tech/webdev magazine

April 27, 2023

Jira Anti-Patterns

Thursday, April 27, 2023 Teklinks

If you ask people to come up with popular attributes for “Agile” or “agility,” Scrum and Jira will likely be among the top ten featured. Moreover, in any discussion about the topic, someone will mention that using Scrum running on top of Jira does not make an organization agile.

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Why Grafana Needs OpenTelemetry

Thursday, April 27, 2023 Teklinks

Grafana is often considered to be the hands-down most popular observability platform for data visualization. OpenTelemetry has emerged as a key open source component to lend compatibility among the different observability platforms.

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April 26, 2023

Socket Supply wants to replace the cloud with peer-to-peer apps

Wednesday, April 26, 2023 Teklinks

Socket Supply Co. is launching Socket Runtime, an open-source runtime that aims to replace cloud datacenters and servers with peer-to-peer apps. It sounds like something the character Richard Hendriks would tout in HBO’s Silicon Valley show — I just watched its full six seasons. And hopefully this turns out better than Pied Piper, though it seems like Socket Supply is no less ambitious as a startup. It also sounds like the blather around Web3, but it’s not.

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Exploring The Potential Of Web Workers For Multithreading On The Web

Wednesday, April 26, 2023 Teklinks

Multithreading is an important technique used in modern software development to enhance the performance and responsiveness of applications. However, it’s not a common practice on the web due to the single-threaded nature of JavaScript. To overcome this limitation, Web Workers were introduced as a way to enable this technique in web applications.

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Custom Training of Large Language Models (LLMs): A Detailed Guide With Code Samples

Wednesday, April 26, 2023 Teklinks

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have gained significant attention due to their incredible capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, to tailor an LLM to specific tasks or domains, custom training is necessary. This article offers a detailed, step-by-step guide on custom training LLMs, complete with code samples and examples.

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April 24, 2023

Why You Don't Need Signals in React

Monday, April 24, 2023 Teklinks

In the world of web frontend development, signals have become a popular topic. At their core, signals are used to represent changes in state over time. Some developers have discussed the potential of using signals in conjunction with React.

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Are meetings making you less productive?

Monday, April 24, 2023 Teklinks

For years, we in tech have grumbled about meetings. According to a study from SurveyMonkey, 32% of people think “this meeting could have been an email” all or most of the time. Sometimes we get roped into meetings with a dozen or more people without really knowing why we’re there.

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Adopting an API Maturity Model to Accelerate Innovation

Monday, April 24, 2023 Teklinks

Key Takeaways A common side effect of digital transformation is addressing the problem of API maturity With widespread API acceptance, you begin to get API sprawl. API sprawl results when you have an unplanned and unmanaged proliferation of APIs to address day-to-day business issues.

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April 22, 2023

Too Many Meetings Isn’t Necessarily a Problem to Fix

Saturday, April 22, 2023 Teklinks

In a recent sprint retrospective, our development and design team unanimously flagged “too many meetings” as the number one thing to fix. (I’m guessing you are nodding in agreement as you read this.) The quality of the meetings wasn’t an issue.

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Building a blog with Next.js 13 and React Server Components

Saturday, April 22, 2023 Teklinks

I've been tinkering with this website and the Next.js 13 App Router for a while now, and it's been a great experience, especially in the last few months. But I've seen some confusion around how to use the new features and React Server Components, so I wrote up an outline on building this website.

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April 21, 2023

How To Design An Effective User Onboarding Flow

Friday, April 21, 2023 Teklinks

You’ve built an amazing SaaS product. It’s only a matter of time before users flock to it in droves. Right? Unfortunately, the dropoff and inactivity rate can be high with apps. One way to overcome this challenge is by designing an onboarding process that helps users recognize its potential and motivates them to use it. In this article, you will learn how, with the help of Feathery, to design an effective user onboarding flow for your app.

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How Adding a Delivery Lead Changed Our Project

Friday, April 21, 2023 Teklinks

How did adding a Delivery Lead changed our software development project? Well first, let me give you some context. I am currently on a medium-to-large project with four to seven developers at any one time.

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Buying a bicycle using Playwright

Friday, April 21, 2023 Teklinks

There is a time in every cyclist's life when they decide to change their bike. This year I felt it was my turn to do so. That's why I used e2e testing, wrote Telegram bots, and set up GH Actions. This year I decided I wanted a new bicycle.

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April 19, 2023

Breaking React Query's API on purpose

Wednesday, April 19, 2023 Teklinks

Designing APIs for library interfaces is a pretty hard thing to do. You want your APIs to be flexible and cater to all needs. At the same time, you'd want them to be minimal and intuitive to avoid a steep learning curve.

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An example of LLM prompting for programming

Wednesday, April 19, 2023 Teklinks

My account of an internal chat with Xu Hao, where he shows how he drives ChatGPT to produce useful self-tested code. His initial prompt primes the LLM with an implementation strategy (chain of thought prompting).

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April 17, 2023

A Guide for Building Open-Source Communities

Monday, April 17, 2023 Teklinks

Open-source communities play a pivotal role in the creation and development of software projects. This is the common consensus amongst developers, but building a collaborative, inclusive, and innovative community is no easy feat.

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The people most affected by the tech layoffs

Monday, April 17, 2023 Teklinks

So far, the current wave of tech layoffs has directly affected more than 153,000 people in 2023. But it’s had a disproportionate impact on women, people of color, and people in the United States on H1-B visas.

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How to Weave Git Repositories Together into a Monorepo

Monday, April 17, 2023 Teklinks

So you have a bunch of Git repositories for individual projects and you want to bring them together into a monorepo. Maybe you want to share code without constantly publishing dependencies. Maybe you want to simplify testing or deploy everything together with infrastructure-as-code.

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April 11, 2023

Load Testing for 2022 Wrapped

Tuesday, April 11, 2023 Teklinks

Wrapped is Spotify’s global annual year-end campaign that celebrates our listeners with a personalized review of their listening habits over the past year. Last year, with more than 150 million unique engaged users across more than 111 markets, the Wrapped engineering team had the extraordinary challenge of supporting traffic across many regions and from different devices to ensure the Wrapped experience was a smooth one.

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Build faster with Buck2: Our open source build system

Tuesday, April 11, 2023 Teklinks

Buck2, Meta’s open source large-scale build system, is now publicly available via the Buck2 website and the Buck2 GitHub repository. While it shares some commonalities with other build systems (like Buck1 and Bazel), Buck2 is a from-scratch rewrite.

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April 10, 2023

Don’t Let Your Design System Dictate Your Design Process

Monday, April 10, 2023 Teklinks

Design systems are an essential component of modern design. They provide consistency and structure to the development process. However, there is a growing concern that relying too heavily on design systems can be limiting, leading to cookie-cutter designs that lack creativity and innovation.

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HTTP vs Messaging for Microservices Communications

Monday, April 10, 2023 Teklinks

This article will look at a comparison of HTTP and messaging to see which means of communications will work best for their microservices communications. Microservices architecture has gained popularity recently as a technique for creating sophisticated and scalable software systems.

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Using TRPC in Astro and its (React) islands

Monday, April 10, 2023 Teklinks

I started using TRPC in some Next.js projects at work, and really liked the end-to-end type safety this gives you as a developer when working with APIs. So I decided to also implement TRPC on my own website, which is using Astro.

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April 8, 2023

The Future of AI-driven Design and Development, Today

Saturday, April 08, 2023 Teklinks

Let’s first take a look at section generation. In Builder, we ask you for a prompt and a style. Enter anything you want to create for the prompt, like “a homepage hero section” “a signup page”, “a navigation bar”.

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Keep Your Team’s Feedback Flowing With 5-15s

Saturday, April 08, 2023 Teklinks

With the Great Resignation and “quiet quitting” trending, it’s more important than ever to stay connected with your team. However, with a looming recession and the constant reports of layoffs in big tech, you might find your attention elsewhere.

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Building a collaborative asynchronous work environment

Saturday, April 08, 2023 Teklinks

Is there anything more annoying to hear when you’re elbows deep in a hairy bug? When I was working as a software engineer a few years ago, I remember putting on headphones with no music, just to keep people in the office from disturbing me when I really needed to focus.

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April 6, 2023

Journey to Event Driven

Thursday, April 06, 2023 Teklinks

Before delving into different programming models for Event-Driven Architecture, let’s first try to understand what exactly Event-Driven Architecture is. Event-Driven Architecture is an architecture paradigm that uses events to communicate among decoupled services.

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April 5, 2023

SudoLang: A Powerful Pseudocode Programming Language for LLMs

Wednesday, April 05, 2023 Teklinks

Pseudocode is a fantastic way to sketch programs using informal, natural language, without worrying about specific syntax. It’s like sketching your thoughts before diving into the nitty-gritty of coding. It’s useful for brainstorming and communicating ideas with others.

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April 4, 2023

What is a developer experience team?

Tuesday, April 04, 2023 Teklinks

Despite the growing number of developer experience teams in tech companies, these groups don't yet share a common framework for how they should be run. This is apparent both in their naming and their varying scopes of work: we see developer productivity teams, engineering effectiveness, and engineering enablement, and we see some groups focus more on tools and others more on people.

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How to use ChatGPT in product management

Tuesday, April 04, 2023 Teklinks

I’m sure you have already heard of ChatGPT with the recent hype and sky-rocketing social media interest. While it can be interesting to ask a chatbot random questions in natural human language, I’d like to explore how we might use ChatGPT for product management in apps.

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April 3, 2023

Your tech toolbox: The middle ground between tech chaos and rigidity

Monday, April 03, 2023 Teklinks

Our team has been doing only spontaneous code review for a good while – on commits in the master branch that happen to pique one's interest. This week, we started systematically reviewing all non-trivial features, as an experiment, but this is still after it's pushed to master and very likely after it has been deployed to production.

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A Complete Visual Guide to Understanding the Node.js Event Loop

Monday, April 03, 2023 Teklinks

We will begin with a refresher on asynchronous programming in JavaScript. Although JavaScript finds its usage in web, mobile, and desktop applications, it’s important to remember that in its most basic form, JavaScript is a synchronous, blocking, single-threaded language.

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April 1, 2023

Migrate to Vite from Create React App (CRA)

Saturday, April 01, 2023 Teklinks

A quick migration guide to Vite from Create React App, because (apart from Next.js) Vite is the natural successor of CRA for creating a modern React application as SPA. First, install Vite and all React related libraries (here: Vite's React Plugin) as development dependencies.

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Yarn Workspaces: A Solution to Organizing a Monorepo

Saturday, April 01, 2023 Teklinks

A monorepo is a way for software development teams to store code for several projects in the same repository. Monorepos are nice because they keep all the code related to a project in the same place and offer a high degree of flexibility when it comes to organization.

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What’s different about these layoffs

Saturday, April 01, 2023 Teklinks

It’s an anxious time to work in tech. According to one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023. This is scary. People have lost their livelihoods.

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