Search the archive

BILLABEAR

BillaBear is a standalone Subscription Management and Billing System that integrates with Stripe. It provides a REST API allowing you to integrate it easily.

TRY

try allows users to test commands before using them on a live system. It will show the effects of a command and then prompt users to see whether they want to commit the changes made at the end of the command's execution. try is still a prototype and not a full sandbox so users should not use it to test commands that will remove everything or write zeros to a disk.

CAN WEB DEVELOPERS BE HELD LIABLE?

This blog post discusses the potential legal liabilities web developers can be responsible for because of website accessibility. While the ADA doesn't hold developers liable, California's Unruh Act could potentially allow for such lawsuits, though proving intentional misconduct will be challenging. The post also highlights Assembly Bill 1757, which could make it unlawful for developers to knowingly create inaccessible websites, opening the door for lawsuits from clients and their customers.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT VECTOR INDEX FOR YOUR PROJECT

With so many vector index solutions, it’s hard to pick the right one for your use case. This guide explains the different indexing strategies vector stores use and provides a flowchart for how you can pick the right strategy. It’s based on a couple rules of thumb, such as your data size and how much you care about accuracy.

THE JOURNEY OF MIGRATING A TINY APPLICATION TO VUE

Many Vue developers have struggled to migrate to Vue 3. This article chronicles one developer’s experience with Vue 3 and details solutions to common issues so that your experience can be seamless.

ADVANCED MACOS COMMANDS

macOS is fortunate to have access to a huge arsenal of standard Unix tools. It also has a good number of macOS-specific command-line utilities that provide unique macOS functionality. This article goes through some of them.

GOOGLE HAS A SECRET BROWSER HIDDEN INSIDE THE SETTINGS

Google Chrome’s settings is an embedded WebView.

THE 3 BEST MONOREPO TOOLS FOR 2023

Monorepos can be a pain, but these tools make your life a lot easier.

MARGIN-TRIM AS A BEST PRACTICE?

It’s not every day there is a new “best practice” for CSS, since it’s such a huge, ubiquitous, and highly used language. Using margin-trim might be added to the mix.

WHY VUE IS A GREAT FIT FOR MODULAR SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

It can be difficult to decide what frontend framework to invest in. After all, decisions like this have big implications for teams that will likely be working with a certain technology for years to come. This article talks about why Vue should be one of your top contenders when choosing a frontend framework to invest in for the long haul.

BUILDING LLM APPLICATIONS FOR PRODUCTION

It’s easy to make a cool app with LLM, but making it production-ready is hard. This article discusses the key challenges and solutions around productionizing LLM apps, particularly on prompt ambiguity, inference cost, and latency. It also looks at how to compile multiple tasks with control flows (think agents and tools) and presents some promising use cases from companies building on top of LLMs.

AN INTRODUCTION TO DEBUGGING IN NODE.JS

Node.js has become increasingly popular for creating server-side web applications, build tools, command-line apps, and more. However, it can be hard to work through code errors after you write code and run it. This article will give you a thorough look at how to successfully debug your Node.js code.

STRENGTHS

Forcing yourself into a role or environment that falls outside your natural strengths will lead to you working twice as hard to make progress - while being miserable along the way. This article offers the best (and easiest) way to build a career aligned with your strengths.

PRODUCTIVITY

While it's hard enough to break out of habits, it's even harder to break free from a company culture that has bought into the meeting vortex fallacy. This article takes a look at why allowing your company culture to give your teams' brains time to digest after each meeting is crucial. It also dives into how to take back control and give your teams time to process information after meetings.

HOW TO GIVE CODE REVIEW AS A JUNIOR DEVELOPER

As a junior developer, code reviews offer a valuable learning opportunity and a chance to contribute to the team’s success. This post explains how you can provide effective code review feedback as a junior developer.

FOSSFOX

Market and opportunity explorer for open-source software engineers.

PRIMEREACT

PrimeReact provides over 90 React UI Components with top-notch quality to help you implement all your UI requirements in style.

STARRY-NIGHT

Starry-night is a syntax highlighter. It is an open source version of GitHub’s closed-source PrettyLights project. Starry-night supports 580+ grammars and it is of extremely high quality. It uses TextMate grammars, which are also used in popular editors like SublimeText, Atom, and VS Code.

OPENAI PPUS: HOW OPENAI'S UNIQUE EQUITY COMPENSATION WORKS

OpenAI's capped profit model means that the company will be able to generate more value than it would owe investors. Its employees receive a base salary and equity in Profit Participation Units (PPUs). This article explains how OpenAI's PPUs work, how OpenAI distributes them, and other benefits that OpenAI offers to employees. A link to a compensation benchmarking tool for employers is available near the end of the article.

REQUIREMENTS

With all the articles about just how amazing all the developments in AI have been, many software developers fear they’ll be replaced by artificial intelligence. The hardest part about creating software is not writing code - it’s creating the requirements, and those software requirements are still defined by humans. This article talks about the relationship between requirements and software, as well as what AI needs to produce good results.

CHATHN

ChatHN is an open-source AI chatbot that uses OpenAI Functions and the Vercel AI SDK to interact with the Hacker News API using natural language.

HOW TO WRITE BETTER CODE WITH CHATGPT

Rules to follow to write reliable code when you use ChatGPT as your coding companion.

MCKINSEY FINDS

A recent McKinsey study that looks at 850 different job roles and 2,100 tasks across occupations in 47 countries concludes that generative AI could add 4.4 trillion a year to the global economy. This would be done through automating repetitive work so humans can be freed up to do other tasks.

LOCATED

If a program uses a configuration file (or several), it should have an obvious command line way to find out where it expects to find that configuration file. Programs should fully expand and report the location they'll use given the current settings of things like environment variables.

UNEXPECTED DOWNSIDES OF UUID KEYS IN POSTGRESQL

UUIDs are commonly used as keys in PostgreSQL databases. However, UUID’s come with their own downsides. The most important of these downsides is a loss of temporal locality. The trouble with picking random values is that they lose any correlation between the order of inserts and the order of IDs. This can lead to a loss of performance.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES IN REACT NATIVE: THE RIGHT WAY!

Managing environment variables in React Native is crucial for any project; it can be sometimes tricky and challenging. With all the options available out there, people tend to get lost and have a lot of questions. This article defines the best method for managing environment variables and outlines why it’s the right way and how you can replicate it in your own React Native applications.

HOW PLATFORM ENGINEERING WORKS

Platform engineering brings velocity, stability, and a product mindset to engineering. Platform engineers support the software delivery velocity and system stability of engineering organizations. This article breaks down some lessons that are not only useful for platform engineers, but for all software engineers, such as focusing on outcome over output.

HOW TO DO THE THING YOU'VE BEEN AVOIDING

Most people have something that they are thinking about doing, but they aren’t - maybe because they think it’s a bad idea. Many people do or avoid things because they assume other people think the same. However, it’s worth asking yourself some simple questions in order to analyze an idea to see if it really is that bad. Usually, it’s more worth it to try that new idea you have and fail than not try at all.

Facing an uninterested or confrontational interviewer can be one of the most challenging obstacles that you'll face during the hiring process. While there's no singular way to approach or address this situation, there are a number of options you can take under consideration during and after the interview. For example, you can engage the interview with stories, ask them about their successes, reframe the experience, and even address the issue directly.

ANIME.JS

Anime.js is a lightweight JavaScript animation library with a simple, yet powerful API. It works with CSS properties, SVG, DOM attributes, and JavaScript Objects.

MAILPIT

Mailpit is a multi-platform email testing tool & API for developers. It acts as both an SMTP server and as a web interface to view all captured emails. Mailpit offers many features, such as message tagging, advanced mail search, a REST API, and configurable email storage.

AI.JSX

AI.JSX is a framework for building AI applications using Javascript and JSX. While AI.JSX is not React, it's designed to look and feel very similar, while also integrating seamlessly with React-based projects. With AI.JSX, you don't just use JSX to describe what your UI should look like, you also use it to describe how Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, should integrate into the rest of your application. The end result is a powerful combination where intelligence can be deeply embedded into the application stack.

GOOGLE DOMAINS TO SHUT DOWN

Google Domains, the third most popular domain registrar, is shutting down and selling its customer accounts to Squarespace. This move has raised concerns about the sale of personal information, seemingly contradicting Google's policy of not selling such data to third parties. The company's silence on the matter has allowed competitors to capitalize on the situation and has raised questions about the future of other Google services.

YOU CAN’T TRUST GOOGLE

Google is likely to discontinue any service that it cannot directly monetize with ads at a large scale. Its primary business is advertising, not products or services, and this is reflected in their poor customer service. The recent discontinuation of Google Domains and the neglect of Google Home/Nest are examples of this. Users of Google's products and services are warned to always have a backup plan, as any Google offering could be discontinued without much notice.

SIX MORE COMPANIES COMPETING WITH OPENAI

This article introduces six AI companies that are competing with OpenAI: Adept AI, Inflection AI, Runway, Aleph Alpha, AI21 Labs, and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). These companies are developing innovative AI technologies, ranging from AI assistants and creative tools to large language models and AI platforms.

THE GETTING STARTED WITH AI STACK FOR JAVASCRIPT

a16z explains their JavaScript stack for getting started with AI.

DOM VS VIRTUAL DOM: HOW REACT IS REVOLUTIONIZING WEB DEVELOPMENT

Refresher of how React's Virtual DOM works and why it is performant.

THOUGHTS ON SVELTE(KIT), ONE YEAR AND 3 BILLION REQUESTS LATER

An engineer works with Svelte and SvelteKit for a whole year in production and breaks down the good, the bad, and the ugly.

OPEN-SOURCE RESUME BUILDER AND PARSER

An open-source resume builder and parser for job seekers.

BATTERIES

The European Parliament recently voted on regulation that would, among other things, require smartphone manufacturers to make their device’s batteries more easily user-replaceable.

CRAFTING A BETTER, FASTER CODE VIEW

The new GitHub Code View brings users many new features to improve the code reading and exploration experience. GitHub’s engineering team overcame a number of unique technical hurdles in order to deliver these features without compromising performance. The team had a few guiding principles on which they refused to compromise while building the new Code View, such as the importance of speed, intuitiveness, and ease of use. In this article, they dive through the challenges they faced and how they solved them in detail.

CREATING ANIMATED LOGOS WITH LOTTIE AND VUE

There are many different ways to create animated logos, for example, using SVG or GIF files with animated icons. However, these types of animations can be demanding on website performance and can slow down your website. Lottie is a JSON-based animation format that is only half the size of other animation formats. This article introduces Lottie’s features and walks readers through the process of creating a Lottie animation and integrating it into a Vue 3 application.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), a key protocol in client-server communications. It explains the process of establishing and terminating a TCP connection, known as the 3-way handshake, and how TCP handles lost segments during this process. The article also discusses TCP keepalive, a mechanism for checking client status, and how TCP manages various edge cases, such as when the client or server goes offline.

BEFORE YOUR NEXT FRONTEND PULL REQUEST, USE THIS CHECKLIST

Frontend pull requests often contain common mistakes which can cause nasty bugs, jangled nerves, and wasted time. But they can be easily avoided by following this list of 7 small (but crucial) rules.

3 RED FLAGS THAT MEANS YOUR TEAM IS BURNT OUT

Sometimes, a team collectively hits a wall and experiences burn out. There will always be signs that lead up to this. This article outlines what some of the tell tale indications of burnout are and how you can help your team get out of a slump.

ANNOUNCING SVELTE 4

Svelte 4 has been released. Svelte is a JavaScript framework that’s an alternative to React and Angular. Its goal is to be efficient, tiny, and extremely easy to write. Svelte 4 results in a 75% reduction in package size, a better developer experience, updated docs, and many other features.

UNKEY

Unkey is an open source API key management solution. It allows you to create, manage, and validate API keys for your users. It’s built with security and speed in mind.

AI GETTING STARTED

The venture capital firm a16z has published AI Getting Started, a Javascript “AI getting started stack” for weekend projects, including image/text models, vector stores, auth, and deployment configs.

THE TRIMODAL NATURE OF SOFTWARE INTERNSHIP SALARIES

Doing an internship is a great way to start building your future career, but there's something that often confuses people - the fact that software engineer internship salaries are usually split into three groups. By understanding the trimodal nature of internship salaries, you can make better choices about your career path and income expectations. Most internship salaries fall into 3 categories: “most companies” pay $15-30/hour, top big tech, finance, and consulting pay $40-$70/hour, and the top trading firms and hedge funds pay $60-150/hour.