2022.12.19 - What I learned at GitLab that I don't want to forget

Title: 2022.12.19 – What I Learned at GitLab That I Don’t Want to Forget

SvelteKit 1.0 & Avoiding Web‑App Duplication with React Native & Overengineering & Climate Tech

This Week’s Highlights

What I learned at GitLab that I don’t want to forget https://boleary.dev/what-i-learned-at-gitlab-that-i-dont-want-to-forget/
I hope I can carry even a small piece of that into my next adventure—but I wanted to be more specific, both for myself and for all of you, about the things I think are most important to remember. It’s hard to pick a single “favorite” value or sub‑value, so I’ve tried to summarize the life lessons I’ve learned into three categories:

Write down everything
Give and accept: ownership, agency, and responsibility
Be transparent with a low level of shame

Announcing SvelteKit 1.0 https://svelte.dev/blog/announcing-sveltekit-1.0
SvelteKit is a framework for building web applications on top of Svelte, a UI component framework that developers love for its performance and ease of use. Related: Announcing SWR 2.0, Htmx in a Nutshell.

Avoiding Web‑App Duplication with React Native https://blog.standardnotes.com/40921/no-react-native-is-not-the-future
Standard Notes has seen its codebase evolve many times over the years. When we first launched in late 2016, we started with three codebases: our web app (which our Electron desktop app contained), a native Swift iOS app, and a native Kotlin Android app. This was immediately untenable. Coordinating bug fixes across three platforms was hard enough, but building new features? Out of the question. We had to call our app “simple” because we literally couldn’t make it anything else.

Optimize Interaction to Next Paint https://web.dev/optimize-inp/
Learn how to optimize for the Interaction‑to‑Next‑Paint metric.

Correcting Overengineering https://alexturek.com/2022-12-16-Correcting-Overengineering/
Ultimately, overengineering isn’t about technical skill. It’s about hubris: believing you can anticipate distant‑future needs better than the people who are actually going to need them. Less‑experienced engineers view this positively, thinking that adding code now is cheaper than later. More‑experienced engineers learn that adding things to a system is cheap compared to maintaining and removing them.

Deep Reads

[Translation] React Is Dying: Check Out These Better Alternatives https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/P-DcT-zN1vYyIunWlsQlAw
A lot of fascinating things are happening in the framework world that you probably haven’t heard about yet. If you’re thinking, “Damn, do we really need another JavaScript framework?” you’re missing the point—I’m not trying to push another new framework on you. Why should we adopt something just because we don’t use something else? In this article I’ll share some magical innovations in web frameworks. We deserve better, don’t we? These frameworks have existed quietly for a while and now have made great strides; it’s time to pay attention. If you’re still unaware, you’re missing out.

Inside the Mind of a Frontend Developer: Article Layout https://ishadeed.com/article/inside-frontend-developer-mind-article-layout/
This is the second article in my series digging into the mind of a frontend developer. I’ll think aloud about how to build an article layout using CSS techniques like grid, flexbox, comparison functions, and more.

Five Challenges to Building an Isomorphic JavaScript Library https://doordash.engineering/2022/12/06/five-challenges-to-building-an-isomorphic-javascript-library/
For context, isomorphic (or universal) JavaScript is code that can run in any environment—Node.js or a web browser. The alternative is to create separate, targeted libraries for each environment (e.g., one for Node.js, one for the browser). A single library across environments offers clear benefits—if you can overcome the challenges of building one.

How Can We Improve the Flutter Experience for Desktop? https://medium.com/flutter/how-can-we-improve-the-flutter-experience-for-desktop-70b34bff9392
Insights and priorities based on 2022 Flutter desktop user research by Mindy Hoover and Chris Bracken.

Shipping Spotify’s Culture: 5 Plugins (and 4 Principles) for Supercharging Developer Experience at Scale https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/12/shipping-spotifys-culture-5-plugins-and-4-principles-for-supercharging-developer-experience-at-scale/
ICYMI, Spotify officially began selling enterprise software today: the Spotify Plugins for Backstage bundle subscription. Some of these commercial plugins started as internal tools built by Spotify developers for Spotify developers. Other plugins in the bundle are brand‑new to the Backstage platform. But they all embody our ways of working—our secret sauce for improving developer experience at scale. And now that we’re sharing these plugins with the world, you don’t have to work at Spotify to see those principles in action. They’re right there in the plugins themselves, in how they work and how they were built.

The GPT‑3 Architecture, on a Napkin https://dugas.ch/artificial_curiosity/GPT_architecture.html
There are countless brilliant posts on GPT‑3, showcasing what it can do, pondering its consequences, visualizing how it works. With all that out there, it still took a crawl through several papers and blogs before I felt confident I’d grasped the architecture. So the goal of this page is humble but simple: help others build as detailed an understanding of the GPT‑3 architecture as possible. Related:

Database Sharding Explained https://architecturenotes.co/database-sharding-explained/
More features, active users, and data are collected daily. Your database is slowing your application. Many people don’t understand database sharding, which could solve their difficulties. This article explains database sharding, its benefits, how to use it, and when not to.

Fresh Finds

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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.

2022.12.19 - What I learned at GitLab that I don't want to forget

Title: 2022.12.19 – What I Learned at GitLab That I Don’t Want to Forget

This Week’s Highlights

Deep Reads

Fresh Finds

Sources & References

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