2022.08.15 - The Origin, Positioning, and Worldview of Yuque

Title: 2022.08.15 – The Origin, Positioning, and Worldview of Yuque

This Week’s Highlights

The Origin, Positioning, and Worldview of Yuque https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/xd7uAsivYE1PJRfKKfeTBw
In this episode we focus on the product Yuque, with guests Yu Bo, the overall head of Yuque, and Jing Tong, the product lead. Yuque is an Ant Group product that aims to be the next‑generation document and knowledge‑base platform. I talked with the two decision‑makers about why Yuque was created, its product positioning, and its worldview. The discussion centered on the gossip and probing questions about Yuque’s internal and external relationships.

It’s important to note that Yuque’s external challenges go beyond competing with other document‑oriented or collaboration tools. Within the Alibaba ecosystem, its relationship with DingTalk is a key question: despite DingTalk receiving larger group investment, Yuque was launched as a technical middle‑platform project rather than by a business team—why hasn’t DingTalk absorbed Yuque? Likewise, what is Yuque’s relationship with Ant Group and Alipay? Why does a document/knowledge‑base product receive continuous funding from Ant, whose core business is payments and wealth‑management tools? Yuque claims to “provide excellent document and knowledge‑base tools for every person and every team.” So is it B2B or B2C? How does it view the “ceiling” and usage‑frequency issues of document products? These are soul‑searching questions. Fortunately, Yu Bo and Jing Tong were very candid and didn’t dodge any of them, making for an in‑depth conversation. I recommend product folks, researchers, and anyone interested in internal entrepreneurship at large tech firms to check out this dialogue.

The Confusion and Hope Around Cloud IDEs https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/AJTGkBqbKAOIAcH0slsrDg
What’s the next big era for software engineering? AI‑generated code? Copilot is successful but still only an assistant. AI‑written code is like fully autonomous driving—I remain skeptical. I believe the next step is cloud‑based development, i.e., Cloud Development. We definitely need a Cloud IDE, but today’s Cloud IDE suffers from the same “feature‑bloat” problem as PDA‑style tools, mixing too many traits of current desktop IDEs. I’m convinced that future cloud IDEs will look nothing like today’s. After Microsoft bought GitHub, its major cloud‑related move was Codespaces. Is Codespaces a Cloud IDE? Despite GitHub’s massive user base, Codespaces usage is modest, and it can also attach to the desktop VS Code, meaning the web‑based IDE isn’t the core. One point: as long as humans write code, we need editors. Current editor tech (Monaco, ACE, CodeMirror) is all built by overseas teams; we searched domestically last year and found no Chinese editor projects.

Additional reads: Will low‑ and no‑code tools ever truly disrupt tech development? (https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/08/10/will-low-and-no-code-tools-ever-truly-disrupt-tech-development/) • Add a slash, become an indie developer | 706 No‑Code Cohort Recruitment (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/bPu9XPL85aZpz0PvsOYmug).

On‑Call Compensation for Software Engineers https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/oncall-compensation/
In this issue we dive into:

• On‑call philosophies across the industry. How do groups of companies approach on‑call practices and compensation?
• Companies that pay and those that don’t. An overview of more than 120 firms and their approach to paying, versus others which do not.
• How much do companies pay? Data points from 80 employers, the largest data set of this kind published to date.
• Companies that don’t pay. How do they approach on‑call?
• Poor on‑call cultures. What are examples of places where on‑call can be a reason for churn?

AFFiNE.PRO – The Next‑Gen Knowledge Base to Replace Notion & Miro https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/552965032
Planning, sorting, and creating—all together. Open‑source, privacy‑first, and free to use. There can be more than Notion and Miro. AFFiNE is a next‑gen knowledge base that brings planning, sorting, and creating together. Privacy‑first, open‑source, customizable, and ready to use.

Patterns.dev – Modern Web App Design Patterns https://www.patterns.dev/
Improve how you architect web apps. Patterns.dev is a free book on design patterns and component patterns for building powerful web apps with vanilla JavaScript and React.

Don’t Call It a Comeback: Why Java Is Still Champ https://github.com/readme/featured/java-programming-language
Far from dead, the perpetually popular language is up to speed and ready for the future.

Deep Reads

The State of End‑to‑End Testing with Angular https://blog.angular.io/the-state-of-end-to-end-testing-with-angular-d175f751cb9c
In the Angular v12 release blog post we announced plans to investigate the future of Protractor. Based on community feedback via the RFC process, we’ve decided to deprecate Protractor, while working with the community to find a long‑term support option for active projects that wish to continue using Protractor.

How to Build Great Products and Companies – Build Book Notes https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/549795452 https://github.com/zijie0/HumanSystemOptimization
I recently read Tony Fadell’s 2022 book Build and was blown away. Tony is a legend who led the creation of the iPod and iPhone, then co‑founded Nest, sparking the smart‑home market. In Build, he starts with personal career development, then moves to building exceptional products, outstanding teams and organizations, founding a world‑class company, and the mindset of a CEO. After finishing, I even switched my phone to an iPhone to salute great products and companies! The book is dense with stories; different readers or readers at different career stages will get varied insights. I’ll be revisiting it repeatedly. Below are some quick notes to share and discuss. Also see: Learnings of a CEO: Wade Foster, Zapier (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/learnings-of-a-ceo-wade-foster-zapier/).

Not All Zeros Are Equal https://www.oddbird.net/2022/08/04/zero-units/
And every “best practice” comes with caveats.

How and Why We Removed jQuery from GOV.UK https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/11/how-and-why-we-removed-jquery-from-gov-uk/
For a long time our frontend code on www.gov.uk – the publishing domain for GOV.UK – depended on an outdated version of jQuery, a library designed to make writing JavaScript easier. Here’s how and why we decided to remove jQuery, and what the results have been.

Redesigning ESLint https://eslint.org/blog/2022/08/redesigning-eslint/
A brief insight into ESLint’s recent brand refresh and website redesign.

What Is Component‑Driven Prototyping? https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/what-is-component-driven-prototyping/
Component‑driven prototyping is the next iteration of user‑experience design. Designers no longer start from scratch, and engineers write less code. The result? Better cross‑functional collaboration, faster time‑to‑market, superior consistency, fewer errors, better testing, meaningful stakeholder feedback, and smoother design handoffs.

How We Made the Vercel Dashboard Twice as Fast https://vercel.com/blog/how-we-made-the-vercel-dashboard-twice-as-fast
We were able to confirm that our improvements had a real impact on our users over time using Vercel Analytics, noting that our Vercel Analytics scores went from 90 to 95 on average (desktop). Let’s review the techniques and strategies we used so you can make a data‑driven impact on your application.

How to Use Multithreading in Node.js https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-multithreading-in-node-js
In this tutorial you’ll create a Node.js app with a CPU‑intensive task that blocks the main thread. Next, you will use the worker‑threads module to offload the CPU‑intensive task to another thread to avoid blocking the main thread. Finally, you will split the CPU‑bound work across four threads to run in parallel and speed up the task.

How Instagram Suggests New Content https://engineering.fb.com/2022/08/12/web/how-instagram-suggests-new-content/
In August 2020 we launched Suggested Posts in Instagram to achieve this objective, which currently appear at the end of your feed. Here’s how we designed this marriage of familiarity and exploration.

Recreating “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” for the Web https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2022/08/09/recreating-the-effects-of-nuclear-weapons-for-the-web/
In my previous post I wrote about a way to center elements based on their content, without forcing the element to be a specific width, while preserving the interior text alignment. In this post I’d like to talk about why I developed that technique.

Why the Future of Serverless Databases Is Distributed Document‑Relational [https://www.youtube.com/wa…]
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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.