2023.03.27 - The End of Front-End Development

Title: 2023.03.27 – The End of Front‑End Development

ChatGPT plugins & Building APIs for AI & BFF & Serverless & 健康 & 文化芯片 & 孔子 & 天下一家

This Week’s Hot Topics

The End of Front‑End Development   https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/the-end-of-frontend-development/
Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with lots of early‑career devs who are getting more and more anxious about AI. They’ve seen the increasingly‑impressive demos from tools like GPT‑4, and they worry that by the time they’re fluent in HTML/CSS/JS, there won’t be any jobs left for them. I couldn’t disagree more. I don’t think web‑developer jobs are going anywhere. And I’m getting pretty sick of the FUD being spread online. So, in this blog post, I’m going to share my hypothesis for what will happen. Things are going to change, but not in the scary way people are saying.

ChatGPT plugins   https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins
We’ve implemented initial support for plugins in ChatGPT. Plugins are tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle, and help ChatGPT access up‑to‑date information, run computations, or use third‑party services. Related:

• ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!
• Google Bard
• Introducing Mozilla.ai: Investing in trustworthy AI
• GitHub Copilot X: The AI‑powered developer experience
• GPT is revolutionary: Even a stochastic parrot can sing
• ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like
• Reinventing collaboration with AI in Microsoft Loop

Building APIs for AI: An Interview with Zapier’s Bryan Helmig   https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/building-apis-for-ai-an-interview-with-zapiers-bryan-helmig/
I got a chance to sit down with Bryan Helmig (@bryanhelmig), the CTO and founder of Zapier, to talk APIs, interoperability, and learn more about the company’s first‑ever public API: Natural Language Actions (NLA). With this new API, they’re making it possible to plug integrations directly into your product, and it’s optimized for LLMs.

Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – npm scripts   https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-part-4/
npm scripts are executed by JavaScript developers and CI systems all around the world all the time. Despite their high usage they are not particularly well optimized and add about 400 ms of overhead. In this article we were able to bring that down to ~22 ms.

Do You Need a BFF? The Backend‑for‑Frontend Pattern   https://spin.atomicobject.com/2023/03/20/backend-for-frontend-pattern/
Overall, the BFF pattern is a great tool for developers looking to create applications with complex connections between multiple clients and servers. Its scalability and flexibility allow for easier development and a better, tailored user experience.

In‑Depth Reading

Why Serverless Isn’t Succeeding   https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/dIWV9qzFuByaUxvi6p1q2w
So you can see that Serverless does have some penetration, but it’s mostly used in isolated, small‑scale scenarios. Think of it as an add‑on to an application rather than the foundation for building the app itself. Why, then, aren’t people using Serverless to build full applications?

New React docs pretend SPAs don’t exist anymore   https://wasp-lang.dev/blog/2023/03/17/new-react-docs-pretend-spas-dont-exist
React just released their new docs at https://react.dev/. While they look great and pack a lot of improvements, one section that caught the community’s attention is “Start a New React Project”. The strongly recommended way to start a new React project is to use a framework such as Next.js, while the traditional route of using bundlers like Vite or CRA is fairly strongly discouraged. But what about typical Single‑Page Apps (SPAs)? Dashboard‑style tools that live behind authentication (and don’t need SEO at all), and for which React was originally designed, still very much exist.

Migrating from ts‑node to Bun   https://johnnyreilly.com/migrating-from-ts-node-to-bun
I’ve wanted to take a look at some of the alternative JavaScript runtimes for a while. The thing that has held me back is npm compatibility. I want to be able to run my code in a runtime that isn’t Node.js and still be able to use npm packages. I’ve been using ts‑node for a long time now; it’s what I reach for when I’m building any kind of console app. In this post I want to port a console app from ts‑node to Bun and see how easy it is.

Rich Harris Talks SvelteKit and What’s Next for Svelte   https://thenewstack.io/rich-harris-talks-sveltekit-and-whats-next-for-svelte/
The creator of Svelte explains why it will get an overhaul this year and how SvelteKit can help deploy the frontend framework.

When is :focus-visible visible?   https://bitsofco.de/when-is-focus-visible-visible/
Before the :focus-visible CSS pseudo‑class was introduced, there was no middle ground to this debate—you either sided with design or accessibility (hopefully the latter). But now, with :focus-visible, we can have focus styles that apply only when the browser/user agent determines that focus should be indicated on the element.

Who builds it and who runs it? SRE team topologies   https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/03/20/who-builds-it-and-who-runs-it-sre-team-topologies/
Ad‑hoc SRE principles can get you on the right track, but if you want to sustain it long term, you’ll need organizational structure.

The history and legacy of Visual Basic   https://retool.com/blog/the-history-and-legacy-of-visual-basic/
In Cooper’s eyes, though, Windows had one major drawback. The shell—the graphical face of the operating system where you started programs and looked for files—was rudimentary, lacking overlapping windows and visual polish. Compared to Apple’s Macintosh GUI released almost two years earlier, it was clearly an aspect of the project into which Microsoft just hadn’t put much effort. “It was a program called MSDOS.exe and it was very clear that somebody had written it in a weekend,” Cooper observes. “[Microsoft] might as well have had a neon sign saying, ‘Market Opportunity.’ And it just really intrigued me. So I started saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to build a shell.’”

Fresh Finds

• W3C: Privacy Principles for the Web
• Announcing the ESLint Community GitHub organization
• Recharts V2.5
• DOCX 8.0: Generate Word .docx Files from Node or Browser
• Swift Package Index gains Apple sponsorship
• Playwright v1.32.0: Intro

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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.