2022.10.03 - Don't worry, Nobody is Replacing Node, not Even Bun and Even less Deno

Title: 2022.10.03 – Don’t Worry, Nobody Is Replacing Node, Not Even Bun, Let Alone Deno

Frameworks & Developers as an audience & The Evolution of HTTP APIs & CTOs Should Actually Be Technical

This Week’s Highlights

Don’t worry, Nobody Is Replacing Node, Not Even Bun, Let Alone Deno
https://blog.bitsrc.io/dont-worry-nobody-is-replacing-node-js-not-even-bun-and-even-less-deno-4e7148cff78
Let’s face it once and for all: Node is here to stay for a long time.

We Don't Need Faster Frameworks, We Need Better Tooling
https://alexkondov.com/we-need-better-tooling/
New projects are emerging in numbers comparable to those during the notorious JavaScript fatigue era. SWC and esbuild are trying to replace Webpack, while Bun and Deno are racing to fix Node’s shortcomings. But that won’t be enough until we get a tool like Vite or Rome that encompasses the whole toolchain and hides it behind a simple API. Much like we needed an abstraction over the DOM to work productively, we also need an abstraction over our tools. Related: The new wave of JavaScript web frameworks.

Developers as an Audience Is a Hard Sell – Part One “Developers Are Influencers”
https://christianheilmann.com/2022/09/26/developers-as-an-audience-is-a-hard-sell-part-one-developers-are-influencers/
When I wrote the developer advocacy handbook and announced my new role as “Developer Evangelist” to my company, one of the main points I made was how developers are an incredibly important audience for any company to covet. Not only do they build your products, they also influence other people.

The Hundred‑Year Programming Language
http://codefol.io/posts/the-hundred-year-programming-language/
A certain kind of software developer—or more often, businessperson—likes to talk about a “hundred‑year programming language,” or even a “hundred‑year framework.”

The Turbulent Twenty Years: The Evolution of HTTP APIs
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/9TAYgS74yVdNmjduRycy4A
Over the past two decades, APIs have moved from chaos to order, from free‑form experimentation to strict protocol adherence, and from unrestricted design to rigorous type safety. Each evolution has made the entire API lifecycle—creation, deployment, retirement—more mature, while the difficulty of writing APIs and the required skill set have steadily declined and automation has increased. However, just as the highest level in Jin Yong’s wuxia novels is “no technique surpasses technique,” no matter how concise the API code is, as long as code exists there will be endless costs. Therefore, the best API system is one that provides services without writing a single line of code.

Deep Dives

Optimize Long Tasks
https://web.dev/optimize-long-tasks/
You've been told to “don’t block the main thread” and “break up your long tasks,” but what does that actually mean?

Get in Zoomer, We’re Saving React
https://acko.net/blog/get-in-zoomer-we-re-saving-react/
Lately it seems popular to trash React. Both the orange and red sites recently spilled the tea about how mean “Uncle React” has been, and how much nicer some of these next‑gen frameworks supposedly are.

How to Create Wavy Shapes & Patterns in CSS
https://css-tricks.com/how-to-create-wavy-shapes-patterns-in-css/
The wave is probably one of the most difficult shapes to make in CSS. We usually approximate it with properties like border-radius and a lot of magic numbers until we get something that feels kind of right. And that’s before we even get into wavy patterns, which are even trickier.

100 Days of More‑or‑Less Modern CSS
https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2022/100-days-of-more-or-less-modern-css/
It’s time to get up to speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why “more‑or‑less” modern CSS? Because some topics cover cutting‑edge features, while others have been around for a while but I still have little to no experience with them.

node_modules: How One Character Saved 50 GB of Disk Space
https://mainmatter.com/blog/2022/09/29/pnpm/
Have you ever worked with JavaScript? Been annoyed by the three‑hundred copies of left-pad scattered across all your node_modules folders? Would you prefer all your projects to share a single node_modules folder instead of each having its own copy? If you answered “Hell, yeah!” then this post is for you.

From Development to Real Users: How to Create a Web Performance Story
https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/09/from-development-to-real-users-how-to-create-a-web-performance-story/
Common questions when dealing with performance include: How do you convince stakeholders that improving performance is worth the investment? How can you prove the work is necessary in the first place? How do you demonstrate that you’ve shipped improvements? And what is the impact of certain changes on users in different scenarios?

Regulate Web3 Apps, Not Protocols
https://a16zcrypto.com/web3-regulation-apps-not-protocols/
The first generation of the web gave us incredible tools—networking, data‑exchange, email, and file‑transfer protocols—that made moving information at internet speed possible. Web3 makes the transfer of value occur at that speed, with lending and asset exchange already available as native functions of this new internet. This is an incredible public good that must be protected. As Web3 expands from decentralized finance (“DeFi”) to video games, social media, creator economies, and gig economies, regulation that creates a level playing field across these sectors will become even more critical. Weighing all the factors, the right approach becomes clear: apps should be regulated, not protocols.

Why Modern Software Is Slow – Windows Voice Recorder
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-software-is-slow-windows-voice-recorder/
I apologize for this title because many things can make modern software slow. Blindly applying a single explanation without investigation is the software equivalent of a cargo cult. That said, this post describes one example of why modern software can be painfully slow.

How We Reduced Our Annual Server Costs by 80 % — From $1 M to $200 k — by Moving Away from AWS
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-we-reduced-our-annual-server-costs-by-80-from-1m-to-200k-by-moving-away-from-aws-2b98cbd21b46
An interview with Zsolt Varga, the tech lead and general manager at Prerender.

Prompt Engineering Is Hard
https://xeiaso.net/blog/prompt-engineering
I’ve seen many Twitter comments that completely misunderstand the process of getting a decent result with AI generators like Stable Diffusion and DALL‑E 2. People seem to assume it’s just “push a button, receive bacon” with no real creativity involved. As someone who has done a lot of experimentation in the past few months, I’d like to challenge that assertion and show you what the process for getting a decent result actually involves.

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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.