Developers often volunteer to be held hostage by one technology, or a small handful of them, and declare it the ideal, the future, or [any admirable adjective]. They have little desire to learn anything beyond that ideal and even consider it harmful. The problem runs deep and applies to any technology a developer loves. Subjectivity is a poor — and even somewhat destructive — quality for a developer. Sure, some technologies may be closer to your heart, but they shouldn't cloud your objectivity when making decisions...

Frontend bundling is a task as old as time, and for ages webpack has been the standard. It's used almost everywhere, including in many well-known tools. But its main problem is slowness. Today there are worthy competitors — Vite, Parcel.js, Rollup.js, and others — yet the common pain point is migrating an existing application from webpack to an alternative. That task can take an overwhelming amount of time and feel more like a burden than a pleasure. But what if a fast bundler appeared that was compatible with webpack configuration? As it turns out, one has. Meet Rspack!

This year has been unofficially declared the year of AI, and ChatGPT is the reason why. Hardly any sphere of human activity was left without AI solutions, and code written by developers is no exception. Here I've gathered the most popular AI coding assistants available today, prioritizing the ones with a free option.

The family of cross-mobile development solutions just grew: JetBrains has released a production-ready version of its framework for simultaneous Android/iOS/Web/TV development in Kotlin. A strong competitor to the React Native/Flutter that web developers are used to, but with much closer access to the mobile APIs, especially on Android.

Often you need to receive data from the server, or exchange it, quickly and continuously — and the usual answer is WebSockets. But if your task only involves receiving data from the server without sending anything back, there's a good alternative that is undeservedly forgotten: Server-Sent Events.

Sooner or later, every web developer runs into CSS. But what follows below isn't about new properties or trendy CSS techniques — it's about organizing the styles in your application. The term "organizing styles" might sound grander than it actually is 😁

Prettier has released a major version 3.0.0! There are plenty of changes, all listed here:

➡️ https://prettier.io/blog/2023/07/05/3.0.0.html

My take: a very large release. The team made plenty of breaking changes, so upgrade carefully and treat it as a separate, full-fledged task.

The notable changes include:

#1 trailingComma: "all" is now the default. To restore the v2 default behavior, set trailingComma: "es5". As a general rule, I set trailingComma: "none" — I don’t see any advantage in a confusing trailing comma. Some argue it helps write code faster (supposedly you no longer have to keep thinking about whether you’ve put a comma at the end of an object, array, function, type, and so on, because it gets added automatically when autofixers are configured correctly). I can’t wrap my head around that: we’re not typists, we’re programmers, and our time goes mostly into thinking, not typing 🙂

#2 Support for Flow special comments has been removed. Too few people use Flow and its directives, and the code still has to be maintained — so the team tossed it rather than spend time on it. Move to TypeScript and you’ll be happy

#3 TypeScript support got a nice upgrade. Many pleasant changes and fixes landed for formatting types, keywords, and more. It used to happen that a pass through Prettier left types less readable than you’d like — the new version should fix that

If browser caching is a mess in your head, the article below will help you sort it out:

➡️ https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/increasing-application-performance-with-http-cache-headers

My take:

The article above covers the main caching scenarios, which is enough for 99% of tasks. For the remaining 1%, you can look up the description of all Cache-Control header properties (here) or search for your specific case.

P.S. If your project uses NestJS, you can experiment with CacheInterceptor, as shown here

PayPal has open-sourced JunoDB, its super-fast key-value database. The performance is impressive: 350 billion requests per day. It comes with horizontal scaling, replication, and clustering out of the box — everything you need for a high-speed application

If you're looking for information about WebAssembly, the linked article is an excellent read. It covers the topic less through technical how-to examples and more through the question of whether WebAssembly is even needed (spoiler: it is), why JavaScript is the center of its universe, which working tools exist today, and the vision for the future of WASM as a whole. Inside, you'll find plenty of links to WebAssembly-related projects, initiatives, and working libraries. Enjoy the read 📖