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MUTATIVE

Mutative is a JavaScript library for efficient immutable updates. It’s 2-6x faster than the native handcrafted reducer and more than 10x faster than Immer. Some of Mutative's features include higher performance, optional freezing state, and support for JSON Patch.

QUICKJS

QuickJS is a compact embeddable JavaScript engine. It supports the ES2023 specification including modules, asynchronous generators, and mathematical extensions. QuickJs is small and easy to embed, offers a fast interpreter with low startup time, and can compile JavaScript to executables without any external dependencies.

BILL GATES INTERVIEWS SAM ALTMAN ABOUT OPENAI’S SPEEDY RISE

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed the rapid development of AI and its potential impact on the future in a recent podcast interview. Altman is excited about the progress of AI, specifically regarding advancements in multimodality, reliability, and reasoning ability. AI has the potential to transform various industries, including programming, education, and healthcare, making people more efficient and enabling them to tackle new challenges.

CAREER TREASURE HUNT: MENTORING FROM BOTH SIDES

Mentorship is a two-way street that can be incredibly valuable for both the mentee and the mentor. A mentor's role is to provide guidance and share experiences, not to dictate the mentee's path. This article thoroughly covers the ins and outs of mentorship, explaining what it is, how to find a mentor or mentee, and how to manage a mentorship relationship. It highlights the need for open communication and established goals and expectations.

LATENCY NUMBERS YOU SHOULD KNOW (X POST)

Latency number cheat sheet for things like RAM access, database inserts for Postgres, and more.

VIRAL LAYOFF VIDEOS REFLECT A SEA CHANGE IN WORK CULTURE

Getting laid off was once a process that most people kept quiet about, but many of today’s workers are shedding that stigma by publically opening up and sharing their layoff stories and the real emotions they felt during the process.

THE EASIEST WAY TO GET STARTED WITH THREE.JS WEB ANIMATIONS

A basic guide for understanding how Three.js web animations work that shows you how to animate something in your browser in 5 steps.

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WEB COMPONENTS IN EARNEST

This article is an extremely detailed walkthrough on how to build an app (specifically a palette generator) using Web Components and JavaScript. The app in this case is simple but complete. It’s entirely built with custom elements, has almost no dependencies, and runs fast. The author deep dives into the components and code, writes his own testing library (300 lines), and discusses some positives of using web components (like avoiding await/async or any other artificially introduced async behavior).

HOW WE STRESS TEST AND BENCHMARK COCKROACHDB FOR GLOBAL SCALE

CockroachDB is regularly stress-tested and benchmarked using various benchmarking methods. These tests include daily benchmarks using TPC-C and TPC-E benchmarks on different node configurations, weekly benchmarks with larger clusters, and per-release benchmarks before major software updates. Ad hoc tests, such as scalability testing with varying node counts and workload types, are conducted to understand performance at scale.

WHY TAILWIND ISN’T FOR ME

Tailwind CSS is widely popular in web development today, but there are some notable downsides to it. It leads to ugly-looking HTML. The use of @apply in Tailwind is incompatible with other CSS frameworks, leading to vendor lock-in. Tailwind also encourages the use of `div` and `span` tags, whereas the modern web supports a much larger range of expressive custom elements and attributes.

RATINGS != PROMOTIONS

High ratings alone don’t necessarily lead to promotions. It’s important to focus on adopting the behaviors of the next career level as these behaviors are transferable, sustainable, and ultimately more financially rewarding.

THINK FOR YOURSELF IF YOU WANT AI TO TEACH YOU HOW TO CODE

While AI can help generate code and provide solutions, developers should be careful to not become too reliant on the technology. Instead, they should approach AI tools with the goal of understanding and reviewing the generated code rather than blindly copying it. This not only allows for a better learning experience while coding, but also allows for easier debugging later on.

INTRODUCING ANDROID EMULATORS, IOS SIMULATORS, AND OTHER PRODUCT UPDATES FROM PROJECT IDX

Google’s Project IDX, a cloud-based workspace for full-stack multi-platform development, has added support for various languages and frameworks, including Astro, Go, Python + Flask, Preact, and Node.js. Developers can now preview their Flutter mobile apps in an iOS simulator or Android emulator. Project IDX now has simplified Docker container management and supports running command-line tools within the workspace and auto-detecting network ports.

TXTAI

Txtai is an all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, language model orchestration, and various language model workflows. It incorporates vector search with SQL, object storage, topic modeling, graph analysis, and multimodal indexing. The project can be implemented using Python or YAML and offers API bindings for various programming languages.

WHAT'S BEHIND THE TECH INDUSTRY'S MASS LAYOFFS IN 2024?

In the first four weeks of 2024, nearly 100 tech companies, including Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, TikTok, and Salesforce, have collectively laid off about 25,000 employees, despite their stock prices returning to pre-pandemic levels and being highly profitable. These layoffs seem to be aimed at satisfying investors and boosting stock prices. They are driven by copycat behavior and may not actually be necessary.

NEW GITHUB COPILOT RESEARCH FINDS 'DOWNWARD PRESSURE ON CODE QUALITY'

GitHub Copilot usage has led to an increase in AI-assisted code, which in turn has created a downward pressure on code quality. Code written with AI is often harder to maintain and of lower quality as it’s often verbose or copy-pasted. However, GitHub Copilot has had a positive effect on developer productivity and satisfaction.

SIMPLE TRICKS TO LEVEL UP YOUR TECHNICAL DESIGN DOCS IN 2024

Technical design docs (or tech specs) are important because they reduce risk, document decisions, and help align stakeholders on technical choices.

ASK HN: WHAT HAPPENED TO STARTUPS, WHY IS EVERYTHING SO POLISHED? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Startups today are much more polished compared to the “MVP” startups of the past. However, commenters agree that while startups are more visually polished on the outside, it may not mean that they are necessarily as polished on the inside (on the application level).

GIT COMMIT MESSAGES ARE USELESS

Git commit messages are often useless and unread. A better approach for teams would be to adopt modern trunk-based engineering practices, where pull request branches are squash-merged into the main branch, making individual commit messages irrelevant.

WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? RUST'S PROBLEM WITH SLOW COMPILES

Rust's slow build times have been a common complaint among developers, but new tooling is able to optimize compilation.

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EXPLORING THE ANIMATION LANDSCAPE OF 2023 WRAPPED

12 MODERN CSS ONE-LINE UPGRADES

12 one-line CSS upgrades that will help reduce technical debt, remove unnecessary lines of JavaScript, and score easy wins for user experience. Examples include pairing `object-fit` with `aspect-ratio` to ensure images are not distorted when you apply a custom aspect ratio and using `width:fit-content` over `display: inline-block` to reduce an element’s width to the content size - this maintains the same effect while leaving the display value available, thereby not changing the position of the element in the layout.

DEFINING OUR ICP IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING WE EVER DID

Defining an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is critical for startups. Having a clear ICP is crucial for achieving product-market fit as it helps in targeting the right customers and shaping the product, marketing, and sales strategies accordingly. Startups should define their ICP early and continuously refine it as they gather more relevant data and recognize genuine enthusiasm from potential customers.

HOW TO GROW PRODUCT-MINDED ENGINEERING TEAMS

A product-minded engineer can build products more efficiently by focusing on the features that matter and avoid over-engineering. These engineers understand the broader goals of the company, bridge communication gaps between technical and non-technical stakeholders, and make data-driven decisions. Teams with product-minded engineers often hire the right individuals, establish a collective vision, promote collaboration between engineering and product teams, and provide innovative solutions.

VIROREACT

ViroReact is a library for developers to swiftly create augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications. It ensures seamless native execution across various mobile VR platforms (such as Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, and Google Cardboard for both iOS and Android) as well as AR platforms (iOS ARKit and Android ARCore).

MARKER

Marker converts PDF, EPUB, and MOBI files to Markdown. It has support for a range of PDFs, removes headers/footers and other artifacts, converts equations to LaTeX successfully, formats code blocks, and tables, and supports multiple languages.

JINT

Jint is a JavaScript interpreter designed for .NET environments. It is compatible with various .NET platforms, including .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET 4.6.2 onwards. Its primary use cases involve running JavaScript securely within a .NET application, enabling the interaction between JavaScript and native .NET objects, and supporting scripting in .NET applications to allow customization using JavaScript, similar to how Unity games use it.

APPLE IS BRINGING SIDELOADING AND ALTERNATE APP STORES TO THE IPHONE

Apple is set to introduce significant changes to its iPhone app ecosystem in March in response to the European Union's Digital Markets Act. iOS users in the EU will be able to download apps from third-party app stores. Developers can choose whether to use Apple's payment services or integrate third-party payment systems. Apple is introducing a hefty Core Technology Fee for developers that integrate third-party payment systems or distribute their apps on third-party app stores. It will charge developers €0.50 (around 54 US cents) per annual app install. This fee only kicks in after a million annual installs in the EU.

HOW DOES VISA/MASTERCARD MAKE MONEY?

The credit card is often called the "most profitable product in banking" because it generates significant revenue through the payment flow process. When a cardholder pays a merchant $100 using a credit card, the merchant compensates the acquiring bank with a "merchant discount fee." The acquiring bank then keeps a portion (e.g., $0.25) as the acquiring markup and pays the issuing bank an interchange fee (e.g., $1.75) to cover the transaction. The issuing bank incurs costs like managing accounts, fraud detection, and clearing, which justify its compensation. Card networks like VISA charge banks for their services, but the interchange fee may vary for different merchants, typically being higher for smaller merchants.

USING ALTERNATIVE BROWSER ENGINES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Apple has introduced alternative browser engines for iOS in the EU, allowing users to use browser engines other than WebKit.

LUMOS

Lumos is a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) LLM Chrome extension for browsing the web. It is powered by local LLMs, so inference is done locally on your own machine.

ANNOUNCING ADONISJS V6

AdonisJS is a fully-featured web framework for Node.js. Version 6 adopts TypeScript and ESM for new applications and adds type-safe routes and controller bindings.

MEMORY FRAGMENTATION. DOES IT AFFECT PERFORMANCE?

Memory fragmentation is an unwanted problem that occurs in the OS in which a process is unloaded and loaded from memory and the free memory space gets fragmented. Fragmentation impacts performance negatively.

BUILD A NEXT.JS APP IN STORYBOOK WITH REACT SERVER COMPONENTS AND MOCK SERVICE WORKER

Learn how to develop, document, and test React Server Component applications in isolation using Storybook, using Mock Service Worker to mock network requests.

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HOW WE BUILT IT: SMART RETRIES

Stripe developed a “smart retries” tool that uses ML to determine the best time to retry failed payments. The tool helped some businesses recover over $100 million in revenue. This article goes into detail on how the tool was implemented and provides 4 key lessons on building and choosing the right ML model and giving customers control over how often payments are retried.

LESSONS LEARNED UPGRADING TO REACT 18

The team at SonarQube recently upgraded from React 17 to 18. In this article, they share the three biggest issues and lessons they learned during the process. TypeScript needs to be updated with React. There is a set of codemods released by the React Core team that helps to automatically update types, but they come with a couple of issues. React 18 enables automatic batching by default which can boost performance, but it can also break UI tests and uncover other underlying issues.

FIXING CUMULATIVE LAYOUT SHIFT PROBLEMS

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much a page shifts while it is being loaded. It can negatively impact both search rankings and user perception of site speed. Images are a common cause of CLS problems. To improve CLS, web developers can give the browser hints of what size images will be by giving images a width and height attribute separate from the CSS width and height attributes that are part of the style tag.

WHY I DON'T USE SCRUM TO MANAGE MY REMOTE TEAMS

Scrum is often used as a process to manage teams, especially remote teams. However, it can add 8 hours of meetings per sprint, which is equal to 2 full days of productivity per month. Many projects can’t be easily forced into a 2-week sprint process. Using a collaborative document for each project that addresses the key questions is more efficient. Meetings can be held to address denser tradeoff decisions as long interactions over async communication can create long lead times.

ACCURATE ENG ESTIMATIONS: PREDICTING AND NEGOTIATING THE FUTURE

Estimating project timelines in software is hard. Initial estimates are commonly disrupted by external pressures to deliver faster. Estimates are also pressured by cross-functional teams, upper management, and ego-driven desires for faster delivery. To deal with these pressures, it’s helpful to focus on project scope, use productivity metrics, and address optimism bias and black swan events.

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ZED

Zed is a high-performance multiplayer code editor from the creators of the code editor Atom.

RETRIEVER

Retriever lets you request secrets from anyone without any of the data going to a server.

REACT EMAIL 2

Resend’s React Email 2 includes features such as a new preview experience, significant performance improvements, new components for displaying code, and the ability to deploy to Vercel. The preview experience has been revamped with new mobile previews, a revamped file tree, better user feedback, and improved error handling. New components, including a code-block and code-inline component, make it easier to display code in emails.

FROM SEVEN FAILURES TO 10X GROWTH

Jam, a bug reporting tool, achieved remarkable growth in 2023, going from zero to one million Jams created. It took 18 months and seven failed launches before it achieved product-market fit. To reach this milestone, Jam used internal testing extensively, focused on quality, had a small group of focused pilot users, and tracked retention.