A study on the factors that affect the adoption of internal developer tools showed that developers do not want to change their usual style of work and might prefer tools that are easy to integrate with their usual style of work. Developers select or design tools that fit well with the usual work style of team members and that can be easily customized to their needs. The findings imply that developers are more likely to adopt tools that are used by their peers or by their community. The paper suggests utilizing developer-led blog posts or demonstrations of build automation tools at company events and public events to increase adoption.
6 pieces of career advice from Zoom's new CPO, Smita Hashim. She is a first generation immigrant and a working mother, and she gives advice on how to balance work and family life and what to focus on during your career.
Tips for scaling engineering teams and codebases. For example, leaving optionality open while building on a codebase is immeasurable but a huge win for engineering as the codebase grows. This means that costly coding decisions are ideally reduced, especially if they need to be reversed.
Generating income from open-source is next to impossible. However, there are a few things that have been found to work to generate open-source income, such as offering commercial licenses for companies, charging for more features, and offering a hosted version if it’s an open-source SaaS project.
Distributed systems send data over the network using various network protocols. This article explains how common network protocols work, where they are used in distributed systems, and how to troubleshoot common problems.
Application monitoring is the process of collecting data to track availability, bugs, resource use, and changes to performance in applications that affect the end user. Understanding the performance of applications in real-time is critical for ensuring positive experiences for users. In this article, Expedia explains how they observe, monitor and improve the operational performance of their applications through application monitoring tools.
Cloudflare has developed a new feature to safeguard GraphQL APIs from harmful queries that could lead to a denial of service. The protection mechanism involves the use of a custom-built GraphQL query parser, which provides detailed insights into requests and enables the application of various security settings. This approach effectively manages the unique challenges posed by the single endpoint and highly flexible query structure of GraphQL APIs.
Becoming a senior developer and a better engineer often comes through not just experience, but also through evolving the way you think about and approach problems. This article lays out 9 non-technical mental models that help you think like a senior developer.
The blog post presents a theory that Reddit's recent API changes are driven by the interests of OpenAI, given the significant stake and influence that OpenAI stakeholders have in Reddit. The author suggests that Reddit's data is extremely valuable as training data for AI models, and by restricting access to this data, OpenAI can create a competitive advantage or moat. The post also speculates that Reddit's future actions might include buying out more third-party clients or extending the deadline for API changes.
Overcoming burnout is tough. It decreases productivity and affects your mental health negatively. However, there are ways to come back from burnout and put measures into place to make sure you don’t burn out again. For example, taking regular breaks, having regular self-check-ins, and following a well thought out plan are measures that can help you tackle burnout as a developer.
The Vercel AI SDK is an open-source library designed to help developers build conversational, streaming, and chat user interfaces in JavaScript and TypeScript. The SDK supports React/Next.js, Svelte/SvelteKit, with support for Nuxt/Vue coming soon. It features first-class support for LangChain and OpenAI, Anthropic, and HuggingFace, Edge Runtime compatibility, and callbacks for saving completed streaming responses to a database (in the same request).
OpenObserve is a cloud-native observability platform built specifically for logs, metrics, traces and analytics designed to work at petabyte scale. It’s easy to get up and running in less than 2 minutes.
GitHub surveyed 500 developers in the US to get a sense of how they use AI coding tools. Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer examines the results and adds context on how the survey was conducted. 92% of developers in the survey said they use AI coding tools at work. The top 3 areas where AI coding tools helped the most were in learning, productivity, and focus.
2023.06.16·
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com·3 min read·TLDR Web Dev
Apple’s Vision Pro isn’t an iPhone moment, or at least, not exactly. Rather, the Vision Pro actually looks a bit more like the original Macintosh, which was over $7,000 (adjusted for inflation) when it launched in 1984 and most people didn’t know why they needed one. Apple has decided that the capabilities of the Vision Pro are the minimum viable product - that it just isn’t worth making or selling a device without a screen so good you can’t see the pixels, pass-through where you can’t see any lag, perfect eye-tracking, and perfect hand-tracking. However, this still doesn’t guarantee success. This analysis breaks down Apple’s approach to the Vision Pro, how it compares to Meta’s approach to VR, and how long it might take for this battle to play out.
Reddit is facing backlash from its community due to changes aimed at increasing profitability, including a "premium access" pricing for API users, which threatens third-party applications. In response, thousands of moderators have blacked out over 8,000 subreddits in solidarity with developers.
AI Chrome Extensions can help you to tap into the extraordinary powers of AI to streamline your coding journey. This article features ten extensions that can help you leverage AI in your day to day work.
Since alerting subscribers in the United States that it would begin to curb password sharing on May 23, 2023, Netflix has had the four single largest days of U.S. user acquisition in the four and a half years that Antenna has been measuring the streaming service. Based on the most current data available, Netflix saw nearly 100,000 daily sign-ups on both May 26 and May 27.
The new GPT API features function calling, making it easier to connect with external tools and APIs. It can output JSON instead of just strings when making function calls. Function calling basically gives developers lower-level access to the large language model, making developing on top of the GPT API easier. This article goes through an example of using the API properly and the implications of this new feature.
Netflix migrated their mobile apps to GraphQL in 2022. This was done with zero downtime and involved a total overhaul from the client to the API layer. Doing this safely for 100s of millions of customers without disruption was exceptionally challenging, especially considering the many dimensions of change involved. This blog post shares the broadly-applicable techniques (beyond GraphQL) Netflix used to perform this migration. The three strategies discussed are AB Testing, Replay Testing, and Sticky Canaries. Netflix first created a new GraphQL service over the previous legacy monolith API endpoints. It then deprecated both the service and legacy API in favor of GraphQL services owned by the domain teams.
Using HTTP to query for a search works, but it's not the most optimal UX if your query takes a long time. Users have to wait for the entire search to complete, which can take up to 30 seconds for sparse queries that are not requested often. A better UX would be to stream responses as you query, which can be accomplished with Server-sent events (SSE). This article explains how SSE works, how it differs from traditional web sockets, and how you can integrate it in Express.js.
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind, so you’ll be inclined to do more. Google famously prioritized speed as a feature. They realized that if search is fast, you’re more likely to search. The reason is that it encourages you to try stuff, get feedback, and try again. Working fast ends up implicitly lowering the activation energy to do new tasks, which means you get more done and try more things.
This retrospective post covers things one developer learned while working on large TypeScript and React codebases. It recommends best practices to replicate and pitfalls to avoid.
Reactivity is an important feature of front end frameworks. There are a number of ways to provide this functionality. This post summarizes the three ways frameworks today provide reactivity: value-based (think states in React), observables-based (through subscriptions), and signal-based (which is close to observables-based, but without the need to subscribe/unsubscribe). It discusses the pros and cons of each reactivity model and a hot take on why signals are the best model out of the three.
Zap is a zig framework to create REST APIs quickly. It can be considered to be a microframework for web applications, similar to Flask for Python. Zap comes with multiple features, such as routes, endpoints, cookie support, middleware, and more.
Rewind-UI is a React component library for building modern web applications using Tailwind CSS. It offers a range of accessible, highly customizable components that can be easily integrated into any React project. Rewind-UI comes with a set of default styles that can be easily customized using Tailwind CSS classes. Furthermore, each component can be parameterized using a set of props that can be used to change the default styles of the component.
Most people dream of building great projects, but many never start. Of the few that start, even fewer finish. This guide breaks down how to plan successfully and overcome roadblocks to become one of the few that finishes the projects they start. Finishing requires effort and courage.
Promising stories like that of Theranos and FTX have ended with the discovery of fraud. But how were investors and so many others fooled by the founders of these companies? Each company had warning signs that were similar and when these warning signs came up, they deserved much more scrutiny than they actually got. For example, if it seems like only one person can get this company to work and/or if a lot of important data is missing or kept secret, then it might be a sign to take a closer look at the company.
As the demand for software applications continues to grow, the pressure on developers to deliver high-quality solutions in a timely manner has increased exponentially. No-code and low-code development tools have become popular to address this challenge. This article explores the world of low-code and zero-code development tools, the benefits, key features, use cases, challenges, and the future of this emerging field.
Coding interviews continue to get harder as more software engineers join the industry. Recognizing patterns in problem statements can help make interviews easier to both approach and solve. This article lays out 20 coding interview patterns that a developer should know if they are interviewing for a new job.
React is just one of many choices for frontend development. This blog will discuss frontend frameworks other than React that are popular and a good fit for web application development.
Vitest is a powerful unit testing framework primarily used for JavaScript and TypeScript. This post explores how to use Vitest and React Testing Library to help unit test React hooks in a way that makes them easy to maintain and extend.
Million is an extremely fast and lightweight (<4kb) virtual DOM that makes React components up to 70% faster. It makes creating web apps with fast rendering and loading speeds easy (it's just wrapping a React component). Million.js reduces the overhead of React immensely by using a fine-tuned, optimized virtual DOM.
OpenAI has released new updates to the gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4 APIs. These updates introduce function calling capabilities, a new way to more reliably connect GPT's capabilities with external tools and APIs. The updates also include a 75% cost reduction of embeddings and a 25% cost reduction on input tokens for gpt-3.5-turbo. gpt-3.5-turbo now has a 16k context version.
Resend is a modern email sending platform focused on providing the best developer experience. With Resend, you can code your email using React instead of outdated HTML table layouts. It also provides higher performance and better observability compared to competing platforms.
Microsoft invested billions to get early access to the generative artificial intelligence technology of a much smaller OpenAI. The partnership is considered a smart move on Microsoft’s part. However, the relationship has produced conflict and confusion behind the scenes. For example, people within Microsoft have complained about diminished spending on its in-house AI and that OpenAI doesn’t allow most Microsoft employees access to the inner workings of its technology. Also, Microsoft and OpenAI sales teams sometimes pitch to the same customers. Despite these issues, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood has called it a “great partnership” where both sides benefit.