2023.11.20 - A faster web in 2024

Title: 2023.11.20 – A Faster Web in 2024

Effective software product development & 复杂度 & 稳定性 & 少熬夜 & 善护念

This Week’s Highlights

A Faster Web in 2024
https://rviscomi.dev/2023/11/a-faster-web-in-2024/
So with 2024 around the corner, I wanted to take a closer look at what it’s going to take to carry this momentum forward and continue making the web even faster. But there’s a catch. The metric we use to measure interaction responsiveness is changing in 2024. And this new metric is finding a lot of responsiveness issues that have been flying under the radar. Will we be able to meet this new challenge? Will we be able to do so while keeping pace with the performance improvements of 2023? I think so, but we’re going to need to learn some new tricks.

How Deco.cx, Brazil’s Top Front‑End Platform, Uses Deno Subhosting to Move Fast and Serve Their Clients’ Storefronts Even Faster
https://deno.com/blog/deco-cx-subhosting-serve-their-clients-storefronts-fast
Despite being around for a year and having already onboarded some of Brazil’s biggest brands, Deco.cx plans to expand beyond e‑commerce. “We want to be the web editor where you don’t have to choose between full code and no‑code,” Guilherme says. “Deno has given us the speed and flexibility to pursue these big ideas.”

Organizational Principles for Effective Software Product Development
https://sollecitom.github.io/software-product-development-blog/posts/2023/2023-11-16-organizational-principles-for-effectiveness/
I often rant about what I feel is wrong with an approach, practice, or system. Today, instead, I want to describe some principles that an effective software product development company should adopt. Why principles? Wouldn’t a detailed description of how things should work be more useful? It’d be almost impossible to write, as it’d be a colossal task. Perhaps it’d be good for a book, but definitely not for a blog post. Also, reality is multifaceted and nuanced. Everything depends on everything. Prescriptive approaches don’t cope well with dynamic situations. Principles, on the other hand, allow you to deal with uncertainty.

Will AI Render Programming Obsolete?
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/will-ai-render-programming-obsolete/
It’s exhilarating to think that, with the help of generative AI, anyone who can write can also write pr[ograms. It’s not so simple. Related:

• OpenAI’s Misalignment and Microsoft’s Gain
• Google DeepMind’s Weather AI Can Forecast Extreme Weather Faster and More Accurately
• Universe’s Key Takeaway: Innovate Better with AI‑Powered Workflows on a Single, Unified Platform
• Transforming the Future of Music Creation

Deep Reads

HTML Web Components: An Example
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components-an-example/
There are different ways to use web components. One way of using them requires JavaScript in order for them to “run” and display anything in the browser. An alternate way of using them allows you to display information/content in the browser before any JavaScript executes, and then you use web‑component‑structured JavaScript[1] to enhance what’s already on display. In an attempt to explain this more, let’s use a simplified example. Related: HTML Web Components.

Exploring V8’s Strings: Implementation and Optimizations
https://iliazeus.github.io/articles/js-string-optimizations-en/
JavaScript was always, in one way or another, a text‑manipulation language—from early web‑page HTML to modern compilers and tooling. Not a surprise, then, that quite a lot of time was spent tuning and optimizing the string‑value handling in most modern JS engines. In this article, I will focus on V8’s implementation of strings. I will demonstrate various string optimizations by beating C++ in a totally 100 % legit benchmark. Finally, I will show how these implementation details might actually perform worse in some cases, and how to deal with that.

How to Scale a Large Codebase
https://vercel.com/blog/how-to-scale-a-large-codebase
Recommendations for building and scaling large software projects.

Reducing Complexity: The Software Industry’s False Promises
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/665064842
In software development, many people praise “simplification” as a virtue and urge us to avoid and reduce complexity; however, reality tells me that such advice is highly unreliable. In fact, I think this advice is not only ineffective—it’s nonsense—and can even have negative effects. I’ll try to explain what the truth actually is.

Stability: The Hard Part Isn’t the Technology, It’s…
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/9rAhbG6lu-flNIGQEF5w0g
As someone who has caused and dealt with serious incidents, I still believe that achieving stability is not primarily a technical challenge. More precisely, the technical side—code, design, change management—has well‑established guiding ideas and principles. If you look at many post‑mortems, the improvement measures often echo similar themes. Yet turning those ideas into practice is a complex topic that requires capability, resources, and, importantly, sustained investment. There is no silver‑bullet product that, by installing a certain tool, guarantees stability.

Fresh Picks

OpenAI Announces Leadership Transition Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years – The Technology Has Become the Standard LAN Worldwide

React Datasheet Grid: A React Component to Create Beautiful Spreadsheets visx: A Collection of Expressive, Low‑Level Visualization Primitives for React Node.js CLI Apps Best Practices Prettier 3.1: New Experimental Ternary Formatting and Angular Control‑Flow Syntax!

Blender 4.0 WASM by Example Half‑Life 25th Anniversary Update

Products & Others

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft
Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it. So maybe the thing to teach isn’t a skill but a spirit. I sometimes think of what I might have been doing had I been born in a different time. The coders of the agrarian days probably fiddled with waterwheels and crop varietals; in the Newtonian era, they might have been obsessed with glass, dyes, and timekeeping.

Academician Zhang Boli: Young People Should Stay Up Less and Not Over‑Exert Themselves
https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1781964194462770975
Academician Zhang Boli says: “I’ve also noticed that many young people now love to stay up late every night, basically surviving on coffee. As a result, many of them develop cardiovascular problems in their early 40s. This is consuming life at the cost of health and is absolutely unacceptable!” “I sincerely advise these night‑owls that a double success in health and career can only be built on a healthy body.” He stresses that one must never sacrifice health for career advancement—it’s not worth promoting.

What Should We Protect?
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PDA8p9L-HzXaB-nPDnoBig
Starting tomorrow, become a newcomer: read the classics, eat seasonal local food, connect with the world sincerely, let go of self‑centeredness, seek to understand others. By understanding you, I become better; mutual understanding and empowerment is the natural order of the world.

Xi Jinping’s Speech at the Joint Welcome Banquet of U.S. Friendly Organizations
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PH8KdWD6yGVqS65ZPNwSJQ
In the long river of history, the sands that remain after the great tides are always the most valuable. No matter the circumstances…

(content truncated)

---

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.