2023.11.06 - The product manager role is a mistake

Title: 2023.11.06 – The Product Manager Role Is a Mistake

Web Components & Internet Artifacts & Architecture of LLM Applications & 孕育生命 (& “nurturing life”) & 大国总理 (& “prime minister of a great power”)

This Week’s Highlights

The product manager role is a mistake https://sollecitom.github.io/software-product-development-blog/posts/2023/2023-10-21-product-manager-role-is-a-mistake/
Is there any alternative, then, to finding, hiring, putting in charge, and coping with a tremendous person? If you’re not pushed by greatness and craftsmanship, can you not build a successful product company? Good news is, you can! There’s an alternative model that works. You hire everyday great people. Each one needs to be great at something, obsessed by their craft, and driven by quality. You then put them together in a team, without individual responsibilities, ensuring that there’s minimal overlap in areas of greatness. And you pay them to have fun doing what they love doing, in exchange for putting their time and skills at the service of your company. These people are still going to be challenging, stubborn, egotistic, quirky, and volatile. But give them good problems to solve, allow them to do great work, and they’ll fully dedicate themselves to making your company successful.

Blinded By the Light DOM https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2023/11/01/blinded-by-the-light-dom/
For a while now, Web Components (which I’m not going to capitalize again, you’re welcome) have been one of those things that pop up in the general web conversation, seem intriguing, and then fade into the background again.

Internet Artifacts https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/
You may touch the artifacts. The websites on display work—even the ones that used Flash!

Machine learning of GUIs at scale https://austinhenley.com/blog/machinelearningguis.html
Imagine if you could say to ChatGPT, “Go try out my app for 5 minutes and let me know what you think about the getting‑started experience.” Or if you could ask questions like… Does my iOS app’s GUI follow common practices? Is it accessible? What are some examples of apps that use these specific UI controls on the same screen? If we had a rich database of app GUIs and the right ML models, then we could answer these questions and build a copilot tool that “understands” the visual and interaction designs of GUIs, not just the code!

The architecture of today’s LLM applications https://github.blog/2023-10-30-the-architecture-of-todays-llm-applications/
Here’s everything you need to know to build your first LLM app and problem spaces you can start exploring today. Related:

• Leveraging AI to empower all developers at GitHub Universe 2023
• Humans at the heart of generative AI
• OpenAI DevDay, Opening Keynote
• Teachers in India help Microsoft Research design AI tool for creating great classroom content
• Achieving Scale Through Simplicity + the Future of AI

Deep Reads

How to Render Word Documents in the Web https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/663256825
Many developers, like me, rarely use Word and stick to Markdown. I’ve been using Markdown since 2007, back when almost nobody knew about it, alongside alternatives like AsciiDoc, Textile, reStructuredText, etc. However, for non‑developers Word is far more common, and it handles complex tables much better—for example, the one below—so we’d like Amis to support rendering Word documents as well.

Two Years of Open‑Source, Ideals Ultimately Defeated by Reality https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/664734009
In September 2021 I got back in touch with my former boss, “Ping Ge,” who had just graduated and was looking for a chance to apply his skills. He’d spent a year rewriting an old PHP‑based backend code generator in Go and wanted to build a configuration‑driven application engine. He needed someone to develop the front‑end – the UI engine – for this engine, so we clicked instantly. Thus began my two‑year‑and‑one‑month open‑source journey (the project is called Yao, and I’m responsible for its UI engine, XGen). After YAO’s release, I wrote the first intro article and promoted it on various forums worldwide; within a month it amassed 3 k stars and topped GitHub Trending in the Golang category. At the time we were full of confidence, thinking we’d become the next Vercel of the open‑source world.

front‑end complexity is all in your head https://erock.prose.sh/front-end-complexity
Tech stacks don’t solve complexity. Every specialty must have complexity or else specialization wouldn’t exist. The complexity doesn’t live inside our tools; it lives inside us. Humans are the progenitors of complexity. Tools inherit the complexity of their creators. There is no escape—simplicity is an ideal that is always out of reach.

You’re Gonna Need A Bigger Browser https://berjon.com/bigger-browser/
As with the rest of this series, my goal isn’t to reinvent everything from the ground up. In many cases we can obtain a different system by using the same pieces in a different configuration or by adding a novel primitive. My focus is on inviting you to think about what could use shaking up. In this post I’m questioning some aspects that strike me as worth exploring for change; where needed there will be a follow‑up post going into greater detail.

The proper design process in web development https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-proper-design-process-in-web-development.html
Today web developers are told that in order to do so‑called modern web development they need to use JavaScript frameworks because they are an essential part of modern front‑end web development. What a load of rubbish! Related: Elevating Software – The Indispensable Role of UX.

Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – Tailwind CSS https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-part-8/
Since its inception, Tailwind CSS has become a super popular way to style web projects. This time we will be taking a look at the architecture that powers it and what can be done to improve it.

Goodbye, Node.js Buffer https://sindresorhus.com/blog/goodbye-nodejs-buffer
It’s time to move from Buffer to Uint8Array.

Why I Won’t Use Next.js https://www.epicweb.dev/why-i-wont-use-nextjs https://leerob.io/blog/using-nextjs
In this post I’m arguing why I won’t be using Next.js because I think Remix is a better tool for creating excellent user experiences. That doesn’t mean you’re a failure or a bad person if you use Next.js. (That said, I do think you’d be happier and more productive with Remix; otherwise I wouldn’t bother writing this.)

Why Stack Overflow Is Embracing Svelte https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/10/31/why-stack-overflow-is-embracing-svelte/
Overflow joins Ryan for a conversation about all things front‑end, including how he joined Stack with a mandate to modernize the front‑end UI and why Stack Overflow developers are such big fans of Svelte. Related: Svelte Flow – a customizable Svelte component for building node‑based editors and interactive diagrams by the creators of React Flow.

Full‑Stack Tao: Start With the Domain [https://alexkondov.com/full-stack-tao-start-with-the-domain/](https://alexkondov.com/full-st

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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.