TLDR Web Dev 2024-02-22

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, or engage with the global API community.

And for a limited time, you can save 30% off your ticket!

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.

Space is limited — save your spot now.

React has multiple trends in 2024 in various categories. On the UI side, headless libraries with barebones components are gaining popularity along with utility-first CSS like Tailwind CSS. There are multiple emerging frameworks and tools, like Astro for static websites, authentication solutions like Supabase, tRPC for maintaining type safety, and TanStack Router for routing in single-page React apps. Some paradigm shifts that will continue in 2024 are the usage increase of React Server Components, better compilers and bundlers, and a push towards the edge of better performance.

The React Compiler is now in production on Instagram. It automatically re-renders only the necessary parts of a UI upon state changes. The React team has been adding features to React Canary, which allows early adoption of stable features before official release, like Server Components and Actions. Actions in React can handle data submissions in both client-only and client-server apps and it offers features like optimistic updates and form state management.

Airbnb started as a monolithic Ruby-on-Rails application and eventually moved to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The SOA approach aimed for loosely coupled services with focusing on clear data ownership, specific concerns for each service, and avoiding functionality duplication. Airbnb's migration journey involved multiple iterations, with the final version completely eliminating its monolithic architecture. Pros of SOA include increased reliability and scalability, while cons include increased development time and complexity. Airbnb also uses an in-house API framework, automated canary analysis with Spinnaker, and Powergrid for parallel task execution to support its SOA.

Senior developers don’t have all the answers and seniority doesn’t always guarantee job security. Seniors often have a harder time juggling work-life balance and leading projects can be an anxious endeavor. Boring tasks, like meetings, documentation, and code reviews, are part of the deal, as is dealing with legacy code.

Google's new language model, Gemini Pro 1.5, has impressive vision capabilities - it can process video and extract structured content. This author tested the model with videos of bookshelves and was able to get a JSON array of the titles and authors of the books in the videos. While there are limitations, such as safety filters and the model sometimes hallucinating incorrect details, Gemini Pro 1.5’s large context window makes analyzing video much easier compared to other LLMs.

This article proposes a new approach to software integration called a "Schema Network". Instead of building integrations from scratch using each software’s APIs, Schema Network aims to reuse existing integrations by composing them through a network of apps and integrations. This offers a more efficient, wider coverage of software integrations compared to current methods.

ReadySet is a transparent database cache for Postgres & MySQL that has the performance and scalability of an in-memory key-value store. It sits between applications and databases and turns complex SQL reads into fast lookups. ReadySet keeps cached query results in sync with databases automatically by utilizing its existing replication stream.

Remix has announced the stable release of Remix Vite, which offers various new features and improvements built on top of Vite, including an SPA mode, Cloudflare Pages support, a cleaner build output, and better server/client separation.

Google Cloud’s upcoming developer conference is packed with immersive learning, community interactions, and a peek into the future of Google Cloud — with a focus on the latest tools for building AI-powered applications.

What’s on the agenda:

• Deep dive programs on gen AI
• 500+ sessions (101 - 301 level) across 10 different tracks
• Cutting-edge AI demos and interactive learning

Join Next ‘24 this April in Las Vegas ↗️

Apple has added PQ3 to iMessage. PQ3 is a new post-quantum cryptographic protocol that offers strong protection against current and future threats from quantum computers. It surpasses the security of all other widely available messaging apps by achieving Level 3 security. PQ3 features post-quantum encryption, a self-healing key mechanism, a hybrid design, and formal verification that ensures security.

A npm package called execution-time-async had malicious code hidden in it that was designed to steal login credentials and passwords from various browsers. The attacker, who has been identified, used various tactics to hide the malicious code, including obfuscation and placing it in a seemingly innocuous test file. They seem to be targeting software developers, possibly through social engineering schemes.

Google has released Gemma, a new family of open-source AI models that competes with LLaMA 2 and Mistral. The Gemma models offer state-of-the-art performance, are optimized for multiple frameworks and hardware, and come with a Responsible Generative AI Toolkit for developers. Free access is available for research and development through Kaggle, Colab, and Google Cloud credits.

Generative AI is progressing fast and there are a lot of open questions about what the future of development and tech looks like. For example, what app opportunities are emerging, and what role will AI agents play in the future?

Two tips for building React Router apps: keep action data flat when using JSON, and use specific names for URL params, like “userId” instead of just “id”.

Use Ollama to talk to local LLMs in Apple Notes.

Sync, search, and backup your shell history.