Nowadays, Alpine Linux is one of the most popular options for container base images. Many people (maybe including you) use it for anything and everything. Some people use it because of its small size, some because of habit and some, just because they copy-pasted a Dockerfile from some tutorial. Yet, there are plenty of reasons why you should not use Alpine for your container images, some of which can cause you great amount of grief…
Josh Comeau:
Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with lots of early-career devs who are getting more and more anxious about AI. They’ve seen the increasingly-impressive demos from tools like GPT-4, and they worry that by the time they’re fluent in HTML/CSS/JS, there won’t be any jobs left for them.
I couldn’t disagree more. I don’t think web developer jobs are going anywhere. And I’m getting pretty sick of the FUD? being spread online.
So, in this blog post, I’m going to share my hypothesis for what will happen. Things are going to change, but not in the scary way people are saying.
This site categorizes, displays & provides CSS font-family declarations for the system fonts on every modern OS. Why are system fonts cool? Because they’re the fastest fonts your website can use. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes — just instant renders.
Postman surveyed over 37,000 developers to ask them how they worked with APIs. Most of those findings are in their State of the API Report (2022), but there were a few things to highlight separately. Here’s what they learned:
This is the fourth year in a row for Postman’s State of the API survey and report. It’s the largest and most comprehensive survey and report on APIs. You should check it out.
Andrew Quinn:
fzfis a bit of a weird program because installing it actually overwrites a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts, in the interest of making them better. Normally I would hate this. But…
Lots of good stuff in this post 👍
Quirks: every language has ’em, and the more you learn a language the more of ‘em you run across. Here’s a collection of quirks across a bunch of languages. I’m positive there’s many more that could be added…
This is an awesome HN thread on all the ways blogging have improved the lives of developers around the world. It’s brimming with statements like:
I’ve been blogging since 1998 and can trace every major step forward in my career to my blog.
The best time to start your developer blog was 1998. The second best time is right now.
A multi-tenant HTTP reverse tunnel solution through remote port forwarding from the SSH protocol.
This is intended for small teams that need to expose the local development environment to the public internet, and you need to bring your own domain name and SSO provider.
It gives stable subdomain for every user, and gated by your SSO through OIDC protocol.
Think this as a bare-bone alternative to the ngrok’s $65/user/month enterprise tier. Try to put this behind a production system will blow up your SLA.
For individuals and production systems, just buy ngrok, it is still my favorite.
Justin Searls dives deep into whether AI tools like ChatGPT actually threaten knowledge worker jobs and provides helpful ideas around what to do about it.
Having spent months programming with GitHub Copilot, weeks talking to ChatGPT, and days searching via Bing Chat as an alternative to Google, the best description I’ve heard of AI’s capabilities is “fluent bullshit.” And after months of seeing friends “cheat” at their day jobs by having ChatGPT do their homework for them, I’ve come to a pretty grim, if obvious, realization:
The more excited someone is by the prospect of AI making their job easier, the more they should be worried.
A cool microsite by Henri Parviainen that helps you design some scrollbars by pointing-and-clicking then copy/paste the requisite CSS code to recreate in your app.
Sualeh Asif from Control (an AI code editor):
We’ve been using GPT-4 for a few months internally, and we thought we’d highlight a few examples](https://github.com/anysphere/gpt-4-for-code) that have been both particularly impressive and really useful to us.
Here it’s converting a Python dict of member functions to esoteric but correct-on-first-try C++ code 👇
Thomas Ricouard:
This is the first article in what I hope will be a long series of stories about the making of the Ice Cubes app. This article will focus on what the app is, the general story behind it, and an overview of the codebase.
I’ve been using Ice Cubes (source code, App Store) for all Mastodon stuff on my phone since it was first released, and I really like it. I didn’t know it was open source at the time, but even better: its author is writing all about the making of it. Looking forward to this series!
Corey Quinn:
Countless volumes have been written about the various benefits of serverless, a task made even easier by it being such a squishy, nebulous term that’s come to mean basically whatever the author wants it to mean. This has been a boon for AWS’s product teams, who’ve gone from creating services that are clearly serverless such as DynamoDB, Route 53, IAM, and others to instead slapping the “serverless” moniker on things that are clearly not very serverless at all, like OpenSearch and Aurora.
Andy Jiang and Deno’s content team are really speaking my language lately:
Sites take time to build these days. A large Next.js 11 site will take several minutes to build. This is wasted time in the development cycle. Build tools like Vite or Turbopack highlight their ability to get this number down.
But the deeper question hasn’t been considered:
Why do we even need a build step?
This web-based tool has a lot of cool features: node search, embeddable widgets, downloadable images, dark mode & more. Jump straight to the online editor to try it out.
Hired CEO, Josh Brenner:
We create this report every year to help talent professionals and software engineers understand the hiring climate, as well as what’s top of mind for employers and engineers.
Here’s some of their key findings:
There’s a lot to digest here. Worth a read, especially if you’re on the market.
Evan Hahn, describing what he calls the “lone developer problem”:
A lot of software is built by one person. It might be an entire product built by a lone developer or a significant piece of a system.
When this happens, I’ve observed that code written by a single developer is usually hard for others to work with. This code must’ve made sense to the author, who I think is very smart, but it doesn’t make any sense to me!
All this time, I just thought it was my code that was hard for others to work with! Turns out I’m not alone…
Congrats to Dan, Rachel and the entire React team for shipping a new docs site! Here’s their TLDR:
Typst is a new markup-based typsetting system that is designed to be as powerful as LaTeX while being much easier to learn and use.
You know how collaborating with Google Sheets, Airtable & friends is super easy because anybody with a web browser and the correct permissions can get in on it? With Mathesar, you can enable that kind of access to any Postgres database!
Super powerful? I think so. Super risky?! Likely, especially if a lot of your data-related logic is in app code. Worth it? That’s up to you to decide…
Steve Yegge is very excited about LLMs and thinks the rest of us should be as well:
There is something legendary and historic happening in software engineering, right now as we speak, and yet most of you don’t realize at all how big it is.
LLMs aren’t just the biggest change since social, mobile, or cloud–they’re the biggest thing since the World Wide Web. And on the coding front, they’re the biggest thing since IDEs and Stack Overflow, and may well eclipse them both.
Steve’s been in the industry a long time. He worked at Amazon back when AWS was just a demo on some engineer’s laptop and he worked at Google when Kubernetes was just a demo on some engineer’s laptop.
The point: when Steve Yegge gets excited about something it probably means more than when most people get excited about something.
