/Trends

10 Web Development Trends In 2023

- Robin Wieruch tl;dr: Robin discusses (1) Meta frameworks. (2) Application and rendering patterns. (3) Serverless at the edge. (4) Database renaissance (5) JavaScript runtimes. And more.

featured in #390


The Cloudy Layers Of Modern-Day Programming

- Vicki Boykis tl;dr: "Instead of working on the core of the code and focusing on the performance of a self-contained application, developers are now forced to act as some kind of monstrous manual management layer between hundreds of various APIs..." Vicki shows us how this manifests.

featured in #373


The Evolution Of Scalable CSS

tl;dr: "In this post, we’ll develop a deeper understanding of CSS by diving into the underlying issues that make it difficult to scale. We’ll understand the evolution of the various CSS best practices that have emerged and changed over time. By the end, we’ll have a good grasp on past approaches to scaling CSS on large projects, and how popular tools like Tailwind and a range of others address these issues in counter-intuitive ways."

featured in #368


The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2022

- Stephen O'Grady tl;dr: Top 5 in order are JS, Python, Java, PHP and C#, with the following trends to note: (1) Despite its meteoric rise, TypeScript has stalled in the rankings holding its ground at eighth. (2) Go has also stalled, never placing higher than 14th and having dropped into 16 for the last three runs.

featured in #362


This Program Is Illegally Packaged In 14 Distributions

- Artemis Everfree tl;dr: "We’ve got distributions of a Go package that includes entirely unlicensed code. We’ve got a host of Go packages that may not be complying with the terms of the license, when the distributions can even agree what the license is. And it’s apparently not limited to just go. Is this normal? Is this legal? I don’t really know."

featured in #346


You Will Always Have More Problems Than Engineers

- Matt Schellhas tl;dr: "Yet as companies far and wide try to use technology to solve the world’s ills, they grapple with an inviolable truth: there always will be more problems than engineers... that has consequences," which Matt discusses here.

featured in #335


The Slow March Of Progress in Programming Language Tooling

- Adam Gordon Bell tl;dr: "My thesis is that the tooling and developer experience for programming languages is improving over time, but mainly in new languages. It goes like this: Tooling innovation happens, new languages adopt and standardize on it, and end up incrementally better than existing languages. If you add up enough of these increments, the older languages, which may have pioneered some of these innovations, seem painful and antiquated."

featured in #335


Code Bloat Has Become Astronomical

- Cliff Harris tl;dr: "If I’m right and conservatively, we have 99% wastage on our PCS, we are wasting 99% of the computer energy consumption too. This is beyond criminal. And to do what? I have no idea, but a quick look at task manager on my PC shows a metric fuckton of bloated crap doing god knows what."

featured in #327


Firefox Rolls Out Total Cookie Protection By Default To All Users Worldwide

tl;dr: "Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit. Instead of allowing trackers to link up your behavior on multiple sites, they just get to see behavior on individual sites. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website."

featured in #326


The Collapse Of Complex Software

- Nolan Lawson tl;dr: Nolan discusses the trends causing increasingly complex software, such as commercial pressure or misaligned incentives. "It takes a lot of discipline to resist complexity, to say “no” to new boxes and arrows. To say, “No, we won’t solve that problem, because that will just introduce 10 new problems that we haven’t imagined yet.” Or to say, “Let’s go with a much simpler design, even if it seems amateurish, because at least we can understand it.” Or to just say, “Let’s do less instead of more.”

featured in #324