Web in October - Mindless Newsletter by Agney
A full moon Halloween night! 🎃
Another month and another large company goes fully remote - Dropbox. Many people have been pondering what will happen to the offices that they have build so far and Dropdown answers it by transforming them to coworking spaces.
Github received a takedown notice for the very popular cli - youtube-dl from RIAA. The cause seen here is that it can be used for downloading copyrighted songs from Youtube. This stirred up a controversy on whether DMCA was being misused against software which has lots of other lawful use cases. Here's the XDA guide to find out more.
We had two major conferences last month and here's the Youtube streams if you missed them:
Releases
- NextJS 10 - This is the release I'm most excited about. This is one feature that NextJS was missing from Gatsby (as a plugin, but it was always installed, so does it matter). This release should get lots of people to switch over.
- NodeJS 15 - The new NodeJS release brings some awaited features like
AbortControllerto abort your Promises. NodeJS also ships in with NPM 7 with support for Workspaces, which has been delayed due to different controversies under NPM, but now we can finally move over from Yarn 1. - Webpack 5 - Webpack is bringing this out of beta after so long (which is expected for a project that is depended on by so many projects). While there aren't major changes, the performance enhancements are known to be worth it.
- Skypack Discover - Fred K. Schott, who wrote Snowpack is bringing a new open source discovery tool named Skypack. It also brings package ratings with improvement notes that package owners can use for better more consistent library solutions.
- AVIF - A new image format is here and as always the answer to when you can use it is It depends. More to work on for cloud and terminal based image compression libraries.
- Remix Framework - Remix is a new paid React framework from the creators of React Router and they have just released an early look. There is an ongoing debate in whether people would pay for such a framework when NextJS or GatsbyJS is available for free.
Tutorials
- Why I love React - In a JavaScript world that was throwing away libraries and technologies in days, React managed to come in and stick on for years now. What makes React tick? Kent C Dodds tries to explain in this blog post.
- Serverless Horror Stories - It's pretty clear that we can't just move things to serverless and save money from it. Need proof? This article is full of those horror stories.
- GraphQL at Treebo - Treebo discusses their microservice architecture and how GraphQL has helped smoothen the communication process.
In the Spotlight
XState has been a state management library that is gaining momentum in the JavaScript community. The idea is to use state charts where state can be easily visualised, also it helps to ensure that it never reaches an impossible state.
This month we saw:
- The new issue of ThoughtWorks Radar has moved XState from "access" to "trail"
- How xstate saved our 🥓 - XState has been slowly gaining momentum as a state solution in JavaScript apps. Here egghead.io founder discusses how they are using XState for their platform.
- Refactoring useReducer to XState - Swizec Teller comes has a live coding session refactoring
useReducerto XState and how it's better. - Choosing your own adventure - NextJS Conf - At one of the most anticipated talks at NextConf, Cassidy Williams demoed the code for a text adventure game using XState - fully visualised state of course.
If you like to catch up, David K, author of XState is doing a live workshop for State Machines on FrontendMasters starting November 5th.
In Other News
- Managing a pandemic on Excel - It's said that every business application moves towards Excel everyday it is build. But Britain gave the world a shock as the news of reaching the limit of Excel and missing Coronavirus patients came out. Surely, it can't have reached 1,048,576 rows, they said, but they had arranged cases per column - so that was just 16,384 aka XFD.
- Among Us Hacks - Among Us has caught our attention this month with politicians making records out of it. But as with Fall Guys last month, there have been hackers throwing the system out of balance and developers rushing to fix them.
- How URL was build - In an era where Google is trying to hide URLs wherever possible, this is a great look into one of the most recognisable identifiers of World Wide Web.
- How Bitcoin powered Nigerian protests - I have been a proponent of the theory that blockchain is a solution to no real world problem, but it's heartening to see bitcoin helping these rebellions and not just as drug money.
Looking ahead
- NodeConf is happening on November 2-6th - virtually of course