/Trends

The Rise Of The AI Engineer

tl;dr: “Every startup I know of has some kind of discuss-ai Slack channel. Those channels will turn from informal groups into formal teams, as Amplitude, Replit and Notion have done. The thousands of Software Engineers working on productionizing AI APIs and OSS models, whether on company time or on nights and weekends, in corporate Slacks or indie Discords, will professionalize and converge on a title - the AI Engineer. This will be the highest-demand eng job of the decade.”

featured in #428

Self-Healing Code Is The Future Of Software Development

- Ben Popper tl;dr: The article discusses the concept of self-healing code and its potential impact on software development, highlighting the use of generative AI models in automating the creation, maintenance, and improvement of code. While the field is still developing, a guided, auto-regressive approach can lead to better outcomes.

featured in #425

An Explosion In Software Engineers Using AI Coding Tools?

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: What do AI coding tools help the most with? The survey lists the top areas mentioned by developers: (1) Learn: develop coding language skills (57%). (2) Productivity: become more productive (53%). (3) Focus: spend more time building and creating, less on repetitive tasks (51%). Gergely dives how engineers are leveraging AI tools.

featured in #423

OpenAI’s Moat Is Stronger Than You Think

- Ravi Parikh tl;dr: Ravi Parikh, CEO of Airplane, discusses his perspectives on why he thinks OpenAI will have a durable moat and why the usage of general-purpose AI models will be mostly limited to a few large companies in the future.

featured in #420

Is There A Drop In Software Engineer Job Openings, Globally?

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Gergely analyzes data points from Indeed and Hacker News to conclude the following: (1) There was a peak in software developer positions posted between mid-2021 and mid-2022. (2) The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020. (3) Germany, France and Australia still have significantly more jobs than in February 2020.

featured in #400

Software And Its Discontents, Part 1

- Kellan Elliot-McCrea tl;dr: Kellan tries to answer a simple question: “where is the frustration and disillusionment, so prevalent currently in the software industry, coming from?” He covers 4 key trends in the last decade: (1) An explosion in the complexity of software development. (2) Talent become significantly more expensive. (3) Success become more elusive than ever, with startups having “lost that magic feeling.” (4) Conflicts over changing expectations of the work environment.

featured in #393

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