2022.12.05 - Be the Primary Person Responsible for Health

Title: 2022‑12‑05 – Be the Primary Custodian of Your Health

The best leaders & Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem & Hexagonal Architecture & Tech predictions for 2023 & Free software & On Protracted Struggles and Pragmatism

This Week’s Hot Topics

The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/37-years-ago-steve-jobs-said-best-managers-never-want-to-be-a-manager-science-says-he-was-right.html
We thought we’d become a big company, so we hired “professional managers.” We brought in a bunch of seasoned managers, but it fell flat. They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to actually do anything. Related:

• A coach, a mentor and a sponsor
• A collection of inspiring resources related to engineering management and tech leadership
• Having a creative practice as a programmer
• 83% of Developers Suffer from Burnout

Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – one library at a time
https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem/
Most popular libraries can be made faster by avoiding unnecessary type conversions or by not creating functions inside other functions.

Hexagonal‑Inspired Architecture in React
https://alexkondov.com/hexagonal-inspired-architecture-in-react/
My gripe with the front‑end community is that we’re too obsessed with polishing low‑level APIs and building new tools, instead of thinking about architecture and patterns. We’ve iterated on state management a thousand times, yet we haven’t translated core programming concepts to the UI. I’ll try to show how we can apply hexagonal architecture ideas in React.

Tech predictions for 2023 and beyond
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2022/12/tech-predictions-for-2023-and-beyond.html
The next wave of innovators—some of whom I met while filming Now Go Build—are already building solutions to reforest the planet, keep youth active, and re‑imagine the supply chain from warehouse to delivery. And that’s just the beginning. As advanced technology becomes ever more ubiquitous—every aspect of life turning into data we can analyze—we’ll see a torrent of innovation, especially in 2023. Related: Cloudy with a chance of… the state of cloud in 2022

Introducing a product‑delivery culture at Etsy
https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/etsy-product-delivery-culture.html
During the cloud migration, Etsy was scaling both its business and its team. Mike identified the product‑delivery process as another potential bottleneck. The autonomy given to product teams led to a problem: each team delivered in its own way. Joining a new team meant learning a new set of practices, which was painful as Etsy was hiring many newcomers. Moreover, several product initiatives failed to deliver the expected ROI. These signals prompted leadership to reassess the effectiveness of their product planning and delivery processes.

How we all develop and support free software
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/nov/29/giving-tuesday-pono-appeal/
Today is Giving Tuesday, and I want to share part of the story that brought me to the Software Freedom Conservancy. After starting as a donor over five years ago, I now work there and feel even more passionate about our mission.

In‑Depth Reading

The BBC’s 15 Web Principles: 15 Years Later
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/11/the-bbcs-15-web-principles-15-years-later/
There’s a fair amount of early‑Web‑2.0 idealism in these 15 principles. Honestly, I can’t find much to disagree with. Across the web—not just at the BBC—they’re often ignored in practice. I wonder whether the BBC’s culture could still produce something like this in 2022, let alone enforce it on its own sites. What will the next 15 years bring?

Tailwind Is a Leaky Abstraction
https://jakelazaroff.com/words/tailwind-is-a-leaky-abstraction/
I spent the past few months at work learning Tailwind with an open mind. I can now say confidently that I actually dislike Tailwind and wouldn’t use it for new projects.

Frontend developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
https://medium.com/@stephenjayakar/frontend-developers-stop-moving-things-that-im-about-to-click-on-5827bc0409b3
Please. It’s an insult to my brain. You place a button somewhere, then decide “nah, let’s move it elsewhere.” Here are some recent examples that have annoyed me the most.

When to use gRPC vs. GraphQL
https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/11/28/when-to-use-grpc-vs-graphql/
We dive into two of the most popular API protocols to see where each shines.

CRDT: Fractional Indexing
https://madebyevan.com/algos/crdt-fractional-indexing/
Collaborative peer‑to‑peer apps sometimes need to maintain a consistent order of objects across all peers. For example, a peer‑to‑peer photo‑album app might need to sync the order of photos. The algorithm shown here is one way to achieve that. It belongs to a family of algorithms called CRDTs (Conflict‑Free Replicated Data Types), which I won’t detail here. Unlike my original article on this technique, the version below uses random offsets to avoid a central server and works in true peer‑to‑peer scenarios. Compared with tree‑based indexing, fractional indexing is simpler but does not prevent interleaving of concurrently inserted runs, making it unsuitable for textual data.

The Best Go Framework: No Framework?
https://threedots.tech/post/best-go-framework/
Other languages have de‑facto “default” frameworks—Java has Spring, Python has Django/Flask, Ruby has Rails, C# has ASP.NET, Node has Express, PHP has Symfony/Laravel. Go is different: there is no default framework. Even more interesting, many suggest you shouldn’t use a framework at all. Are they crazy?

Cache invalidation really is one of the hardest problems in computer science
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2022/11/25/cache-invalidation-really-is-one-of-the-hardest-things-in-computer-science/
My colleagues recently wrote a great post on the Netflix tech blog about a tough performance issue they wrestled with. They eventually traced it to false sharing, a caching‑related performance problem. I’ll take that post and write a simplified version of part of it…

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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.