2022.10.10 - The Future of the Web is on the Edge

Title: 2022.10.10 - The Future of the Web is on the Edge

Web on the Edge & Ten Years of TypeScript & Video generation & Lens Of A Programmer

This Week’s Highlights

The Future of the Web is on the Edge https://deno.com/blog/the-future-of-web-is-on-the-edge
In the beginning, there was a single computer on a desk in a basement in Switzerland. 32 years later, there are hundreds of millions of versions of that computer all around the world. Some are even powered down by default. But developing for the web still feels as if there is only one machine. We develop as if our code is going to be deployed on a single instance of a server somewhere in a huge data center in Virginia, California, or Switzerland. But this doesn’t have to be the case anymore. For years, anything static was served from CDNs around the globe, close to users. Now, the same is starting to be true of dynamic web apps. You can deploy it all, everywhere.

Ten Years of TypeScript https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/ten-years-of-typescript/
The core team has worked hard on TypeScript, but we know that the fundamental thing that’s enabled this success is the community. That includes the external contributors to TypeScript, the library authors and everyday developers who took a bet on TypeScript and proved the language out, the DefinitelyTyped contributors, the community organizers, the experts who took the time to answer questions and taught others and made a path for newcomers – every TypeScript user, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you. You’ve been a part of building something great. We hope that the next 10 years of TypeScript treat you well! Related: TypeScript Best Practices at Viget.

The Battle for the Soul of the Web https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/internet-archive-decentralized-web-web3-brewster-kahle/671647/
Long before the NFT boom or the Web3 backlash, an unglamorous movement was under way. Where does it stand now?

Imagen Video: high‑definition video generation with diffusion models https://imagen.research.google/video/
We present Imagen Video, a text‑conditional video generation system based on a cascade of video diffusion models. Given a text prompt, Imagen Video generates high‑definition videos using a base video generation model and a sequence of interleaved spatial and temporal video super‑resolution models. We describe how we scale up the system as a high‑definition text‑to‑video model, including design decisions such as the choice of fully‑convolutional temporal and spatial super‑resolution models at certain resolutions, and the choice of the v‑parameterization of diffusion models. Related: The Illustrated Stable Diffusion, How a Stable Diffusion prompt changes its output for the style of 1500 artists, Discovering novel algorithms with AlphaTensor, AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation.

Through The Lens Of A Programmer https://www.simplethread.com/through-the-lens-of-a-programmer/
I spend a lot of time talking to computers. That is, if you classify programming a computer as talking to them, which I personally wouldn’t do. If it really were the case that we were talking, then it would certainly be a one‑sided conversation. But it is some form of communication. And if I am stubbornly persistent with trying to personify the computer, which it seems like I am, then it probably would be best described as some form of prescriptive writing. But then again, we could say that programming is a sufficient term. Anyway, I spend a lot of time programming computers. It is my job to communicate things to a computer in a way that these simple machines will understand. And I do mean simple in a hurtful, nasty way.

Deep Reads

I changed my mind about writing new JavaScript frameworks https://whitep4nth3r.com/blog/write-a-new-javascript-framework/
A few months ago, whilst deep in a dark cloud of personal overwhelm caused by the unrelenting exponential growth of the web ecosystem, I wrote about how you probably shouldn’t write a new JavaScript framework. But I’ve changed my mind. Maybe you should write a new JavaScript framework. And here’s why.

Where Web Components Went Wrong (And How We Can Turn It Around) https://space.matthewphillips.info/posts/where-web-components-went-wrong/
I've been a fan of web components since I first heard about them. I wrote my first article about them probably 7 or 8 years ago (which I can no longer find, sadly). I've written numerous libraries for writing web components, including but not limited to Haunted. I've given talks on building web components. I've argued about them on Twitter (probably too much). Related: A Web Component Story.

Blogged Answers: A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2020/05/blogged-answers-a-mostly-complete-guide-to-react-rendering-behavior/
Details on how React rendering behaves, and how use of Context and React‑Redux affect rendering.

Making React fast by default and truly reactive https://legendapp.com/open-source/legend-state/
We love React and we've been very happily using it since 2015, but the dev experience and performance has always been held back by one fundamental flaw.

AI code completion is like cruise control – and that’s great news for bigger teams https://christianheilmann.com/2022/10/05/ai-code-completion-is-like-cruise-control-and-thats-great-news-for-bigger-teams/
When machine‑learning‑assisted code completion came around in the form of GitHub Copilot and the fast‑follow Amazon CodeWhisperer it was impressive to see just how fast new ideas follow the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Migrating our monorepo seamlessly from Dep to Go Modules https://monzo.com/blog/2022/09/29/migrating-our-monorepo-seamlessly-from-dep-to-go-modules
Since 2018, we've been using Dep to manage all the dependencies (473 at the time of counting) in our microservices monorepo. In 2020, Dep was deprecated in favour of the officially‑supported Go modules system, but we weren’t able to migrate because of the new way it calculates the dependency tree; migrating to Go modules would have changed over 1.5 million lines of third‑party code.

Why is it hard to learn another programming language? https://austinhenley.com/blog/learnanotherpl.html
Learning my first programming language was really hard. Learning the second was also hard but probably easier. What about the third or fourth? The Nth? Does each one get easier? Does knowing other languages create new difficulties?

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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.