2022.06.27 - The Grug Brained Developer

Title: 2022.06.27 – The Grug‑Brained Developer

This Week’s Highlights

The Grug‑Brained Developer https://grugbrain.dev/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31840331 https://www.yuque.com/tianzhou/bb/grug-developer
A layperson’s guide to thinking like the self‑aware “smol brain.”

What Would a Chromium‑Only Web Look Like https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/22/chromium-only
My ears perked up when a well‑placed contact told me that “many in the Chromium community are arguing for a Chromium‑only Web.” While the Chrome team (and friends) have long railed against what they see as other browsers’ sluggish implementation of cutting‑edge web extensions, advocating a Web that runs on a single engine is a huge leap. Related: GitHub – How we think about browsers, Where is Copilot Taking Us?.

Why I Like Hexagonal Architecture https://alexkondov.com/why-i-favor-hexagonal-architecture/
I haven’t written much clean code in the past nine years. I’ve built features and whole products on my own. Yet when I look at my code I don’t get the satisfaction an artist feels when admiring their work. I wasn’t writing the clean code you read about in books. I didn’t use design patterns. I didn’t think about architecture, structure, or readability. My only concern was whether it produced the desired output on the client’s screen. In hindsight, that was a normal consequence of the environment I was working in.

GitHub Copilot Is Generally Available to All Developers https://github.blog/2022-06-21-github-copilot-is-generally-available-to-all-developers/
We’re making GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor, generally available to all developers for $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year. It will also be free for verified students and maintainers of popular open‑source projects. Related: Copilot sells code other people wrote, GitHub Copilot and open source laundering, Thank you to our maintainers.

Companies Using RFCs or Design Docs and Examples of These https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/rfcs-and-design-docs/
This article collects openly available RFC templates and examples, plus a list of companies that use such a process. I encourage you to use these examples for inspiration—take the parts that resonate, experiment, and adapt them to your needs.

Why Products Should Be “Slick,” Not Just Viable https://herman.bearblog.dev/mvp-vs-slc/
I hate the term MVP. Over the past decade it’s been overused and misunderstood to the point where anything labeled an MVP is automatically assumed to be pretty terrible. Most MVPs are unfortunately too “M” to be a “V,” and the “ship it while you’re embarrassed by it” culture leads to products that give users an embarrassingly bad experience. The problem is that your users hate MVPs. Related: Products and People.

Deep Reads

Airbnb’s Trip to Linaria https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/airbnbs-trip-to-linaria-dc169230bd12
Learn how Linaria — Airbnb’s newest choice for web styling — improved both developer experience and web performance.

How We Built Hydrogen: A React Framework for Building Custom Storefronts https://shopify.engineering/how-we-built-hydrogen
We’ve been building Hydrogen, a React framework for custom storefronts on Shopify, for more than a year. We invested in cutting‑edge tech like React Server Components to make building on the Shopify platform a terrific experience for developers. Here’s a behind‑the‑scenes look at how we did it, what we learned from big bets, and what it was like to build a new framework from the ground up on experimental technology.

Svelte Origins: A JavaScript Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMlkCYL9qo0
Svelte Origins: The Documentary tells the story of how Svelte came to be, what makes it different, and how it changes the game as a JavaScript framework. Filmed across Europe and the US, it features Svelte creator Rich Harris and core community members who helped shape Svelte into what it is today.

Notes on WebAssembly http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2022/06/wasm-notes.html
One of the things that attracted me to work at Figma was the chance to learn about and work with WebAssembly. It turns out Figma is a pretty good environment for this. Figma blends “native to the web” — much of the app is written in the ordinary React/TypeScript stack — with a surprising amount of low‑level C++ code. Documents edited in your browser are rendered using GPU shaders managed by a C++ scene graph, which you’d probably only notice when you think about how smooth zooming feels! This post goes into it a bit. Related: The State of WebAssembly 2022.

Reflecting on Software Development: Survival Strategies https://ourai.ws/posts/survival-in-software-team/
Many articles discuss front‑end engineers’ career growth from a positive, uplifting angle—society tends to promote “comfort” and “happiness,” letting people forget the crises around them. This piece tries to look at the opposite, exploring the problems, dilemmas, and contradictions front‑end engineers may face in their careers, aiming to awaken a sense of urgency. I don’t provide a “survival strategy” as the title suggests; instead I point out the “survival problems” and hope readers will seek strategies that suit them.

Software Methods – Competitive Advantage Through Modeling http://www.umlchina.com/book/softmeth.html https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/vC5s365f2sAdjNIKeROQ8Q
In the early reform era, many farmer‑entrepreneurs in China succeeded without formal management or methods—just boldness—because the market was almost empty and competition minimal. Their logic was simple: everyone needs to eat, so opening a restaurant makes money. That mindset no longer works; competition is fierce, and perhaps only one out of ten new restaurants survives. The software industry follows a similar pattern. Early on, knowing how to code was enough; the idea was simple: every company needs finance software, so building it was profitable. Today, a “idea” may be thought of by thousands simultaneously; a system you want to build may already have many equivalents. If you price high, someone will undercut you; if you price low, someone may give it away for free. The era of opportunity‑driven, coarse‑grained operations is gone. To gain an edge in fierce competition, software organizations must improve skills at the detail level. This book focuses on two skill areas: requirements and design.

Why We Need a Flowchart Editor That Doesn’t Give You Carpal Tunnel https://www.scottantipa.com/why-knotend
This post explains why I’m building knotend, a flowchart editor designed for speed, and why we need to move away from mouse‑centric flowchart tools. Related: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines.

Unlocking the Metaverse: New Opportunities in Games Infrastructure https://future.com/metaverse-infrastructure-technology-games/
Why game creators? No other industry has as much experience building massive online worlds where hundreds of thousands (and sometimes tens of millions) of participants interact simultaneously. Modern games are about far more than “play”—they involve “trade,” “craft,” “stream,” or “buy.” The metaverse adds even more verbs—think “work” or “love”—to that list. And just as microservices and cloud… (content truncated)

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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.