tech/webdev magazine

February 28, 2023

The Unit in Unit Testing

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 Teklinks

Key Takeaways Unit tests should increase confidence that our code works correctly, allow us to document how our code should function, and aid in designing loosely coupled, highly cohesive software.

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February 26, 2023

What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

Sunday, February 26, 2023 Teklinks

That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text.

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February 24, 2023

February 22, 2023

Getting started with SolidJS

Wednesday, February 22, 2023 Teklinks

Solid.js is an open-source JavaScript library for building web applications focusing on performance and simplicity. It is designed to make it easy for developers to create fast, scalable, and maintainable web applications. Solid.

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February 21, 2023

How to create a video and audio recorder in React

Tuesday, February 21, 2023 Teklinks

In today’s world, where remote and hybrid work is becoming more popular, organizations need to adopt asynchronous forms of communication in their day-to-day operations. These include recording or taking notes of meetings, using more text forms of communication, etc.

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Is a Small Team or Large One Better for a Junior Dev? It Depends.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023 Teklinks

I’m coming up on one year in the accelerator program at Atomic Object. During that time, I’ve had the pleasure of working on a small team with only one other developer and on a larger team with seven developers. The dynamics working on small vs. large teams can be quite different.

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Successful Startup Founders Avoid These 2 Mistakes

Tuesday, February 21, 2023 Teklinks

As part of Atomic’s gratis consulting practice, I speak with three or four early-stage startup founders each month. These founders want to understand how to engage with a firm like Atomic to build some or all of their products. I’ve done this for a few years now.

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Automate your releases on GitHub.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023 Teklinks

So, what are releases? Packaging/bundling software and making it available for a broader audience for download and use. Why use them? To distribute the software (Binary distribution). To keep track of type and amount of changes. To follow Semantic versioning practices.

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February 19, 2023

Minimal TypeScript Crash Course For React

Sunday, February 19, 2023 Teklinks

Even if you haven’t worked with TypeScript yet, you probably heard about it. It’s seen vast adoption in the React world in the past years. As of today, almost all React jobs seem to require TypeScript knowledge. So, many React devs ask themselves: Do I really need to learn TypeScript?

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February 17, 2023

useSignal() Is The Future of Web Frameworks

Friday, February 17, 2023 Teklinks

The key difference between Signals and State is that Signals return a getter and a setter, whereas non-reactive systems return a value (and a setter.) (Some reactive systems return a getter/setter together, and some as two separate references, but the idea is the same.

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The hardest conversation ever

Friday, February 17, 2023 Teklinks

I've tried to write this post as a note, stopped, expanded, asked for feedback and had to put it out as a form of catharsis. I've added a detailed chapter to my book about hyper growth, layoffs and tools that hopefully won't need to be used.

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Introducing Qwik

Friday, February 17, 2023 Teklinks

Websites send JavaScript to the browser to provide interactivity. The amount of JavaScript downloaded to the browser is going up every year, as the complexity of websites goes up. Most JavaScript frameworks download and execute all of the code at once.

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February 16, 2023

Why writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

Thursday, February 16, 2023 Teklinks

Picture this: it’s a work day at an enterprise payments processing company, and there is a critical data engineering task that needs to be completed. In this case, I’m the data engineer who needs to finish the task, but I am missing information necessary for my data model to be finished.

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February 15, 2023

Tips for Handling Stressful Life Transitions

Wednesday, February 15, 2023 Teklinks

It would be redundant at this point to say that the past few years have been rough. We’ve had disease, war, environmental disaster, political tension, you name it. To be graduating college and moving on to a life with a 9-to-5 job in the middle of it has created for me an odd dissonance between the world outside and the uncertain future I am trying to build. The life transitions are seemingly endless!

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February 14, 2023

February 13, 2023

A Comprehensive Guide to Distributed Caching

Monday, February 13, 2023 Teklinks

An essential website requires a web server to receive requests and a database to write or read data. However, this simple setup will only scale once you optimise your database or change the overall database strategy if you receive millions of requests per second.

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Unlock New Possibilities with Hybrid Rendering

Monday, February 13, 2023 Teklinks

Since the initial launch of Astro 1.0, developers have had to choose between generating static (SSG) or server (SSR) output. Static websites offer incredible performance by building your pages ahead-of-time. Servers leverage their dynamic power to generate HTML on-demand, unique for every request.

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Release strategies

Monday, February 13, 2023 Teklinks

Releasing means to put in front of our customers the new features of our software, we usually think we are doing that through our deployments. Although that’s not necessarily true.

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February 10, 2023

A Historical Reference of React Criticism

Friday, February 10, 2023 Teklinks

There have been a number of criticisms levied at the React project over the years, some of them handled and some of them still wavering in the wind. In this post, I’ll summarize the ones that are most prominent in my memory as a way of maintaining a record (primarily for my own use but maybe you’ll find it useful too).

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Resumable React: How To Use React Inside Qwik

Friday, February 10, 2023 Teklinks

Did you know you can leverage almost the entirety of the React ecosystem inside a Qwik application? Basically, you can build React applications, without ever loading React in the user's browser. Sounds too good to be true? Let’s see how this works.

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February 8, 2023

When to Quit

Wednesday, February 08, 2023 Teklinks

WWhen do you give up? I’ve been trying to answer that question for myself for the past few years. Accountability can be scary, and it’s hard to know when to create accountability (by setting goals) or to let yourself focus elsewhere.

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Top 9 software architecture tools

Wednesday, February 08, 2023 Teklinks

Diagramming software architecture provides several benefits to how we communicate complexity. Well-thought-out diagrams give engineering teams an enhanced understanding of the design and plan for future development whilst identifying potential issues.

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February 7, 2023

Modularizing React Applications with Established UI Patterns

Tuesday, February 07, 2023 Teklinks

Established UI patterns are often underutilized in the frontend development world, despite their proven effectiveness in solving complex problems in UI design. This article explores the application of established UI building patterns to the React world, with a refactoring journey code example to showcase the benefits.

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Node + SWC make a lightning fast typescript runtime

Tuesday, February 07, 2023 Teklinks

This post covers speeding up the startup part of runtime. The other part - how fast the code is actually running - remains constant (and fast), since it’s javascript being run in all cases. Typescript is a great, but it comes at a cost.

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The technology behind GitHub’s new code search

Tuesday, February 07, 2023 Teklinks

From launching our technology preview of the new and improved code search experience a year ago, to the public beta we released at GitHub Universe last November, there’s been a flurry of innovation and dramatic changes to some of the core GitHub product experiences around how we, as developers, fi

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February 6, 2023

Why I Quit a $450,000 Engineering Job at Netflix

Monday, February 06, 2023 Teklinks

Golden handcuffs — when you stay at a job that you’d rather quit only for the money. I thought I was going to stay at Netflix forever. Top of market pay. Freedom and responsibility. Unlimited PTO. What more could you ask for?

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Measuring Page Speed With Lighthouse

Monday, February 06, 2023 Teklinks

How can we ensure that our pages are loading at top speed? The answer is to measure them regularly with Lighthouse and CI/CD. Page speed matters more than you think. According to research by Google, the probability of users staying on your site plummets as the loading speed slows down.

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5 tips for prioritizing Dependabot alerts

Monday, February 06, 2023 Teklinks

Dependabot alerts can give you a superpower–the ability to secure your project by keeping dependency-based vulnerabilities out of your code. However, while all potential vulnerabilities can be an issue and warrant attention, not all vulnerabilities pose equal risk to your project.

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February 2, 2023

Dynamic micro frontends with Nx and React

Thursday, February 02, 2023 Teklinks

When there are a lot of teams on the project, when dynamic frontend expansion is necessary, and when a rebuild of the entire project is not an option, the concept of Micro Frontends comes into play in conjunction with Dynamic Module Federation.

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