TLDR Web Dev 2024-06-19

WebContainers for AI 🎁, devtool startup tips 🛠️, dealing with cognitive load 🧠

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Articles & Tutorials

Blazing Fast Websites with Speculation Rules (18 minute read)

Speculation rules, a new web platform feature, allow developers to instruct browsers to prerender or prefetch specific pages for faster navigation. Prerendering involves downloading and rendering a page in the background, while prefetching only downloads the main document resource. This can be achieved using URL lists or document rules with conditions.

Scaling smoothly: RevenueCat's data-caching techniques for 1.2 billion daily API requests (26 minute read)

RevenueCat's caching system handles 1.2 billion daily API requests by distributing the load among servers and using the cache for hot data. For low latency, it uses pre-established connections and fails fast on unresponsive servers. To keep the cache up and warm, it plans for server failures and uses fallback pools. To maintain consistency, it employs write failure tracking and consistent CRUD operations.
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Opinions & Advice

Cognitive Load is what matters (15 minute read)

Cognitive load is how much mental effort a developer needs to understand code. High cognitive load is caused by complex code structures and excessive use of features. To reduce cognitive load, developers should prioritize simplicity over complexity, use deep modules with simple interfaces, and avoid an over-reliance on frameworks.

Expert Advice for Landing Your Dream Software Development Job (62 minute read)

This blog post offers advice on job hunting as a developer. It covers preparation steps like knowing your career goals and creating a behavioral story bank, as well as active job search strategies such as networking and applying directly to companies. It also provides detailed information on crafting resumes, interviewing effectively, and negotiating salary.

Software Friction (4 minute read)

Friction is the difference between theoretical plans and reality. It is caused by unexpected issues like bugs, changing requirements, or technical failures. Friction can compound in longer timelines, making each subsequent issue harder to deal with. Teams and developers should deal with friction early by planning smaller iterations, having more redundancy, and automating things properly.
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Launches & Tools

WebContainers (Website)

WebContainers allows developers to build instant, interactive coding experiences on the browser. Its team recently released a way to execute, interpret, and refactor AI-generated code directly in the browser. WebContainers provides a secure, sandboxed environment with zero latency, zero compute costs, and zero virtual machines.

Omnivore (GitHub Repo)

Omnivore is an open source read-it-later solution for people who like text. It features highlighting, notes, search, sharing, offline support, and more. It also has a web app, a native iOS app, and an Android app. All of its source code is included in the repository.

Tsx (GitHub Repo)

Tsx is a command-line tool that allows you to run TypeScript code in Node.js without any configuration. It supports both CommonJS and ES Modules and comes with a built-in watcher for faster iteration.
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Miscellaneous

Lessons from starting, building, and exiting a devtools startup (6 minute read)

This blog post offers advice for founders of developer tool startups. Finding product-market fit should be the first priority for founders over building a complex product. Marketing efforts should be scrappy, and founders should try to maintain a work-life balance if possible to get through the hard times successfully.

On being laid off & unplanned entrepreneurship (11 minute read)

This entrepreneur, after being repeatedly laid off, decided to start his own online business to gain control over his income. He started with online advertising and eventually learned to code, creating simple websites that generated revenue. This led him to buy and develop more websites, eventually focusing on acquiring and developing premium .com domain names.
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Quick Links

A Look at Latest CSS and Web UI Advancements (28 minute read)

This is an article about the latest advancements in CSS and web UI that discusses new features like scroll-driven animations and view transitions.

Sharing new research, models, and datasets from Meta FAIR (6 minute read)

Meta FAIR has released six research artifacts that focus on innovation, creativity, efficiency, and responsibility in AI, including image-to-text and text-to-music generation models, a multi-token prediction model, and an audio watermarking technique.

Every Way To Get Structured Output From LLMs (11 minute read)

A comparison of different frameworks for getting structured output from LLMs, with information on features, prompting, and testing.
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