2023.01.30 - Natural language is the lazy user interface

Title: 2023.01.30 – Natural Language Is the Lazy User Interface

Full Stack Developer & Less JavaScript & 100 million developers & SaaS industry & Understanding Life

This Week’s Hot Topics

Natural language is the lazy user interface https://austinhenley.com/blog/naturallanguageui.html
ChatGPT has kicked off a frenzy. It seems to be everything everyone in tech is talking about. Start‑ups are popping up left and right. Big companies are rapidly releasing ChatGPT‑like features integrated into their products. People are expecting large language models to revolutionize the world—and maybe they will. But a chatbot won’t. Expecting users to primarily interact with software in natural language is lazy. It puts all the burden on the user to articulate good questions: what to ask, when to ask it, how to ask it, how to make sense of the response, and then repeat the whole cycle many times. Related: Google Research, 2022 & beyond: Responsible AI.

What’s next for Flutter https://medium.com/flutter/whats-next-for-flutter-b94ce089f49c
Setting out our vision at the Flutter Forward event in Nairobi.

The less JavaScript, the better https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/01/27/the-less-javascript-the-better-ep-532/
Convert unused JavaScript into lightweight HTML… oh, that feels so good.

You might not need an ORM https://sometechblog.com/posts/you-might-not-need-an-orm/
I still use Prisma on aihelperbot.com for now but will migrate to Postgres.js in the future when I have some free time. In the meantime I’m using raw SQL queries via prisma.$queryRaw in places like the admin dashboard (essentially an array of SQL queries that I iterate over and render as HTML). AI has boosted both my productivity and capabilities, and I wouldn’t want to start a new project without it.

10 Web Development Trends in 2023 https://www.robinwieruch.de/web-development-trends/
In this article I highlight new web‑development trends I’ve observed—trends I expect to keep sparking interest among developers and that I’m excited about for the coming year. Let’s dive in…

You Will Never Be a Full‑Stack Developer, or, Career Advice for the Working Web Dev https://seldo.com/posts/you-will-never-be-a-full-stack-developer
I’ve been thinking a lot about the thing we call “the stack,” one of many vague concepts web developers use to describe themselves. People call themselves “frontend,” “backend,” and “full‑stack,” but there’s no real consensus on what any of those actually mean.

Deep Reads

100 million developers and counting https://github.blog/2023-01-25-100-million-developers-and-counting/
There are now 100 million developers worldwide using GitHub. Here’s what that means—and why it’s just the beginning.

Scrollend, a new JavaScript event https://developer.chrome.com/blog/scrollend-a-new-javascript-event/
Delete your timeout functions and shake off their bugs—here’s the event you really need: scrollend.

How the new Wikipedia design focused on accessibility https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/01/27/how-the-new-wikipedia-design-focused-on-accessibility/
In this post we’ll explore how the Web team tackled accessibility challenges and share opportunities for us to better address the needs of disabled people and other historically marginalized groups.

We actually need more JavaScript frameworks https://whitep4nth3r.com/talks/we-need-more-javascript-frameworks/
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the growing number of JavaScript frameworks available today. Believe me, I was. So I built a tool to help developers choose which framework to use—but it was rubbish. Join me as I share my weird, winding journey through the JavaScript‑framework landscape, from an overcooked meme to a terrible website, ending with a call to action. We’ll delve into the lessons I learned, including the importance of asking the right questions about your project before picking a tech stack and framework.

Software and Its Discontents, Part 2: An Explosion of Complexity https://laughingmeme.org/2023/01/23/software-and-its-discontents-part-2-complexity.html
This is part 2 of my “Software and Its Discontents” series. The series stems from asking a bunch of folks about the current state of software engineering—a sense that things aren’t going well, that people are disillusioned and frustrated. In part 1 I discussed the macro‑economic trend: the end of a decade of cheap money for tech investments, which is driving this conversation and shaping industry changes over the last ten years.

API Evolution Is a Challenge. Could Contract Testing Be the Solution? https://tech.ebayinc.com/engineering/api-evolution-with-confidence-a-case-study-of-contract-testing-adoption-at-ebay/
Contract testing has grown in popularity in recent years with the widespread adoption of microservice architectures. In this article we share our experiences with contract testing at eBay.

What I Learned in One Year as an SRE Trainee https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/sre-trainee
SRE is an approach that uses software‑engineering concepts to solve operations problems. Its principles aim to align development and operations goals to create reliable, scalable systems. In this post I share my experiences as a new SRE, reflecting on lessons learned and challenges faced over the past year. I hope to give you insight into the role of an SRE and perhaps inspire others to consider a career in this field.

Technical Debt https://architecturenotes.co/technical-debt/
How does technical debt accrue? Most people would say “bad engineering.” What is bad engineering? Inflexibility? If a system is engineered correctly to do one thing but is forced to do something else, is that bad engineering?

Things to Do and Not Do During a Wave of Tech Layoffs https://christianheilmann.com/2023/01/24/things-to-do-and-not-to-do-during-a-wave-of-tech-layoffs/
We are currently in a massive round of tech layoffs reminiscent of the first .com crash at the turn of the century. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and now Google announced layoffs in the 10‑k range, and it seems no one is spared. New hires as well as veterans with over 20 years at their companies all received the dreaded meeting. I was also laid off and am still negotiating the details, so there will be a separate post about that. This isn’t my first rodeo, and I’m in a lead position, which is why I get many requests from annoyed and desperate colleagues asking for advice. Here are some things I tell myself right now and others that…

(content truncated)

---

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.