2022.09.19 - Visualizing China

Title: 2022.09.19 – Visualizing China

Memlab & Visualizing China & Cost Reduction & Efficiency Boost & Scholars & Build

This Week’s Highlights

Visualizing China http://vis.pku.edu.cn/blog/visualization4china/ http://vis.pku.edu.cn/vis4china/
“Visualizing China” is a long‑term science‑communication effort by Peking University’s Visualization and Visual Analytics Lab, refreshed and launched during the 2022 National Science Popularization Week. From ancient glory to modern brilliance, China has risen over millennia and, after a century‑long trough, is now surging forward with astonishing vigor. Society has transformed dramatically in culture, economy, technology, and environment. Words like “the sea has turned to mulberry fields” or “the world turned upside down” no longer capture the scale of this epic, enduring history. Fortunately, we can go beyond vague prose and, with the power of visualization technology, actually see the miracles already happening—or about to happen—on this vibrant land.

MemLab: An open source framework for finding JavaScript memory leaks https://engineering.fb.com/2022/09/12/open-source/memlab/ https://github.com/facebookincubator/memlab
To help our developers address this, we built MemLab, a JavaScript memory testing framework that automates leak detection and makes it easier to root‑cause memory leaks. We’ve used MemLab at Meta to successfully contain unsustainable memory increases and identify memory leaks and memory optimization opportunities across our products and infra. We’ve already open‑sourced MemLab on GitHub, and we’re excited to work with the JavaScript community and have developers start using MemLab today. Related: Introducing fuite: a tool for finding memory leaks in web apps.

Enhance: A Web Standards‑Based HTML Framework https://enhance.dev/docs/
It’s designed to provide a dependable foundation for building lightweight, flexible, and future‑proof web applications. Our mission is to enable anyone to build multi‑page dynamic web apps while staying as close to the platform as possible. Enhance fills in the gaps to make building for the backend, and the browser a seamless experience for web authors and consumers.

Scaling Git’s garbage collection https://github.blog/2022-09-13-scaling-gits-garbage-collection/
A tour of recent work to re‑engineer Git’s garbage collection process to scale to our largest and most active repositories. Related: Building the future of the command line.

What Makes a Senior Engineer? Writing Software vs Building Systems https://codewithstyle.info/software-vs-systems/
Senior Engineers care about building systems. To them, creating software is just one step. First, they question whether the software needs to be built at all. They ask what problems it would solve and why those problems matter. They consider who will use it and at what scale. They think about where it will run and how to monitor its proper operation. They also decide how to measure whether the software actually solves the intended problems. Related: Senior Engineers are Living in the Future, What is Data Engineering?.

In‑Depth Reading

A Whole Website in a Single JavaScript File, cont’d https://deno.com/blog/a-whole-website-in-a-single-js-file-continued
Back in April, we published “A Whole Website in a Single JavaScript File”. However, based on some comments, we realized we didn’t fully communicate what we felt was unique about such an exercise — its simplicity and performance without sacrificing the functionality users expect from modern sites. So this is a follow‑up blog post and a new playground demonstrating a fully capable web app with dynamic API endpoints, dynamic rendering, form functionality — all within a single JavaScript file.

React 18's New State Hook You've Never Heard About https://github.com/jherr/syncexternalstore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMeQ51MCegI
UseSyncExternalStore: https://thisweekinreact.com/articles/useSyncExternalStore-the-underrated-react-api

JavaScript APIs You Don’t Know About https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/09/javascript-api-guide/
In this article, Juan Diego covers the least known yet extremely useful APIs, such as the Page Visibility API, Web Sharing API, Broadcast Channel API and Internationalization API. Together we will see what they are, where we should use them, and how to use them.

Why the number input is the worst input https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/09/15/why-the-number-input-is-the-worst-input/
Think that web forms have got your number? If you used input type="number", you may be surprised to find that they don’t.

QR codes https://typefully.com/DanHollick/qr-codes-T7tLlNi
Ever wondered how a QR code works? No, me neither—but it’s low‑key fascinating.

35 Million Hot Dogs: Benchmarking Caddy vs. Nginx https://blog.tjll.net/reverse-proxy-hot-dog-eating-contest-caddy-vs-nginx/
This blog post benchmarks Caddy against Nginx as reverse proxies, complete with extensive graphs and tables. Be forewarned: I was very thorough—I didn’t want to make any mistakes! Nobody is allowed to make mistakes on the Internet.

Serverless Architecture Layers & DDD (Part 1) — The Experience Layer https://leejamesgilmore.medium.com/serverless-architecture-layers-ddd-part-1-the-experience-layer-fc57205153c3
Discussing the five Serverless Architecture Layers in detail, starting with the Experience Layer in Part 1.

Here’s Why Craigslist Still Looks the Same After 25+ Years https://www.pcmag.com/news/heres-why-craigslist-still-looks-the-same-after-25-plus-years
Craig Newmark’s explanation of the site’s evolution (or lack thereof) is surprisingly simple.

Fresh Finds

The Ethereum Merge Is Done, Opening a New Era for the Second‑Biggest Blockchain Adobe to acquire Figma for $20 B, 5 Figma Alternatives for UI & UX Designers

Swift 5.7 Released! WebKit Features in Safari 16.0, Introducing JetStream 2.1 MVP.css – Minimalist stylesheet for HTML elements Ladybird: A new cross‑platform browser project Lightning CSS: An extremely fast CSS parser, transformer, bundler, and minifier Best practices for creating a modern npm package

How do you find the weird parts of the web? [How to run Golang in Google Colab](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1RjCsLMz71ubGCGitVia

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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.