TLDR Web Dev 2024-02-20

POST/CON 24 (April 30 - May 1 in San Francisco) is the place to be if you’re looking to hear from industry leaders, gain new skills, engage with the global API community…or attend an awesome after-party.

(BTW, there’s a 50% discount if you sign up today!)

A small taste of what you can expect from this two-day event:

>> Hands-on, day-long workshops on collaborative API development and API prototyping in Postman.

>> Conference and open labs featuring experts from Postman, Salesforce, Zoom, Clarifai, and many others.

Discount ends TODAY — save your spot

This article describes a method for serving a website directly from a git repository using a modified reverse proxy. The traditional method uses a web server, such as Github Pages, to serve the latest version of the main branch of a git repository. The new method uses git’s internal object structure and a reverse proxy to retrieve content directly from a remote repository on demand. The pros of this are that it’s more efficient than traditional methods and there is no need to maintain a local copy of the repository, while the drawbacks are that it is more complex and requires a deeper understanding of git internals.

The defineModel macro introduced in Vue 3.4 simplifies hierarchical state management and reduces the need for global state or prop drilling. This article demonstrates how to use defineModel with composables for further code organization and maintainability. defineModel makes state management much easier for teams, enabling them to create clean components that are easy to read and understand.

This article discusses the evolution and benefits of serverless computing, which was introduced with AWS Lambda in 2014. It covers best practices like designing for failure, optimizing performance, ensuring security, and managing costs. It also highlights common pitfalls, including cold start latency, security complacency, and complexity in managing services.

Tailwind CSS's core idea of utility-first workflow is harmful because it breaks established best practices and makes code harder to maintain. Tailwind encourages the use of inline styles and vendor-specific language expressions, which can make code messy and difficult to understand. It discourages semantic class names, which are important for maintainability. Developers should consider learning proper CSS and follow established best practices such as "content first" workflow.

A good UI is a function of an organization's ability to deliver on its promises. The Domino's Pizza Tracker, while convenient for users, required significant infrastructure and process changes within Domino's. Compromises are often made between the ideal UI and an organization's reality. This is why startups, with their flexible structures, are better suited for innovative UIs.

A former front-end developer shares his experience transitioning to an engineering management role. The pros of the transition include greater impact, more career opportunities, less knowledge rot, and new challenges. However, engineering management roles have to deal with fewer breaks, longer feedback loops, occasional awkward social situations, and having to deal with corporate politics.

Tempo is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to work with Date objects by providing various utilities. It uses JavaScript's Intl.DateTimeFormat to extract complex data like timezones offsets and locale aware date formats to provide an API to format, parse, and manipulate dates.

Peggy is a JavaScript parser generator that delivers swift parsers equipped with error reporting. Developers can use Peggy to build transformers, interpreters, compilers, and beyond.

htmz is a minimalist HTML microframework that allows developers to create modular web user interfaces with the familiar simplicity of plain HTML.

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Google's motives for deprecating third-party cookies are likely commercial, not privacy-driven, despite the company's emphasis on protecting user privacy. Apple's App Tracking Transparency privacy policy is an example of how companies can use privacy rhetoric while still collecting data. Google's main motivation for deprecating third-party cookies is to boost its own margins by shifting ad spend from its lower-margin Network business to its higher-margin owned-and-operated channels.

This blog post shows some surprising ways to use Copilot beyond the basics: run terminal commands from Copilot chat or directly in terminal using the Copilot CLI, generate pull request summaries, commit messages and documentation, explain a GitHub repo, bulk close issues, and get help with error messages.

Clean code has some language-agnostic fundamentals, such as having a well-organized story, being simple, easy to improve, and well-tested.

CodeRev is a tool for conducting technical interviews using code reviews rather than coding questions.

A "flow engineering" process, which guides an AI model's problem-solving process by splitting it into well-defined steps, leads to better results for LLMs when it comes to solving coding problems.

ChatGPT Custom Actions can be used to create a personal assistant app. This article details the architecture of one such app and implements a sample app built with Rust and OpenAPI. Users can interact with the app through natural language and use custom actions defined by developers.