TLDR Web Dev 2024-03-28

Apple Pay explained 📲, modern CSS guide 📖, open-source code copilot 🤖

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Articles & Tutorials

How Uber Optimized their Hadoop Clusters (6 minute read)

Uber faced challenges with its massive HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) deployment, which was lowering the efficiency of its clusters. To fix this, its team modified settings to increase data transfer rates and parallelism. They also improved its HDFS Balancer algorithm to prioritize data movement to the least utilized nodes and use percentiles instead of fixed thresholds for better target selection. This led to much better cluster utilization and efficiency.

`any` Considered Harmful, Except For These Cases (5 minute read)

Use of the “any” type is discouraged because it disables TypeScript's safety features, making code prone to errors and harder to maintain. However, there are some cases where using “any” is the right solution. It should be used in arguments when defining generic functions that should work with any function type. "any" can also be used with type assertions to work around TypeScript's limitations to accurately model functions that return different types based on input.

What You Need to Know about Modern CSS - Spring 2024 Edition (22 minute read)

This guide lists all the new additions to CSS, like nesting, container queries, view transitions, and :has(). Each feature comes with an explainer, demo, code example, and a quick bit of detail as to why you should care about them.
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Opinions & Advice

The one about the web developer job market (26 minute read)

The web developer job market is in a rough condition and likely to worsen. Mass layoffs are happening despite a supposed AI boom. If the bubble bursts, the job market will further decline. The stock market has been rewarding layoffs and activist investors want to lower developer pay. LLMs enable faster development with fewer developers, if you don't care about software quality.

How to convert your yearly review to a promotion in big tech (6 minute read)

To maximize your promotion chances, maintain a "brag document" of accomplishments, seek regular feedback, and understand your manager's style to properly “manage up”. During annual reviews, write a concise, value-driven, and impact-focused self-review.

Is Europe Better Than America for Working in Tech? (8 minute read)

Europe offers a superior working environment for tech professionals compared to the United States. Europeans enjoy shorter work weeks, more vacation time, and benefit from a cultural emphasis on leisure. Europe's public transit systems offer convenient commutes and intercity travel compared to car-dependent US cities.
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Launches & Tools

Continue (GitHub Repo)

Continue is an open-source autopilot for VS Code and JetBrains. It can answer coding questions, edit files using natural language, generate files from scratch, and more.

Arco Design Vue (GitHub Repo)

A Vue.js 3 UI Library based on Arco Design. It comes with 60+ components and is TypeScript-friendly.

Maizzle (Website)

Maizzle is a framework that helps developers quickly build HTML emails with Tailwind CSS and email-specific post-processing. It is very customizable and comes with free open-source email templates.
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Miscellaneous

Investing in Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide for Startups (22 minute read)

Startups often neglect internal documentation. This can lead to lost knowledge and worse efficiency during crises. The problem worsens as companies grow. To fix this problem, startups need to change their documentation culture. Leaders should set the standard and documentation should be expected in role profiles. Docs should be properly organized and owned by people or teams.

Digital wallets and the “only Apple Pay does this” mythology (5 minute read)

Apple Pay (and other digital wallets) use DPANs (Device Primary Account Numbers) instead of actual credit card numbers (FPAN) to protect customer information and reduce cross-merchant tracking. While DPANs change for different merchants, they remain the same for subsequent transactions with the same merchant. Apple Pay technically doesn't completely prevent individual stores from tracking your purchase history. It doesn't hide personal information, and merchants can still collect details like names, addresses, and product information for order fulfillment.

Writing Gnome Apps in Swift (4 minute read)

GNOME is a popular open-source desktop environment for Linux. The Adwaita for Swift package allows developers to create GNOME apps using Swift. The package takes advantage of Swift's strengths to make building user interfaces for GNOME applications easier.
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Quick Links

Jinjabread (GitHub Repo)

A Python-based static site generator that uses Jinja templates.

To those that use HTMX in production, how is it? (Reddit Thread)

HTMX has been going great for many companies in production, as it reduces dependencies and build sizes.

React Server Components now in RedwoodJS (16 minute read)

React Server Components (RSC) will now be the default way to build apps with RedwoodJS, a full-stack JavaScript web framework.

Codel (GitHub Repo)

Codel is a self-hosted, secure AI agent that autonomously executes tasks using a terminal, browser, and editor.
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