tech/webdev magazine

January 30, 2025

Picking a state management library for a React app used by millions (and why we went with MobX)

Thursday, January 30, 2025 Teklinks

Photoroom is an image editor used by tens of millions of users around the world. As our web app team was crossing 5-developers mark, we found ourselves running into more and more of the same issues: the whole app was rendering too often and we were frequently dealing with an endless list of useEffect dependencies.

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Introducing Swark: Automatic Architecture Diagrams from Code

Thursday, January 30, 2025 Teklinks

Software architecture is hard to get right. Misaligned teams, unclear diagrams, and time-consuming processes often result in frustration and suboptimal design decisions. As engineering teams embrace a decentralized, collaborative approach to architecture, the stakes grow even higher.

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January 28, 2025

Building effective agents

Tuesday, January 28, 2025 Teklinks

Over the past year, we've worked with dozens of teams building large language model (LLM) agents across industries. Consistently, the most successful implementations weren't using complex frameworks or specialized libraries. Instead, they were building with simple, composable patterns.

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January 27, 2025

Become expert in React Query

Monday, January 27, 2025 Teklinks

I've used React Query for a while and built cool things with it. I’m writing this post to my younger self. This post is for people who have already touched React Query, but not leveraged it's full power. If you’ve not worked with yet, go try it out first.

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Stop Using .d.ts Files in TypeScript

Monday, January 27, 2025 Teklinks

Matt Pocock on X, is telling everyone to stop using .d.ts files in your TypeScript projects forever. Here is a tweet from his reinforcing his position: Keep in mind, this is Matt Pocock, the TypeScript wizard, so this post should be taken seriously.

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January 24, 2025

Resolving an unusual wifi issue

Friday, January 24, 2025 Teklinks

Late last year, I started experiencing some unusual intermittent connection issues on my Desktop. In general, I had a stable connection with average latency; however, at (seemingly) random times throughout the week, I would start experiencing sudden 2000ms+ latency spikes every couple of seconds.

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Architecture is a game of constraint satisfaction.

Friday, January 24, 2025 Teklinks

In simple terms, this means that with the technology we can do something that we couldn’t do (or not as well as) before. Although it sounds rather intuitive, this insight has significant implications on our work as architects.

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January 19, 2025

Revealed: React's experimental animations API

Sunday, January 19, 2025 Teklinks

Since its inception over 12(!) years ago, there's been a glaring animation-sized hole in React's API. Over the year its closest competitors like Vue and Svelte have introduced APIs that, while not extensive, still make animations a little easier.

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Five years of React Native at Shopify

Sunday, January 19, 2025 Teklinks

Five years ago, we announced that React Native (RN) is the future of mobile at Shopify. Today, we are excited to share the progress we've made, lessons learned, and what the future holds. Over the past 5 years, we have migrated all our apps to React Native.

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January 15, 2025

Introducing TanStack Start

Wednesday, January 15, 2025 Teklinks

The best way to think about TanStack Start is that it’s a thin server layer atop the TanStack Router we already know and love; that means we don’t lose a single thing from TanStack Router.

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January 14, 2025

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

Tuesday, January 14, 2025 Teklinks

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments. This is a sequel to my review of 2023.

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Refactoring with Codemods to Automate API Changes

Tuesday, January 14, 2025 Teklinks

Refactoring is something developers do all the time—making code easier to understand, maintain, and extend. While IDEs can handle simple refactorings with just a few keystrokes, things get tricky when you need to apply changes across large or distributed codebases, especially those you don’t fully control.

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5 tips to effectively optimize INP in React

Tuesday, January 14, 2025 Teklinks

In this post, let’s consider several optimization techniques for improving Core Web Vitals metrics for sites that are built with React. We are a team of speed consultants from the Czech Republic and in this article we would like to share some experiences from the many front-end performance optimizations we did for our clients.

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Building effective agents

Tuesday, January 14, 2025 Teklinks

Over the past year, we've worked with dozens of teams building large language model (LLM) agents across industries. Consistently, the most successful implementations weren't using complex frameworks or specialized libraries. Instead, they were building with simple, composable patterns.

Full article

January 12, 2025

JavaScript Benchmarking Is a Mess

Sunday, January 12, 2025 Teklinks

I hate benchmarking code, just like any human (which, at this point, most viewers of this probably aren’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). It is much more fun to pretend that your caching of a value increased performance 1000% rather than testing to see what it did.

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You don't need Next.js

Sunday, January 12, 2025 Teklinks

My tweet about this blew up, so I thought it'd be helpful to break down exactly why we made this move. I started ComfyDeploy as an open source project (GitHub) - a full stack app with Next.js doing all the heavy lifting for both frontend and backend.

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React Router 6 Tutorial

Sunday, January 12, 2025 Teklinks

A React Router tutorial which teaches you how to use React Router 6. The code for this React Router v6 tutorial can be found over here. In order to get you started, create a new React project (e.g. create-react-app).

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January 9, 2025

An Unreasonable Amount of Time

Thursday, January 09, 2025 Teklinks

Years ago, Teller performed a magic trick.1 First, he’d have you pick a card. He would attempt to produce the card, but fail, indicating the card may have travelled elsewhere. He’d then lead you on a short walk to a nearby park, and then be inspired to dig a hole.

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Open Letter: Let's stop supply chain attack

Thursday, January 09, 2025 Teklinks

With this letter, I’m proposing some modification of the publish process of all package managers, and Github because it’s the most trusted service provider in the open-source world. Recently, one of the widely used npm packages is compromised and malicious code was distributed using it.

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What we learned copying all the best code assistants

Thursday, January 09, 2025 Teklinks

Since the beginning of Val Town, our users have been clamouring for the state-of-the-art LLM code generation experience. When we launched in 2022, it was GitHub Copilot. But soon it was ChatGPT, then Claude Artifacts, and now Bolt, Cursor, and Windsurf. We’ve been trying our best to keep up.

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January 8, 2025

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

Wednesday, January 08, 2025 Teklinks

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments. This is a sequel to my review of 2023.

Full article

January 6, 2025

My 2024 AI Engineer Roadmap List

Monday, January 06, 2025 Teklinks

Developer Tools & Platforms Frameworks / Infrastructure / Backends Supabase: An open-source Firebase alternative offering Postgres, authentication, and storage solutions.

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Message Queues in System Design

Monday, January 06, 2025 Teklinks

Doing all of this immediately, especially during peak traffic times, could slow down the customer’s experience. In this case, we have a large number of application events, and we can’t handle all of them at once.

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Your Lodash Tutorial: How To Import Lodash Libraries

Monday, January 06, 2025 Teklinks

Optimizing how we use code libraries like Lodash is a great way to avoid common problems during software development. For those of us familiar with using Lodash and other third-party libraries, we are all too familiar with running into these common scenarios:

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