2024.08.26 - DotJs 2025: Rediscovering JavaScript's Future

Title: 2024.08.26 - DotJs 2025: Rediscovering JavaScript's Future

Monorepo developer & Semantic Web & Technological Progress & 慈善 & 纯粹 & 透儒

This Week’s Highlights

DotJs 2025: Rediscovering JavaScript's Future https://marmelab.com/blog/2024/08/22/dotjs-2024.html
After a five‑year hiatus, the dotJS Conference made a triumphant return at the iconic Folies Bergère in Paris. Marmelab had the pleasure of attending the event and we were thrilled to be back. From the stunning venue to the captivating talks and valuable networking opportunities, the conference exceeded our expectations.

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Stripe's monorepo developer environment https://blog.nelhage.com/post/stripe-dev-environment/
This post is an attempt to record the salient features of that environment as I remember it. I’ll also try to reflect on the context, constraints, and motivations for some of these choices; while I think they were good choices in context, they were deeply informed by the business and technical context, and other teams will require variations.

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Being on The Semantic Web is easy, and, frankly, well worth the bother https://csvbase.com/blog/13
The Semantic Web is the old Web 3.0. Before “Web 3.0” meant crypto‑whatnot, it meant “machine‑readable websites”. I thought this concept hadn't really gone anywhere but it turns out that The Semantic Web (best read in a very deep voice) is now very widely adopted.

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What’s Really Going On in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-going-on-in-machine-learning-some-minimal-models/
It could have been that machine learning would somehow “crack systems”, and find simple representations for what they do. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on at all. Instead what seems to be happening is that machine learning is in a sense just “hitching a ride” on the general richness of the computational universe. It’s not “specifically building up behavior one needs”; rather what it’s doing is to harness behavior that’s “already out there” in the computational universe. Related:

• How PyTorch powers AI training and inference
• Classifying all of the PDFs on the internet

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10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing https://www.honest-broker.com/p/10-reasons-why-technological-progress
The divergence was easy to ignore at first. We’re so familiar with useful tech that many of us were slow to notice when upgrades turned into downgrades. But the evidence from the last couple years is impossible to dismiss. And we can’t blame COVID (or other extraneous factors) any longer. Technology is increasingly making matters worse, not better—and at an alarming pace.

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Deep Reads

Web2 is inevitably a dead end; Web3 is the destination: Embrace Web3 https://ourai.ws/posts/web3-is-the-future-for-frontend-engineers-part-2/
During the early days of the bootcamp, I often heard people ask, “Can I find a Web3 job after finishing?” Some even cling to the old mindset of looking for a stable Web3 position… From what I see now, the Web3 industry is wildly volatile—there is no such thing as “stable.” Projects can disappear overnight; the only relatively steady corner might be exchanges. So if you want to work in Web3, you have to accept job instability, fully embrace uncertainty, and become resilient and flexible enough to learn new things quickly and efficiently to cope with constant change. As a self‑described “independent developer,” I won’t lock my income into the single option of “employment”; I’ll diversify it.

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React is (becoming) a Full‑Stack Framework https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-full-stack-framework/
React, with its addition of Server Components and Server Actions, is evolving into a full‑stack framework. Once the most popular frontend framework, it has now successfully bridged the gap between frontend and backend to reign over both sides of the chasm. I'm writing this article because the following illustration has been on my mind.

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Server‑first Web Components with DSD, HTMX, and Islands https://tympanus.net/codrops/2024/08/20/server-first-web-components-with-dsd-htmx-and-islands/
A simple yet powerful approach to Web Component server‑rendering, declarative behaviors, and JavaScript islands.

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Toasts are Bad UX https://maxschmitt.me/posts/toasts-bad-ux
The core problem is that toasts always show up far away from the user's attention.

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Is the UX‑Lite Predictive of Future Behavior? https://measuringu.com/is-the-ux-lite-predictive-of-future-behavior/
The UX‑Lite (Figure 1) is a two‑item UX questionnaire that measures perceived ease of use (PEoU) and perceived usefulness (PU). It’s essentially a miniature version of a questionnaire developed in the 1990s aptly called the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).

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Regexes Got Good: The History and Future of Regular Expressions in JavaScript https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/08/history-future-regular-expressions-javascript/
Although JavaScript regexes used to be underpowered compared to other modern flavors, numerous improvements in recent years mean that’s no longer true. Steven Levithan evaluates the history and present state of regular expressions in JavaScript with tips to make your regexes more readable, maintainable, and resilient.

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Less Is More: Principles for Simple Comments https://testing.googleblog.com/2024/08/less-is-more-principles-for-simple.html
You’re staring at a wall of code resembling a Gordian knot of Klingon. What’s making it worse? A sea of code comments so long that you’d need a bathroom break just to read them all! Let’s fix that.

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Roblox is Already the Biggest Game in the World. Why Can't It Make a Profit (And How Can It)? https://www.matthewball.co/all/roblox2024
So yes, Roblox is unquestionably “working.” Yet Roblox is also unprofitable. Very unprofitable. What’s more, Roblox’s losses continue to swell because its impressive rate of revenue growth has been outpaced by that of its costs. Over the last four quarters, Roblox’s income from operations was ( 3.2 B, representing a ‑38 % profit margin). During the company’s four pre‑pandemic quarters, income was ( 508 MM, for a ‑13 % profit margin). Put another way, revenues are now 6.2× greater, but losses are 18× greater. This is not the typical path of a company, least of all a tech company that is a platform and at Roblox’s scale. So what gives and what’s the significance of the answer?

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Fresh Finds

50 TypeScript F*ck Ups Milkdown: A plugin‑driven framework to build WYSIWYG Markdown editor. Hot Page – a graphical site builder Zen is the best way to browse the web. Github上的超棒的嵌入式项目之——宠物跟踪器 有什么软件官方已经停更了或者公司已经倒闭了，但是你还在用并且觉得很好用的？

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Products and Others

“透儒”与“陋儒” https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/5J5WNf801OF9yo0-vzibJA
The tradition of valuing literature and study is deeply rooted in Chinese civilization. Yet on the vast field of scholarship, many till the soil, and the harvest varies widely from person to person. This gives rise to the distinction between “transparent scholars” (透儒) and “crude scholars” (陋儒). “Transparency” here means not only depth of knowledge but also clarity in how one lives and engages with the world. A transparent scholar reads widely, masters the material, and can synthesize it, applying what they learn to life and practice.

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蓝态张华：最究竟的慈善，莫过于拯救心灵 https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tkAW-RvH2KNZjCLlZbpN5g
He says: “I just want to live with clarity.” It’s often said that the two hardest things in the world are: (1) putting ideas into other people’s heads, and (2) getting people to actually …

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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.