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MOONBIT

Moonbit is a fast, compact, and user-friendly language for WebAssembly. It is influenced by Golang and Rust. The goal of Moonbit is to allow an increase in both program and dev performance for WebAssembly.

SHORT SESSION EXPIRATION DOES NOT HELP SECURITY

Sessions typically expire a set amount of time after a user logs in. However, short session expirations do not help security. This is because reauthentication can be risky and threats usually do not rely on session length for their attacks.

TYPESCRIPT IS SURPRISINGLY OK FOR COMPILERS

There are two main historical languages used for compilers: OCaml and C++. However, TypeScript actually works pretty well as a compiler language due to its flexible type system. This article contains a detailed walkthrough, with code examples, of how to use TypeScript as a compiler language.

DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE INDIVIDUALS

Apple coined the term "directly responsible individual" (DRI) to refer to the one person with whom the buck stops on any given project. Every project would be assigned a DRI who was ultimately held accountable for the success or failure of that project. GitLab has a page in their handbook describing how they utilize the DRIs in their work culture.

THE LOW-BUDGET STARTUP

There is a lot of room for “low-budget” businesses in tech. These are businesses that are driven by profitability first and will probably focus less on the traditional VC-funded hypergrowth route.

2014

X is having trouble displaying old posts that come with images attached or any hyperlinks converted through Twitter’s built-in URL shortener.

HOW WE REDUCED THE SIZE OF OUR JAVASCRIPT BUNDLES BY 33%

Dropbox faced performance issues due to large JavaScript bundles and decided to replace its outdated module bundler during the migration to a new web serving stack. It chose Rollup as the new bundler, which offered features like automatic code-splitting and tree shaking. Despite initial challenges, including resource-intensive builds and bugs in Rollup’s tree-shaking algorithm, the migration was successful. After the rollout, Dropbox observed a 33% reduction in JavaScript bundle sizes, a 15% reduction in total JavaScript script count, and modest improvements in page load times. This change also significantly improved front-end development velocity and reduced maintenance burden.

BUILDING A TWO-WAY DATA BINDING HOOK FOR FORM INPUTS IN REACT

Two-way form input binding is a popular feature offered by JavaScript frameworks like Vue and Svelte. This is an experiment to reproduce the feature in React. It’s also a real-life example of how a seasoned React developer would approach building complex functionality.

ADAPTING TYPOGRAPHY TO USER PREFERENCES WITH CSS

Bringing the user into the design process has been an exciting time for users, designers, and developers. Users can land on their experience and seamlessly begin consuming content with their preferences richly integrated into the design result. This blog post explores using CSS media queries with a variable font to tailor the reading experience even further.

MANAGING DIFFICULT SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

There's a thread that weaves through every project, failure, and challenge. That thread is people. Managing people is complex, intriguing, and ultimately rewarding. This guide is a distillation of lessons learned and a roadmap to help you navigate the choppy waters of managing difficult software engineers.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TEAM TOPOLOGY

Teams need to have an intentional and well-thought-out purpose to thrive. This blog explores two different team topologies strategies. It highlights which topology is most effective in the world today, why it’s effective, and how you can implement it in your organization.

TAGGER

A zero dependency, Vanilla JavaScript tag editor.

PLANE

Plane is an open source JIRA, Linear, and Height alternative. It helps you track your issues, epics, and product roadmaps in the simplest way possible. Plane can be either self-hosted or used through Plane Cloud, which is a hosted solution for Plane.

HOW GOOGLE UNLOCKS AND MEASURES DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY

The time of rapid growth is on hold, leaving engineering teams trying to do more with less. No matter where you are, tighter customer budgets are driving greater demand to release differentiating features faster. Unlocking productivity for one of software development’s biggest expenses is more important than ever. Learn how Google measures developer productivity with mixed methods research, logs, and more.

ARE TECH WORKERS BENEFITING FROM TECH LAYOFFS?

Tech workers continue to be some of the most in-demand talent in the labor market today despite reports about tech layoffs dominating the news for the better part of the year. In fact, a recent survey conducted by Indeed to better understand tech worker behavior suggests that tech workers aren’t being affected by recent economic turbulence quite as much as some might think - some might even argue that tech workers are benefiting from tech layoffs.

13 USEFUL REACT LIBRARIES FOR DEVS IN 2023

These React libraries can help boost your development speed.

FRONTEND AND BACKEND DEFINED

Words like frontend, backend, and variations of them like “frontend development” are broadly used, yet there is little shared understanding as to their meaning, leading to inefficient communication at best and plain misunderstandings at worst.

RESEARCHERS DISCOVER NEW VULNERABILITY IN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, and the Center for AI Safety in San Francisco have uncovered a new vulnerability and proposed a simple and effective attack method that causes aligned language models to generate objectionable behaviors at a high success rate.

FERN - INSTANTLY CREATE A STRIPE-LIKE API EXPERIENCE (GITHUB REPO SPONSOR)

Fern is an open source tool to automatically generate idiomatic client libraries and Stripe-like API documentation. Find out why companies like Scale AI and Flatfile already use Fern to develop their APIs and generate their SDKs, learn more and star us on GitHub! [https://github.com/fern-api/fern?utm_source=tldr]

THE ENGINEERING BEHIND INSTAGRAM'S RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM

USING TYPESCRIPT

React’s official guide on integrating TypeScript with React. It covers the installation of necessary TypeScript definitions, the process of adding type annotations to React components and their props, and examples of using TypeScript with various React hooks like `useState`, `useReducer`, and `useContext`. The guide also introduces useful types from the `@types/react` package and concludes with recommendations for further learning resources.

VUE 3 FOR REACT DEVELOPERS: SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPARISON WITH DEMOS

INTERVIEW

5 SIGNS YOU SHOULD PASS UP ON THAT NEW JOB OFFER

UI COLORS

A Tailwind CSS color generator. Enter a hex code to create a custom color scale.

OGL

OGL is a small, effective WebGL library aimed at developers who like minimal layers of abstraction and are interested in creating their own shaders. Written in ES6 modules with zero dependencies, its API shares many similarities with ThreeJS. However, it is tightly coupled with WebGL and comes with much fewer features.

UBICLOUD

Ubicloud is an open, free, and portable cloud. Think of it as an open alternative to cloud providers, like what Linux is to proprietary operating systems. Ubicloud enables IaaS cloud features on bare metal providers, such as Hetzner, OVH, and AWS Bare Metal.

THE AMAZON PRIME DAY 2023 AWS BILL

ELON MUSK'S CREEP SHOW

HOW THE IMAC SAVED APPLE

HTMX IS PART OF THE GITHUB ACCELERATOR!

MINIMUM VIABLE SECURE PRODUCT

A minimum security baseline checklist for enterprise-ready products and services.

THINGS YOU FORGOT (OR NEVER KNEW) BECAUSE OF REACT

Most people have experienced finding something great beyond the popular defaults. People are shutting themselves off from great things without even realizing it because they aren't trying to find better things beyond familiar boundaries. This applies to tools and workflows, just as much as it does to any other area of life. This article looks at how React is the new default framework and how many people who use it on a regular basis don't realize how much it has fallen behind other tools.

A company built a Twitter-scale Mastodon instance from scratch in only 10k lines of code. They used a platform called Rama to build it quickly and efficiently. Rama unifies computation and storage into a coherent model capable of building end-to-end backends at any scale in 100x less code than otherwise.

THE DOWNSIDES OF MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTURE

A microservices architecture for application development in the cloud is an architectural approach that builds a software application as a collection of small (micro), loosely coupled services. Microservices came in with a great deal of momentum a few years ago, but now we’re seeing their drawbacks for applications on cloud platforms.

EVERYTHING YOU WISH YOU COULD ASK YOUR MANAGER: MAIN TAKEAWAYS

This article jumps into actionable advice for salary negotiation, manager 1-1s, promotion, and more. It goes into how to show your value as an engineer and how to prepare yourself for promotion at all times.

THE 5 PILLARS OF THRIVING TEAMS AND EXTRAORDINARY WORKPLACE CULTURE

Explore the five pillars that create extraordinary team cultures in organizations. These are the keys to boosting productivity, cultivating fulfillment, and fostering well-being among your team.

LOTTIELAB

Lottielab is a web-based animation tool. It aims to reduce the friction of creating and editing product animations by providing an easy-to-use editor with out-of-the-box support for import and export of the Lottie format and many others.

NIM V2.0

Nim is a programming language that is good for everything, but not for everybody. It focuses on the imperative programming paradigm and enhances it with a macro system. Version 2.0 is an evolution (not revolution) of Nim, bringing ORC memory management as a default, along with many other new features and improvements.

SCI-FI IDEA BANK

One way to look at progress in tech is that we’re just working our way through ideas that sci-fi writers came up with a long time ago. So a bank of those ideas might be a roadmap to the future and a compass for those who want to build the sci-fi futures we were promised. This author has put together a list of 3,746 sci-fi ideas that are from various pieces of fiction and media.

HOW IS LLAMA.CPP POSSIBLE?

Recently, a project rewrote the LLaMa inference code in raw C++. With some optimizations and quantizing the weights, this allows running an LLM locally on a wild variety of hardware, like a Pixel 5 and Macbook Pro. This is possible because of the memory bandwidth requirements of the model.

A SENIOR ENGINEER/EM JOB SEARCH STORY

This interview with a software engineer based in New York with more than 15 years of experience looks at how they navigated the job market after being impacted by the industry-wide job cuts earlier this year.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT LANGUAGE FOR YOUR PROJECT

Selecting the appropriate programming language is a critical decision that can significantly impact the success of your software project. With an abundance of options available, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. This comprehensive guide explored practical insights, real-world examples, and actionable tips to help you navigate this crucial choice and ensure your project's success.

AI TOWN

AI Town is a virtual town where AI characters live, chat, and socialize. This project is a deployable starter kit for easily building and customizing your own version of AI Town.

PROVIDER

Home buyers, sellers, real estate agents, and listing websites throughout the US have been stymied for five days by a cyberattack on a California company that provides a crucial online service used to track home listings. The attack, which commenced last Wednesday, targeted Rapottoni, a software and services provider that supplies Multiple Listing Services to regional real estate groups nationwide.

ASK LIKE A HUMAN: IMPLEMENTING SEMANTIC SEARCH ON STACK OVERFLOW

This blog documents how Stack Overflow transitioned from traditional lexical search using matching keywords to semantic search that uses embeddings to understand queries as natural language questions. It describes the problems with lexical search that made the team transition to semantic search and the challenges with implementing semantic search, such as choosing the right tech stack and model.

RESOURCES

This is the first of a two-part tutorial that focuses on best practices for designing accessible text over images for web and mobile app content. Each technique has examples and additional resources for implementation. For example, you should strive to maintain a high contrast ratio between text and images to ensure legibility and readability. There are various techniques for achieving this, such as using overlays, scrims, and blurred backgrounds.

WHY TAILWIND CSS WON

Tailwind CSS is a ubiquitous frontend styling framework. It became popular because there is no need to context switch to CSS files during development, it makes it easy to copy & paste styles on HTML blocks, and it doesn't depend on other libraries.