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DAY.JS

Day.js is a minimalist JavaScript library that parses, validates, manipulates, and displays dates and times for modern browsers with a largely Moment.js-compatible API. If you use Moment.js, you already know how to use Day.js.

WHY HTTP/3 IS EATING THE WORLD

HTTP/3, a new version of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), has gained rapid adoption on the internet, with support ranging from 19% to over 50% among web servers and networks. It is used extensively by major companies like Google and Meta. HTTP/3 solves several problems of older protocols like TCP, offering better security, encryption, efficiency, and performance. Its adoption has been driven by its improved performance, which makes it ideal for loading web pages and streaming videos.

NO MORE VENDOR LOCK-IN? THE RISE OF SKY COMPUTING

Traditional cloud computing often confines users to vendor-specific platforms. Sky Computing reduces this dependency – it’s a technical abstraction layer on top of cloud providers that allow cloud apps to operate freely across multiple cloud providers. This approach offers benefits such as cost optimization, redundancy, risk mitigation, and performance enhancement. It allows companies to achieve greater flexibility, scalability, and avoid vendor lock-in, while cloud providers can tap into new revenue opportunities and expand their market share.

WHERE DOES MY COMPUTER GET THE TIME FROM?

A short informal blog post that explains where various computers in different locations get the time from.

I’M NOT A PROGRAMMER, AND I USED AI TO BUILD MY FIRST BOT

The author of this article was able to create a Slack bot with Replit and its AI capabilities.

CAREER GROWTH AFTER 35: WHAT AWAITS PROGRAMMERS?

A Q&A where over-35 software engineers answer how their careers are.

YOU DON'T NEED A DEDICATED CACHE SERVICE - POSTGRESQL AS A CACHE

This article explores how to leverage the features of PostgreSQL to turn it into a fully featured, efficient caching service. By doing so, you can eliminate the need to operate and manage an additional service for a single task. While the performance may not match that of specialized cache services, the extent of performance degradation will vary based on your data type and usage patterns. The article also offers a set of queries to assist you in assessing system performance.

AN INTERACTIVE INTRO TO CRDTS

RUBY'S NEW TLDR TESTING FRAMEWORK

HOW TO WRITE BETTER DJANGO CODE

STRONG STATIC TYPING, A HILL I'M WILLING TO DIE ON...

OPENTOFU

OpenTofu is an open-source tool for building and managing infrastructure safely and efficiently. It can handle both popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.

SHUTTLE

Shuttle is a Rust-native cloud development platform that lets you deploy your Rust apps for free. It comes with features that improve developer productivity. It has first-class support for popular Rust frameworks, automatic resource provisioning, and scalable hosting.

CSS SCOPE INLINE

CSS Scope Inline allows web developers to scope inline style tags in pure vanilla CSS. It has no dependencies. CSS Scope Inline is an alternative to Tailwind CSS.

SECURITY WEAKNESSES OF COPILOT GENERATED CODE IN GITHUB

A recent study found that 35.8% of Github Copilot-generated code snippets contain security weaknesses. The most frequent security issues include OS Command Injection, Use of Insufficiently Random Values, and Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions, with 11 of them being part of the 2022 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Top-25 list. The study emphasizes the importance of cautious code review and security checks when using AI-generated code in software projects.

DEVELOPER?

GENERATIVE AI

KATA CONTAINERS

PICKING A VECTOR DATABASE: A COMPARISON AND GUIDE FOR 2023

FROM RAPID HIRING

RELATIONAL DATABASES ON AWS

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) offers automated management, backups, and scalability, but it comes at a higher cost. On the other hand, self-hosted databases may be cheaper price-wise, but can end up eating up more developer time. This article compares using RDS versus self-hosting.

WORKING ON MULTIPLE WEB PROJECTS WITH DOCKER COMPOSE AND TRAEFIK

Docker Compose can be used to manage local development environments for web projects. However, when working on multiple web projects, it’s common to run into port clashes. This article introduces a few files that allow individual developers to customize development setups without impacting configurations. It also introduces Traefik, a reverse proxy tool, to simplify routing and access to different projects.

RESPONSIVE TYPE SCALES WITH COMPOSABLE CSS UTILITIES

If you’ve ever attempted to create a responsive type that seamlessly adapts and scales between pre-determined sizes within a type scale based on viewport or container widths, you may have wrestled with JavaScript or wrangled with CSS calculators. Thankfully, it is possible to create truly fluid type scales with composable and responsive type utilities that let your type resize and adapt to the viewport or container width.

BUN HYPE. HOW WE LEARNED NOTHING FROM YARN

This article is very critical and raises serious doubts about the future of Bun. The author makes a parallel with Yarn - how it was very hyped in the beginning but eventually npm caught up. The article dives deep into how Bun actually compares with npm, looking into Bun macros, APIs, and language support.

WHY STAYING UPDATED WITH YOUR SOFTWARE STACK MATTERS

The advantages of using an up-to-date software stack may appear self-evident: enhanced functionality, a more productive development environment, the convenience of using the latest documentation, and stronger security protocols. However, there are more implicit advantages too, such as emphasizing a culture of innovation and improving team motivation.

JSON GENERATOR

Generate, modify, and visualize JSON data with ease. JSON Generator also has templates for common JSON data items.

TRIGGER.DEV

Trigger.dev is an open source background jobs framework for TypeScript. It has features like API integrations, webhooks, scheduling, and delays. Furthermore, it’s able to handle long-running jobs without function timeouts and with auto-resuming features.

LOCALPILOT

LocalPilot allows you to use GitHub Copilot on your Macbook locally with one click. It’s powered by local LLMs like LLaMA 2.

LESSONS FROM BOOTSTRAPPED COMPANIES FOUNDED BY SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

Bootstrapped companies are businesses that don’t take external funding. Many of these companies fly under the radar. This article focuses on five bootstrapped companies that started in various ways, like as a side project, and grew over time. The key takeaways are that bootstrapped companies usually grow slower, focus on simplicity, and make pragmatic engineering choices. For engineers, they offer more flexibility and stability during downturns compared to VC-funded companies.

HONEY, I SHRUNK THE NPM PACKAGE

npm’s compression strategy currently relies on the gzip compression algorithm. However, alternative compression algorithms, like Brotli and ZStandard, could modernize npm and make it smaller in size. A gradual transition plan may help overcome challenges in implementing such algorithms in npm, such as supporting backwards compatibility.

PITFALLS OF DATABASE MIGRATIONS

Database migrations are difficult in practice. This article lists four reasons why, such as the fact that schema state is hard to version control.

CHATGPT.JS

ChatGPT.js is a powerful JavaScript library that allows for super easy interaction with the ChatGPT DOM.

HOW TO DETECT FAILED REQUESTS VIA WEB EXTENSIONS

A simple code example of detecting failed requests using the browser.webRequest extension API.

STATE MANAGEMENT IN MICRO-FRONTEND ARCHITECTURES

This article breaks down monolithic frontends into smaller, manageable pieces and uses diagrams to show how state management works in such architectures.

HOW PINTEREST SCALED TO 11 MILLION USERS WITH ONLY 6 ENGINEERS

Pinterest reached 11.7 million monthly active users (MAUs) in January 2012 with just six engineers. It was the fastest company at the time to surpass 10 million MAUs. Pinterest's growth journey involved several lessons, such as favoring database sharding over clustering and sharding incrementally over time. It faced numerous problems along the way, like data corruption due to some bugs in its clustering algorithm. This article dives into how Pinterest’s backend architecture evolved over time, such as the fact that it transitioned from Django to Flask as it grew.

IN 2023

This article discusses how text encoding has evolved over time and how UTF-8 is the dominant encoding method today. UTF-8 is described as a variable-length encoding, ranging from one to four bytes per code point, making it efficient for a wide range of languages. UTF-8 is also compatible with ASCII and has solid error detection and recovery capabilities. The article dives through various simple questions regarding UTF-8 from a software developer’s perspective.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE BUN JAVASCRIPT RUNTIME

Bun is a rival JavaScript runtime to Node.js and Deno. In this article, you’ll look at Bun 1.0 in comparison to its counterparts and examine the reasons it may be worth a try!

RETURN TO OFFICE IS BULLSHIT AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT

This article argues that the decision to require everyone to return to the office lacks a factual basis and disregards the situations of employees. It also talks about the potential consequences of such a decision, including the loss of top talent in the tech industry.

THE 300% PRODUCTION PROBLEM

The 300% production problem is that to get an application into production, you need to be an expert on the deployment target, the deployment methodology, and in the application itself. Each of these expertise layers is a full-time job or undertaking. The ultimate solution to this problem is simplicity.

HOW DOORDASH DEFINES GREAT ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT

Great companies are built by great people who have great managers. This is certainly true for the engineering team at DoorDash. Defining what great engineering management looks like for DoorDash has been critical for its success as a business. This article gives you a glimpse into the core values that back its teams and managers along the way.

PYTHON 3.12

Python 3.12 has been released, featuring a better debugging and profiling API, flexible f-string parsing, more performance improvements, a new type annotation syntax for generic classes, and more.

OPENSTATUS

OpenStatus is an open-source synthetic monitoring platform. It features both custom monitoring and alerting, with support for custom headers and fast incident alerts.

INSTANT.DEV

Instant.dev offers a speedy, dependable, and battle-tested Object-Relational Mapping and migration management system for Postgres 13+ in JavaScript. For individuals familiar with Ruby on Rails, instant.dev introduces functionality similar to ActiveRecord in the Node.js, Deno, and Bun ecosystems. It’s designed to work with any JavaScript stack.

SHOELACE

A collection of professionally designed, everyday UI components built on Web standards. Works with all frameworks as well as regular

DEPENDENCY COMPOSITION

Frustrated with conventional framework-based dependency injection, Daniel Somerfield, a software engineer with over 20 years of experience, has developed a composition strategy that utilizes partial application to inject context into modules. This article provides a first-person view of how Somerfield identifies and solves a technical problem within his team. By opting to fulfill dependency contracts with functions instead of classes, minimizing code sharing between modules, and guiding the design through tests, Somerfield successfully created a system composed of highly discrete, evolvable, yet still type-safe modules.

THE SYNTHETIC SOCIAL NETWORK IS COMING

Recent developments in AI, such as Meta’s personality-driven chatbots voiced by celebrities, open the door to more immersive AI interactions. There is the potential for AI companions that are warm, empathetic, and helpful, akin to the concept popularized in the movie "Her." These AI companions could provide support and entertainment, particularly for individuals who are lonely or isolated. However, there are unanswered questions about how AI will affect society in terms of personalization, engagement, and loneliness.