2023.04.10 - How to be a -10x Engineer

Title: 2023.04.10 – How to Be a –10x Engineer

WebGPU & Generative AI & Deno SaaSKit & Architectural Complexity & 学会输 (learn to lose)

This Week’s Highlights

How to be a –10x Engineer https://taylor.town/-10x
+10x engineers may be mythical, but –10x engineers exist. To become a –10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies.

Chrome ships WebGPU https://developer.chrome.com/blog/webgpu-release/
After years of development, the Chrome team ships WebGPU, which enables high‑performance 3D graphics and data‑parallel computation on the web. Related: How WebAssembly is accelerating new web functionality, Unknown Pleasures – An Audio Visualizer with WebGL.

What developers need to know about generative AI https://github.blog/2023-04-07-what-developers-need-to-know-about-generative-ai/
Generative AI has been dominating the news lately—but what exactly is it? Here’s what you need to know, and what it means for developers. Related:

• Our Learnings from the Early Days of Generative AI
• Introducing ChatGPT: Your Guide to the SQLizer API
• ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it
• We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistic

Learning React from Two Angles in 2023 https://www.robinwieruch.de/learning-react/
Learning React in 2023 is not the easiest endeavor. While we’ve enjoyed stability since the release of React Hooks in 2019, the tide is turning again, and the shift may be more volatile than the Hooks transition. In this article I compare two approaches to learning React in 2023: the library way and the framework way.

Announcing Deno SaaSKit: an open‑source SaaS template built with Fresh https://deno.com/blog/announcing-deno-saaskit
We’re launching a beta release of Deno SaaSKit, our open‑source SaaS template built on Fresh, with all the foundational features every SaaS needs, including: user accounts, user‑creation flows, landing page, pricing section, sign‑in and session management, billing integration via Stripe, and gated API endpoints.

In‑Depth Reading

Some Miscellaneous Development Topics – Testing https://onevcat.com/2023/04/dev-talk-testing/
In the past I’ve written a few posts about testing, though most focused on a specific framework. I’ve long kept the habit of writing tests for both frameworks and apps, and have experimented with many testing styles. In this short piece I want to explain some basic questions and how my thinking has evolved.

On Endings: Why & How We Retired Elm at Culture Amp https://kevinyank.com/posts/on-endings-why-how-we-retired-elm-at-culture-amp/
From time to time someone asks, “Does Culture Amp still use Elm?” I answer privately that no, we’re no longer investing in Elm, and I explain why. Inevitably they tell me my answer was super valuable and that I should share it publicly. Until now, I haven’t.

RFC: Angular Signals https://github.com/angular/angular/discussions/49685
We teased this in February, and now it’s time to dig into the details: the Angular team requests your comments on our plan to adopt signals as a reactive primitive for Angular.

XUL Layout Is Gone https://crisal.io/words/2023/03/30/xul-layout-is-gone.html
This was a rather big effort (first filed 9 years ago in bug 1033225), and I wanted to document some of the things I learned during the process, the decisions that made it possible, and a few things I might have done differently.

Building GitHub with Ruby and Rails https://github.blog/2023-04-06-building-github-with-ruby-and-rails/
Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today the application is nearly two million lines of code and more than 1,000 engineers collaborate on it daily. Related: Codeberg – Fast open‑source alternative to GitHub.

Saying Goodbye to GitHub https://ersei.net/en/blog/bye-bye-github https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35418760
I’ve been using GitHub since I was eleven. To be fair, I didn’t really understand Git at the time, but I managed to fumble my way through (barely). I do remember getting banned because eleven‑year‑old me decided to tell the internet my age on GitHub, and the Terms of Service prohibited me from using the service until I was at least thirteen.

How eBay Modernized the Most Important Page on Our Platform https://tech.ebayinc.com/engineering/how-ebay-modernized-the-most-important-page-on-our-platform/
eBay’s core page—the View Item page—gets 250 million views per day. Here’s how we tackled the task of modernizing it.

System Design and the Cost of Architectural Complexity https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/79551
In this research setting we found that differences in architectural complexity could account for 50 % drops in productivity, three‑fold increases in defect density, and order‑of‑magnitude increases in staff turnover. Using the techniques developed in this thesis, firms should be able to estimate the financial cost of their complexity by assigning a monetary value to the decreased productivity, increased defect density, and higher turnover it causes. Consequently, firms can more accurately estimate the potential dollar value of refactoring efforts aimed at improving architecture.

Fresh Releases

• Electron 24.0.0
• GRID WORLD by Alexander Miller
• Storybook 7.0 is here!
• Next.js 13.3
• React Chrono: Modern Timeline Component for React
• Croner – Cron for JavaScript and TypeScript
• Facebook: Build faster with Buck2 – Our open‑source build system

Products & Others

His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent. https://www.inverse.com/input/features/tropetrainer-thomas-buchler-torah-software
Who was Thomas Buchler, the late creator of the beloved Torah program TropeTrainer? And can anything be done to revive his life’s work?

How to Do Hard Things https://every.to/no-small-plans/how-to-do-hard-things
A founder explores his journey with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

“Data‑driven” decisions aren’t innovative decisions https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/04/03/data-driven-decisions-arent-innovative-decisions/
If you want to innovate new solutions, you can’t rely on da… (content truncated)

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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.