TLDR WEB DEV 2024-08-05

HOW NOTION DECREASED LATENCY BY 20% WITH CACHING

Notion recently improved its browser performance by using SQLite for client-side caching. This led to a 20% increase in page navigation speeds through a SharedWorker architecture to manage concurrency and prevent database corruption. SQLite was implemented using WebAssembly for local data storage and offline functionality. In this post, the team at Notion goes through challenges they faced with slow disk reads and initial page load times.

"WE RAN OUT OF COLUMNS" - THE BEST, WORST CODEBASE

This author recounts his experience working with a messy, yet strangely enjoyable legacy codebase. The system was riddled with quirks like a table with only one row used for generating IDs, a manually-updated calendar that controlled logins, and a daily data refresh process that could crash the system. The codebase itself was a chaotic mix of technologies, including outdated frameworks and a haphazardly built shipping application. Despite its flaws, the lack of overarching design allowed for independent development and quick fixes, which gave developers a sense of creative freedom.

PORTING MY JAVASCRIPT GAME ENGINE TO C FOR NO REASON

The creator of the Impact JavaScript game engine rebuilt it in C and called it high_impact. This new engine is designed for 2D action games and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and the web. high_impact utilizes a simple framework with minimal code and is highly extensible, offering support for tile-maps, entities, collision detection, and rendering through OpenGL or a software renderer. The developer ported two of his original Impact games, Biolab Disaster and Drop, to high_impact to demonstrate the engine's functionality.

HOW TO BUILD ANYTHING EXTREMELY QUICKLY

“Outline speedrunning” is a technique for accelerating the building process of any project. It involves recursively outlining a project into smaller and smaller components, then filling in these components as quickly as possible without focusing on perfection. Only after completing all components does one go back and refine the work, resulting in a faster and less stressful process. This approach is significantly faster than the traditional "loading bar" style of building, which involves working through the project sequentially.

HOW TO GET PROMOTED (WITHOUT GETTING LUCKY)

Promotions to Staff Engineer focus on sustained, measurable impact aligned with company goals, often demonstrated over at least six months. Leveraging people, writing, and high-quality code multiplies your influence, differentiating higher-level ICs from others. Building a strong internal brand through quality work, collaboration, and effective communication is necessary.

HOW I USE "AI"

LLMs are already providing tangible value, contrary to the claims of many who consider them just hype. This post details how the author uses LLMs to simplify code, automate boring tasks, provide API references, search for things difficult to find, explain concepts, solve one-off tasks, and various other tasks. While LLMs might not be able to solve complex or novel problems, their ability to handle mundane tasks can significantly improve productivity and allow developers to focus on the interesting aspects of their work.

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ELL

Ell is a command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash. You can chat with LLMs and have them call functions through your terminal.

PLAIN VANILLA

Plain Vanilla is an explainer for doing web development using only vanilla techniques. This means no tools and no frameworks — just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

MORPHIC

Morphic is an AI-powered search engine with a generative UI.

USING YOUR KINDLE AS AN E-INK MONITOR

This developer jailbroke their Kindle Paperwhite to use as an e-ink monitor. The process involved jailbreaking the Kindle, setting up a listener server on it to receive image files, and using screen capture and image manipulation tools to send images from a computer to the Kindle.

SHOULD YOU AVOID BARREL FILES FOR BETTER CODEBASE CONSISTENCY AND PERFORMANCE?

Avoiding barrel files can prevent issues like circular imports and improve development speed by reducing unnecessary module loading. Consistency in file organization can be enforced by lint rules like `import/no-cycle`. A single casing format for filenames is useful for team style guides. While barrel files may be necessary for libraries, they often complicate application code and should be avoided.

WHAT WE GOT WRONG ABOUT HTTP IMPORTS

Deno's initial HTTP imports aimed to simplify JavaScript development by using distributed URLs instead of a centralized registry, but this approach faced issues like long URLs, cumbersome dependency management, and reliability concerns. Deno introduced Import Maps and JSR to address these problems, offering better version management and reliability while maintaining the benefits of granular, HTTP-based module loading.

GITHUB PROFILE ROAST

Get your GitHub profile roasted by AI.

WEBGPU UNLEASHED

A free ebook on WebGPU programming.

ENUM CLASS IMPROVEMENTS FOR C++17, C++20 AND C++23 - C++ STORIES

C++17, C++20, and C++23 have introduced improvements to enum classes, enhancing their type safety and usability through features like direct initialization from underlying types, the 'using enum' keyword, and the std::to_underlying utility.

DEGREES OF LINUS TORVALDS

This project uses breadth-first search to identify connections between a GitHub user and Linus Torvalds.