2023.10.23 - Building The Next Web

Title: 2023.10.23 – Building The Next Web

This Week’s Highlights

Building The Next Web https://berjon.com/next-web/
All too often we treat certain aspects of the Web as immutable, when they’re actually just as replaceable as any other component. That’s not to say the Web has no invariants. For example, it would make no architectural sense to talk about a Web without user agents—it’s a foundational component and a necessary constraint. However, browsers—often seen as immovable—are merely one implementation of the user‑agent component, and we can imagine alternatives with different properties.

Forget “No Code.” Adios “Low Code.” Say hello to “Yes Code!” https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/10/20/vercel-gen-ai-vo-web-components-interface/
We chat with Lee Robinson, VP of Developer Experience at Vercel, about v0: a generative‑AI tool Vercel built that produces code for web components from a user’s textual description of a UI or interface.

What Every Developer Should Know About GPU Computing https://codeconfessions.substack.com/p/gpu-computing
A primer on GPU architecture and computing.

Deno KV internals: building a database for the modern web https://deno.com/blog/building-deno-kv
The development of Deno KV was driven by the needs of modern web development and the possibilities presented by FoundationDB. Our focus has always been on functionality, scalability, and seamless JavaScript integration. By leveraging FoundationDB’s lock‑free system and adding features like a transaction layer and speculative execution, we aimed to improve both performance and user experience.

The future of full‑stack Rails: Turbo Morph Drive https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/the-future-of-full-stack-rails-turbo-morph-drive
The “getting back into full‑stack” trend is gaining momentum. Front‑end frameworks are embracing server components, htmx is the new hot thing, and LiveView and LiveWire are taking hold in Elixir and Laravel apps, respectively. And, of course, Ruby on Rails has its newer offspring, Hotwire. Let’s explore how far you can push a full‑stack approach in Rails—and what the future might hold!

Better HTTP server routing in Go 1.22 https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2023/better-http-server-routing-in-go-122/
An exciting proposal is slated for Go 1.22, enhancing the pattern‑matching capabilities of the default HTTP serving multiplexer in the net/http package. The current multiplexer (http.ServeMux) offers only rudimentary path matching, which has spawned a cottage industry of third‑party libraries that provide more powerful routing.

Deep Dives

Safe URLs 101: Spotting the Red Flags https://catonmat.net/safe-urls-101
TL;DR: You can use Browserling (built by me and my team) to check whether a URL is safe. We run browsers in the cloud on virtual machines and give you a remote connection to a browser. This lets you open any suspicious URL without risking your own device, because everything runs inside that remote browser.

We have used too many levels of abstraction and now the future looks bleak https://unixsheikh.com/articles/we-have-used-too-many-levels-of-abstractions-and-now-the-future-looks-bleak.html
A large share of so‑called experts today only know how to configure some hype‑tool, but they understand nothing about how things work at a deeper level. That’s a real challenge and a major problem for the future.

Solid.js Creator Outlines Options to Reduce JavaScript Code https://thenewstack.io/solid-js-creator-outlines-options-to-reduce-javascript-code/
Solid.js creator Ryan Carniato thinks it’s time to put JavaScript on a diet. Here’s how he recommends trimming it down.

Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17 https://blog.timac.org/2023/1019-state-of-swift-and-swiftui-ios17/
Now that iOS 17 is out, let’s analyze its built‑in apps to answer a few questions: How many binaries are in iOS 17? Which programming languages were used to develop these apps? How many apps are written in Swift? What’s the split between SwiftUI and UIKit?

Write more “useless” software https://ntietz.com/blog/write-more-useless-software/
As technologists we spend our days buried in building useful things. Software engineers write code to solve real problems. Computer scientists research to produce novel, tangible results. Technical writers document actual technology, produce real documentation, and so on. The common thread is that when we do technical work, it’s framed around usefulness.

What Came First, Math or Computing? https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/11/277437-what-came-first-math-or-computing/fulltext
Mathematics does not transcend computation after all. Rather, computation lies at the very heart of mathematics. So which came first, math or computing? Neither—both were invented by humans as ways to reason about the physical world. Math and computing have been intertwined for the past 40,000 years and will remain so.

Your curated GitHub Universe agenda: AI, ethics, and productivity https://github.blog/2023-10-17-your-curated-github-universe-agenda-ai-ethics-and-productivity/
Gain actionable insights about the intersection of AI and human skills, while tackling ethics, accessibility, and productivity at these GitHub Universe sessions. Related:

• Autotab – An AI‑powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts
• Llemma: An Open Language Model for Mathematics
• Can You Fall In Love With An AI?
• How AI can improve your processes – without actually using it
• How Meta is creating custom silicon for AI
• Evaluating social and ethical risks from generative AI

Fresh Finds

Node.js 21 is now available! The State of WebAssembly 2023 New Angular 17 feature: deferred loading What’s happening in Chrome Extensions? Storybook 7.5

ApexCharts: Interactive Charting and Dataviz Library Announcing TanStack Query v5 : Hooks for fetching, cache

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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.