websites associated with the teams playing in the Super Bowl.

blog.cloudflare.com10 min read

ENGINEERING PRACTICES FOR LLM APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

It’s important to have automated testing, refactoring of prompts, and defending against adversarial attacks to ensure the reliability and security of LLM applications. This article demonstrates the necessity of thoughtful prompt design, ethical considerations, and incorporating feedback early in the development process through examples and discussions. Like with all development, a lot of core software principles still apply to LLM applications.

martinfowler.com15 min read

IS SOMETHING BUGGING YOU?

FoundationDB is the underpinning of Apple’s current cloud infrastructure. The creators of FoundationDB have created Antithesis, a deterministic autonomous testing platform designed to find bugs in software. When developing FoundationDB, their testing infrastructure was renowned for its effectiveness. Antithesis performs deterministic simulations to test software and find bugs.

antithesis.com7 min read