2023.06.26 - Creating a New Cultural Lifeform

2023.06.26 – Creating New Cultural Lifeforms

Five-Year Rule of Software Transitions & The New CSS & Visualization Technology & Agile & Left the Cloud & The Three Natures of Water

This Week’s Highlights

The Five-Year Rule of Software Transitions https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions-the-five-year-rule/
I’ve been watching this kind of software for a long time, looking for trends, ideally based on any market‑share numbers I find. Over time I’ve noticed something interesting: transitions in this kind of software almost always happen in the same way. In particular they happen quickly. And once they get going, they always seem to take roughly the same amount of time. I call this the “Five‑Year Rule”. The rule is simple: either a new piece of software will become the market leader in about five years, or it never will. Related: Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software.

The Data Visualization Technology Landscape https://visualisingdata.com/2023/06/data-visualisation-technology-landscape/
My work in the data‑visualization field has never been overly aligned with the technology side of things. I’ve always focused my approach on transferring knowledge about the underlying craft of visually communicating with data, agnostic of technology. However, you can’t ignore technology and the prominent role it plays in the practice of this craft. From gathering data, cleaning and transforming it, exploring it, analyzing it, charting it, finessing its appearance—technology (or, more accurately, technologies) is key. In this post I want to at least point you toward some useful resources that may help you, if you have a similar question in mind, find your own answers.

The New CSS https://matthiasott.com/notes/the-new-css
If you attended this year’s CSS Day in Amsterdam, or watched the videos via the live stream like I did, you might have noticed that this time something feels different. The changes coming to CSS are so fundamental on so many levels that it almost feels like a singularity. There is now “CSS before” and “CSS after” the early 2020s.

Announcing Svelte 4 https://svelte.dev/blog/svelte-4
Svelte 4 reduces the Svelte package size by nearly 75 % (10.6 MB down to 2.8 MB), which means less waiting on npm install. Svelte 4 makes the authoring experience more intuitive and consistent: local is now the default for transitions to avoid animations blocking page transitions, preprocessors are easier to write, and multiple fixes make CSP easier to set up and use. Related: Thoughts on Svelte(Kit), one year and 3 billion requests later.

AI Getting Started https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-getting-started
A JavaScript AI‑getting‑started stack for weekend projects, including image/text models, vector stores, auth, and deployment configs. Related:

• How to use GitHub Copilot: Prompts, tips, and use cases
• Part man. Part machine. All farmer.
• OpenLLM: An open platform for operating large language models (LLMs) in production.
• LangChain：2023年最潮大语言模型Web开发框架 (LangChain: the hottest large‑language‑model web‑development framework of 2023)

Deep Dives

Behind the Curtains of Wikipedia Redesign https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/06/behind-curtains-wikipedia-redesign/
The Wikipedia team shipped a redesign of the ubiquitous and one of the most visited websites on the web. Alex Hollendar and Jon Robson led the work and generously discussed the effort with us in a thorough, wide‑ranging interview that covers the design, development, and processes that went into the project.

Spatial Computing 101 https://blog.prototypr.io/spatial-computing-101-853563e3a29e
Vision Pro gives us the possibility of injecting a middle layer between ourselves and the always‑changing dynamic reality. This can help us understand, interpret, and react to the world—but we have yet to define new design patterns for it. Related: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro now available.

Open‑Source Challenge Results from Gamedev.js Jam 2023 https://github.blog/2023-06-21-gamedev-js-2023/
Highlighting 13 of the top games plus source code from the latest Gamedev.js jam—by GitHub Star and event organizer Andrzej Mazur.

What Observability‑Driven Development Is Not https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observability-driven-development
At Honeycomb, we are all about observability. In the past, we have proposed observability‑driven development as a way to maximize your observability and supercharge your development process. But I have a problem with the terminology: I don’t want observability to drive your development.

We Have Left the Cloud https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb
Since it took us years to get into the cloud in the first place, I originally imagined it would take us years to get out as well. But all that work to containerize our applications and prepare them for the cloud actually turned out to make it relatively easy to exit. And now, after six months of effort, it’s done. We’re out. The last application was brought home to our own hardware on Wednesday. Hallelujah!

RoboCat: A Self‑Improving Robotic Agent https://www.deepmind.com/blog/robocat-a-self-improving-robotic-agent
A new foundation model learns to operate different robotic arms, solves tasks from as few as 100 demonstrations, and improves from self‑generated data.

Agile Is People, the Rest Is Commentary https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/agile-is-people-the-rest-is-commentary/
Agile is “just” four principles. Simple, right?

Fresh Finds

• New W3C website deployed
• Ember 5.0 Released
• Panda CSS: Modern, Build‑Time, Type‑Safe CSS‑in‑JS
• Anime.js – A lightweight JavaScript animation library
• Novel: An open‑source Notion‑style WYSIWYG editor with AI‑powered autocompletions
• Vrite Editor is an open‑source, minimalistic WYSIWYG Markdown editor
• React Wrap Balancer: Simple React component that makes titles more readable
• Announcing Hyper Fetch 5.0
• The React Graph Gallery
• Arwes: Futuristic Sci‑Fi UI Web Framework
• Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit to build native user interfaces for applications written in Rust, C++, or JavaScript

Products & Others

Sketch.systems [https…

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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.