2022.10.24 - A 9.6 million km² territory cannot accommodate a youth that refuses to strive

Title: 2022.10.24 – 9.6 million km² of territory can’t contain a youth that refuses to strive

Leaving the cloud & Moving From React to htmx & Node.js 19 & AI will replace middle management & 青春

This Week’s Hot Topics

Why we’re leaving the cloud https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0
Basecamp has kept one foot in the cloud for well over a decade, and HEY has been running there exclusively since its launch two years ago. We’ve run extensively on both Amazon’s cloud and Google’s cloud, on bare virtual machines, and on Kubernetes. We’ve seen everything the cloud has to offer and tried most of it. It’s finally time to conclude: renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal for medium‑sized companies like ours with stable growth. The savings promised by reduced complexity never materialized, so we’re planning to leave. Related: Why we’re moving away from Firebase.

Moving From React to htmx https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/
We took the plunge and replaced the two‑year‑old React UI of our SaaS product with simple Django templates and htmx in a couple of months. We’d like to share our experience with you, with concrete metrics on various aspects, and convince your CTO!

Node.js 19 is now available! https://nodejs.org/en/blog/announcements/v19-release-announce/
We’re excited to announce that Node.js 19 was released today! Highlights include an update of the V8 JavaScript engine to 10.7 and HTTP(s)/1.1 Keep‑Alive enabled by default. Node.js 19 will replace Node.js 18 as our “Current” release line when Node.js 18 enters long‑term support (LTS) later this month. According to the release schedule, Node.js 19 will be the “Current” release for the next six months, until April 2023.

Bottleneck #03: Product vs. Engineering https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/03-product-v-engineering.html
Friction between product and engineering; lack of trust and collaboration slowing product growth. Related: What is “engineering for software?”.

In‑Depth Guide to API Management: Benefits & Use Cases https://research.aimultiple.com/api-management/
APIs have become essential tools for software ecosystems, enabling innovation both inside and outside organizations. It’s estimated that 90 % of developers rely on APIs. As APIs become more prevalent, API management is becoming crucial. This article explores what API management is, its components, benefits, and use cases.

AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers https://chatterhead.bearblog.dev/ai-will-replace-middle-management-not-hourly-workers/
Artificial intelligence can now beat the best human chess players 100 % of the time, no questions asked. The Roomba in the corner of my room still gets stuck and runs out of power. Which of these two technologies will impact corporate America more: robots that must be built by robots to perform a task once done by a person, or a program capable of making the best possible business decision given historic and current data? If you said the latter, you’re correct. The “robot revolution” isn’t coming first; the AI decision‑making paradigm shift is, and it will save corporations billions of dollars in salary costs per year as middle management disappears.

Deep Reads

Style performance and concurrent rendering https://nolanlawson.com/2022/10/22/style-performance-and-concurrent-rendering/
I was fascinated recently by “Why we’re breaking up with CSS‑in‑JS” by Sam Magura. It’s a great overview of some benefits and downsides of the CSS‑in‑JS pattern as implemented by various libraries in the React ecosystem. What really piqued my curiosity, though, was a link to this guide by Sebastian Markbåge on potential performance problems with CSS‑in‑JS when using concurrent rendering, a new feature in React 18.

Futuristic CSS https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/10/futuristic-css/
In this article, Sacha Greif tries to anticipate future CSS trends and looks at some far‑fetched, futuristic CSS features that might one day make their way into browsers.

CSS Halftone Patterns https://css-irl.info/css-halftone-patterns/
A while ago, Ana Tudor created an impressive collection of halftone patterns using only CSS. With a bit of spare time, I dug into the code to see how it was done! Ana’s demos are built with Sass—what better way to learn than to try to reproduce similar effects using vanilla CSS?

The programming challenge that is a modern browser https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/BrowserProgrammingChallenge
Writing and maintaining a modern browser is probably one of the most challenging programming projects you could ask for; it must tackle inherently hard problems at massive scale.

The Go WebAssembly ABI at a Low Level https://xeiaso.net/talks/wasm-abi
The Go 1.11 release in mid‑2018 added support for compiling Go to WebAssembly. It lets you take a reasonable subset of Go programs and run them in browsers alongside JavaScript. I’m Xe Iaso, and today I’ll help you understand how this works and the amazingly terrible hacks that power its core. This talk is aimed at intermediate to expert audiences; it will be most useful if you have some familiarity with JavaScript and WebAssembly, and especially if you enjoy “amazingly terrible” ideas. I’ll provide background and context as needed.

What’s the Future of Python Development? https://spin.atomicobject.com/2022/10/17/python-development/
The main downside of Python is that it can be incredibly slow. As an interpreted language, the Python interpreter runs through the program line by line rather than compiling the whole program first. Moreover, the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) prevents the interpreter from running on multiple threads, so this performance impact can be severe for large applications. So if Python is so slow, why do so many people still use it? And will newer languages eventually replace it? Let’s explore where Python is growing and where it’s struggling.

How to Build Software like an SRE https://www.willett.io/posts/precepts/
Reliability precepts and trade‑offs learned the hard way.

DevOps is Bullshit https://blog.massdriver.cloud/devops-is-bullshit
DevOps started as a well‑intentioned set of practices and culture. Over the years it has devolved into an unholy beast of division and tunnel vision. Why did we stop dreaming bigger? What happened to tearing down silos, increasing engineering velocity, and adding value? Remember the things DevOps was supposed to achieve?

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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.