2022.07.25 - DALL·E Now Available in Beta

Title: 2022.07.25 – DALL·E Now Available in Beta

This Week’s Highlights

DALL·E Now Available in Beta  https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-now-available-in-beta/
DALL·E, the AI system that creates realistic images and art from a natural‑language description, is now available in beta. We’ll invite 1 million people from our waitlist over the coming weeks. Users can create with DALL·E using free credits that refill each month, and buy additional credits in 115‑generation increments for $15. Related: Building text animations for Instagram Stories.

In And Out Of Style  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdZZcbZG83o  https://www.dropbox.com/s/bfgtlzv90jxjz00/inandoutofstyle.pdf?dl=0
It’s an exciting time for CSS! New features seem to appear every day, yet CSS remains an accessible language for anyone building websites. Is this an inevitable part of CSS’s design, or did CSS evolve by chance? Let’s look at the history—and some alternative histories—of the World Wide Web to better understand where we are today, and then cast our gaze to the future!

Reading Source Code: React  https://alexkondov.com/readint-source-code-react/
Before you continue, I should note that this is not meant to be an exhaustive deep‑dive into how React works under the hood. In fact, some of my assumptions will probably be wrong. I’ll focus on the design of the codebase instead, examining the practices and patterns the React core team has applied to software used by countless engineers. Hopefully we can draw inspiration from their decisions.

Comparing the Effort of Developing Enterprise Applications with Programming and with Domain‑Specific Modeling  https://modeling-languages.com/comparing-the-effort-of-developing-enterprise-applications-with-programming-and-with-domain-specific-modeling/
The comparison shows over 500 % productivity for domain‑specific modeling versus manual programming: a week’s workload could be reduced to less than one working day. This mirrors results reported by other companies across various domains, indicating the same benefits apply to web‑based enterprise applications.

Tips & Tricks for Using GitHub Projects for Personal Productivity  https://github.blog/2022-07-21-tips-tricks-for-using-github-projects-for-personal-productivity/
GitHub Issues is a core part of how developers get things done, and as we added more project‑planning capabilities to GitHub, we discovered fun and unique ways to use the new Projects experience for personal productivity. Related: How to develop workflows that inspire your team and boost productivity.

In‑Depth Reading

Rethinking Device Emulation in Browsers  https://christianheilmann.com/2022/07/20/rethinking-device-emulation-in-browsers/
Device emulation in developer tools is great, but it doesn’t serve all users well and could be much better.

Fresh: Blazingly Fast React  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dos7-gX68
Learn how to build super‑fast pages using the React skills you already have, by building your application with the Fresh framework and the Islands architecture.

JavaScript SDK “Package Size Is Massive” – So We Reduced It by 29 %  https://blog.sentry.io/2022/07/19/javascript-sdk-package-reduced
Developers started noticing how big our JavaScript package was, and yes, we were aware. We weren’t ignoring the issue—we don’t want the Sentry package to cause slowdowns. To shrink the SDK effectively we had to balance new capabilities (like release health management and performance monitoring) with a manageable bundle size. After all, new features usually mean a bigger package.

The Many Faces of Themeable Design Systems  https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/the-many-faces-of-themeable-design-systems/
What exactly do we mean when we talk about a themeable design system? This post explores the different flavors of themeability a design system may need to accommodate.

An Introduction to Multithreading in Node.js  https://blog.appsignal.com/2022/07/20/an-introduction-to-multithreading-in-nodejs.html
We’ll explain what multithreading is and how Node.js handles asynchronous operations using the event loop and worker pools, then show how to use the worker_threads module to create and manage threads.

These WebAssembly Veterans Failed at a Startup: Sometimes Migrating from JS to Wasm Isn’t Worth It  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/h3cFSau5cof1j_ndqTMaQw  https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html
The Zaplib team spent a year from coding to exploring real‑world use cases. After the venture failed, they published an excellent post‑mortem explaining why “migrating from JavaScript to WebAssembly is sometimes not worthwhile.”

2022: A Decade Review of Front‑End Toolchains  https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/462985064
Alibaba Mama’s Front‑End “Fast‑Exploding” project started in 2017 and has been updated through 2022. Over the past five years we’ve chronicled industry changes, gradually splitting into a news section (objective info), a专题 (knowledge aggregation) section, and a toolbox (fragmented sharing). For the 2021 year‑in‑review we chose a special format, extending the time span to ten years, cataloguing the release and version‑update history of 12 important packages in the front‑end toolchain, and, using npm download data, examining how the toolchain has evolved over the decade.

CSS font-palette and Color Font Rendering  https://www.zhangxinxu.com/wordpress/2022/07/css-font-palette/
“Color fonts” are fonts that contain built‑in colored glyphs, such as Adobe’s Gilbert font. Browsers have supported color fonts for a long time; if the font uses the COLR/CPAL (v0) standard, browsers—including IE 9 (requires Windows 8.1+)—can render them.

Engineering Efficiency CI/CD: Building a Pipeline Engine  https://tech.meituan.com/2022/07/14/cicd-pipeline.html
After roughly three years of development, the pipeline engine unified server‑side infrastructure for almost all Meituan businesses (in‑store, delivery, Dianping, Meituan Select, platform, autonomous delivery vehicles, core R&D platform, etc.), supporting Java, C++, Node.js, Go, and more. In performance and stability, the engine handles nearly 100 k pipeline executions per day (peaking at over 10 k job schedules per hour), with a system success rate above 99.99 % (excluding failures due to business code or third‑party tools). Below we outline the challenges we faced building the custom engine and the solutions we implemented.

Design Patterns for Asynchronous API Communication  https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/07/21/event-driven-topic-design-using-kafka/
An event‑driven architecture can reduce dependencies, increase safety, and make your application easy to scale. But designing your systems and topics is a non‑trivial task.

Soft Deletion Probably Isn’t Worth It  https://brandur.org/soft-deletion
Soft deletion aims to make removal safer and reversible. Once a record is hard‑deleted, it may technically be recoverable by digging into the storage layer, but in practice it’s extremely hard to get back. The technique also has major downsides.

Fresh Finds

MongoDB 6.0 Now Available!  Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 Is a W3C Recommendation  [Front‑end frameworks popularity (React, …) (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.