2022.05.16 - Google IO 2022

Title: 2022.05.16 – Google I/O 2022

This Week’s Highlights

Google I/O 2022   100 things we announced at I/O   Google I/O 2022 keynote in 18 minutes   Google I/O 2022: That’s a wrap!   Helping you build across devices, platforms, and the world   Flutter 3 release   Advanced Web Apps Fund   Google I/O 2022: Advancing knowledge and computing   2022 Google I/O is here – we’ve picked 10 highlights for you

An RFC for useEvent, a New Fundamental React Hook   https://github.com/reactjs/rfcs/blob/useevent/text/0000-useevent.md   https://typeofnan.dev/what-the-useevent-react-hook-is-and-isnt/   A hook that lets you define an event handler with a permanently stable function identity.

Computational notebooks research at CHI 2022   https://austinhenley.com/blog/notebooksatchi2022.html   Last week I attended the ACM CHI 2022 conference in New Orleans, the premier research venue for human‑computer interaction. My goal was to see as many talks as possible on data science and human‑AI collaboration. Below are my notes on a handful of the computational‑notebook presentations, including my summary and links to the talk video, a short preview, and the paper for each.

Language packs: Meta’s mobile localization solution   https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/09/android/language-packs/   Language packs let us deliver a high‑quality, locally‑adapted user experience worldwide. With this infrastructure, engineers can create and ship gender‑aware translations in a simple, intuitive way. It’s already used in Facebook and Workplace, and we’re exploring integration into other Meta apps. Thanks to language packs, we reduced the iOS Facebook IPA size by 16.6 MB, keeping the app fast and responsive for users.

MVC frameworks aren’t dinosaurs but sharks   https://www.david-dahan.com/blog/10-reasons-mvc-frameworks-arent-dinosaurs-but-sharks   I think there’s a serious “shark” in the web sea: the monolithic MVC framework. Rails (Ruby), Django (Python), Laravel (PHP) and many others have been around for a long time; even if they’re a bit “boring,” they still get the job done very well. Of course, they’re not the right fit for every use case. Like any technology, there are trade‑offs. I’d like to explain, from a personal perspective, why this tech shouldn’t be discarded just because it’s older. If you agree with many of the points below, an MVC framework could very well be the right tool for your project in 2022. Related: Bud – The Full‑stack Go Framework for Prolific Web Developers, Why We Depend on Rails for Many Projects.

Chaos engineering helps DevOps cope with complexity   https://github.com/readme/featured/chaos-engineering   HOW OPEN‑SOURCE IS SPREADING CHAOS THINKING.

In‑Depth Reading

Building a Musical Instrument with the Web Audio API   https://www.taniarascia.com/musical-instrument-web-audio-api/   I hope you enjoyed my write‑up of the Keyboard Accordion app! The full source is on GitHub. There are a few minor bugs—for example, using keyboard shortcuts while holding other keys can cause a note to hang indefinitely. I’m sure you’ll find and fix more as you explore.

Divs are bad!   https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2022/divs-are-bad/   The problem with <div>s isn’t their sheer number—although a huge DOM can hurt performance and make the document harder to read and debug. The real issue is placement. A <div> in the wrong spot can cause serious negative side effects.

How to Use Google CrUX to Analyze and Compare the Performance of JS Frameworks   https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/05/google-crux-analysis-comparison-performance-javascript-frameworks/   Google gathers performance data from millions of opt‑in Chrome browsers worldwide and uses it as a ranking factor for search. It also makes the data publicly available so anyone can check real‑world performance of individual sites. Moreover, the data can be segmented by the technologies a site uses. In this article, Dan Shappir leverages that data to analyze and compare the performance of leading JavaScript frameworks, uncovering surprising behaviors and solving a web‑performance mystery along the way.

Present and Future of the Microservice Architecture   https://www.infoq.com/presentations/present-future-microservices-architecture/   The panelists discuss a range of microservices topics. Related: Wave: a Case Study for Low Architectural Complexity.

I’m All‑In on Server‑Side SQLite   https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/   I’m Ben Johnson. I wrote BoltDB, an embedded database that powers systems like etcd. Now I’m at Fly.io, working on Litestream. Litestream is an open‑source project that makes SQLite viable for full‑stack applications through the magic of ✨replication✨. If you can set up a SQLite database, you can have Litestream running in under ten minutes.

A Generalist Agent   https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent   Inspired by progress in large‑scale language modeling, we apply a similar approach to building a single generalist agent that goes beyond text output. The agent—named Gato—acts as a multimodal, multitask, multi‑embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm, and more, deciding from context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens. This report describes the model, the data, and documents Gato’s current capabilities.

Goodbye Facebook. Hello Decentralized Social Media?   http://blog.archive.org/2022/05/13/goodbye-facebook-hello-decentralized-social-media/   The pending sale of Twitter to Elon Musk sparked a buzz about the future of social media and who should control our data. Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships at the Internet Archive, moderated an online discussion on April 28 titled “Goodbye Facebook, Hello Decentralized Social Media?” covering the opportunities and risks ahead. The webinar is part of a six‑workshop series,

(content truncated)

---

Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.