TLDR WEB DEV 2024-03-13

THE DAY SOFT DELETES CAUSED CHAOS

Soft deletes in databases, while seemingly convenient, can lead to unfortunate consequences due to their hidden complexity and potential for data integrity issues. This author recounts a severe incident where a change in soft delete handling during a migration resulted in allowing the selling of the same seat an unlimited number of times for a popular concert. It’s worth considering using history/audit tables for preserving deleted data instead of soft deletes in production systems.

WHAT IS INP AND WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

Google introduced Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a new Core Web Vital on March 12 to emphasize the importance of a website's overall responsiveness throughout a user's entire visit. INP measures the delay between users' interactions (clicks, taps, or keypresses) and visual feedback from websites. To understand and improve your website's INP score, utilize the Performance tab in Chrome DevTools, prioritize timely visual feedback, and optimize JavaScript execution.

MY FAVORITE ANIMATION TRICK: EXPONENTIAL SMOOTHING

Exponential smoothing is an animation technique that provides a smooth and responsive way to move objects towards their target positions. This blog demonstrates its use in UI elements and camera movement, showing its advantages over linear or easing-based animations. The mathematical basis of exponential smoothing is derived from differential equations, so it automatically handles varying time intervals and speed parameters.

40 YEARS OF PROGRAMMING

This essay reflects over a four-decade career in software development. To be a successful software engineer, one must communicate and collaborate well. While "getting things done" is important, developers must also consider the long-term maintenance costs of their work. Readers should find their own best practices for productive software engineering while also remembering to take care of themselves.

NERVOUS ABOUT Q&AS? 7 ESSENTIAL TIPS TO ANSWER CONFIDENTLY

While feeling nervous when asked questions under pressure is normal, it can hinder your ability to respond with the best possible answer. To overcome this, adjust your mindset, embrace silence, and strategically clarify the question before answering. If the question is complex, provide a brief answer and offer a follow-up discussion. For complaints, focus on understanding the underlying concerns rather than getting defensive.

MENTORSHIP’S ROLE IN MY STAFF PROMOTION

This article offers two stories, with advice, on how mentorship was key to a Meta engineer’s promotion to staff engineer. One story focuses on explicit mentorship, where they regularly checked in with someone to get advice. The other story focuses on implicit mentorship, where they worked with someone who had the skills they wanted to develop.

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BEBOP

Bebop is a fast data interchange format. In benchmarks, it is 100 times faster than Protocol Buffers and 1000 times faster than JSON. Bebop offers the binary serialization benefits of Protocol Buffers with a better developer experience.

ASTRO 4.5

Astro 4.5 introduces a new Dev Audit UI that provides in-browser guidance for improving site performance and accessibility. This release also offers enhanced View Transitions functionality, multi-CDN asset prefixing for optimized content delivery, and more.

WINTERJS

WinterJS is a fast JavaScript server that runs Service Workers scripts. It is able to handle up to 100,000 requests per second on a single laptop.

THE “10X ENGINEER:" 50 YEARS AGO AND NOW

The book "Mythical Man Month,” written 50 years ago, explores the concept of the "10x engineer." Its author theorizes that building a team of supporting roles around a highly productive chief programmer could maximize output. Nowadays, advanced tooling eliminates the need for such hierarchical team structures and much of the proposed support team.

BUILDING META’S GENAI INFRASTRUCTURE

Meta recently built two large-scale AI clusters, each containing over 24,000 GPUs, to power its current and future AI models. Built with a focus on researcher experience and productivity, these clusters feature high-performance networks, powerful storage solutions, and the latest NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Meta is optimizing these clusters to handle large complex models and is scaling its infrastructure to include hundreds of thousands of GPUs by the end of 2024.

THE DIGITAL MARKETS ACT IS IN FORCE! WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is now in effect. Companies like Apple, Google, and Meta must ensure that their designated core platform services comply with the DMA or face substantial fines. Key changes required by the DMA include end of browser engine restrictions, third-party app store access, web app installation fairness, and the respecting of user choice in chosen default browsers.

JCO

Jco is a fully native JavaScript toolchain for working with WebAssembly (Wasm) Components in JavaScript that can transpile Wasm component binaries into ES modules.

IF YOU CAN CODE, YOU CAN WRITE!

Coding and writing are fundamentally similar because both have the potential for impactful change and require clarity, efficiency, readability, and structure.

CAN WE HAVE CUSTOM MEDIA QUERIES, PLEASE?

"Custom media queries" in CSS would allow developers to define reusable media query aliases, making CSS more maintainable.

DETECT CAPS LOCK WITH JAVASCRIPT

Users may accidentally have Caps Lock enabled when typing their passwords - developers can use JavaScript's getModifierState method to detect this and provide a helpful warning.