2023.12.25 - Recapturing early-internet whimsy with HTML

Title: 2023.12.25 – Recapturing Early‑Internet Whimsy with HTML

nobuild & technical debt & 开源价值观 & 急救

This Week’s Highlights

Recapturing early‑internet whimsy with HTML https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/21/1084525/internet-whimsy-html-energy/
Modern forms of coding make most websites feel like commercial transactions. The HTML Energy movement aims to bring back the joys of the early days. Related: The “Cheap” Web, Launching Epic Web.

ONCE #1 is entirely #nobuild for the front‑end https://world.hey.com/dhh/once-1-is-entirely-nobuild-for-the-front-end-ce56f6d7
I don’t even mind having had to travel a long way to get here. I did webpack, I’ve done esbuild, I’ve done all of it along the way. But I’m a firm believer that complexity ought to be a temporary price we pay for progress. The final destination, for me, has always been simplicity. And nothing is simpler than sending a plain‑text JavaScript or CSS file straight to a browser and watching the magic play. Related: Vanilla JS doesn’t scale.

All code is technical debt https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/all-code-is-technical-debt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38694051
As developers, it’s tempting to think we’re creating value by writing code. However, the value of software comes from its usefulness to users, not the elegance of our code. Poorly written code that does a useful task is more valuable than beautifully implemented code that does a useless one. Because of this, we need to ensure we’re working on valuable features. While traditional development processes assume an omnipotent product owner who somehow knows the relative value of features, that isn’t really the case.

10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2024/1/278891-10-things-software-developers-should-learn-about-learning/fulltext
Learning is necessary for software developers. Change is perpetual: new technologies are frequently invented, and old technologies are repeatedly updated. Thus, developers do not learn to program just once—over the course of their careers they will learn many new programming languages and frameworks. Related:

• Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays
• What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
• My belief system for software product development

How it’s Made: Interacting with Gemini through multimodal prompting https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/12/how-its-made-gemini-multimodal-prompting.html
In this post we’ll explore some of the prompting approaches we used in our “Hands‑on with Gemini” demo video. We’ll soon be rolling out Gemini for people to try in Google AI Studio, our free, web‑based developer tool where you’ll be able to try your own multimodal prompts with Gemini. We hope this guide of starter prompts and ideas inspires you to explore your own concepts. Related:

• 2023: A year of groundbreaking advances in AI and computing
• What is UI 2.0? Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann explains
• Think with AI: How to Use a Custom GPT as a Thinking Partner
• AI debugging at Meta with HawkEy
• v0: The AI‑Powered Component Creator Opens Up
• PowerInfer: Fast Large Language Model Serving with a Consumer‑grade GPU
• OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today

In‑Depth Reading

WeChat Business Development Methods and Practices https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/668009310
Cut through the fog and get to the essence; a ten‑thousand‑word essay that helps you master business development. What is a business, and how do you uncover its value? This article explores several angles on effective business development; the first part introduces the topic and invites discussion and improvement.

How Meta built the infrastructure for Threads https://engineering.fb.com/2023/12/19/core-infra/how-meta-built-the-infrastructure-for-threads/
A huge amount of infrastructure goes into serving Threads. Because of space limitations, we’ll only showcase two existing components that played an important role: ZippyDB, our distributed key/value datastore, and Async, our aptly named asynchronous serverless‑function platform.

How we organize and get things done with SERVICEOWNERS https://github.blog/2023-12-19-how-we-organize-and-get-things-done-with-serviceowners/
Take CODEOWNERS and GitHub teams to the next level. Learn how GitHub engineering solves the age‑old problem of “who owns what.”

Alternate Futures for “Web Components” https://blog.carlana.net/post/2023/web-component-alternative-futures/
It seems like Web Components are always just on the cusp of finally catching on. They’re like the “Linux on the desktop” moment for frontend nerds. I keep reading the latest articles about Web Components as they bubble up on my social feeds, hoping I missed something that finally gives them substance, but I always end up disappointed.

Rethinking React best practices https://frontendmastery.com/posts/rethinking-react-best-practices/
A deep dive into the evolution of React from a client‑side view library to an application architecture.

I Love Ruby https://eliseshaffer.com/2023/12/18/i-love-ruby/
I’ve done a lot in my career—from business‑support software to large backend systems and even robotics. If there’s been a consistent through‑line, it’s the Ruby programming language.

Fresh Finds

🚀 Front‑end DApp development tool, Ant Design Web3 1.0 released 🎉🎉🎉 26 Other Web Development Terms You May Not Have Heard Of date‑fns v3 is out!: Modern JavaScript date utility library Puck: The visual editor for React. PostgREST: Providing HTML Content Using Htmx Wasm3 entering a minimal maintenance phase

Figma and Adobe are abandoning our proposed merger Wireflow: Free Wire / User Flow Tool

Products & Others

Open‑Source Values: How Human Civilization’s Evolution Can Coexist with Modern Business https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20231222A01YYZ00
Values are the underlying logic that guide human behavior. The values of open source include dedication, gratitude, openness, courage, the pursuit of continuous improvement, and fair compensation for labor. At first glance, this philosophy seems to echo Aristotle’s virtue ethics, but in fact…

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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.