weeklyfoo #72 is here: your weekly digest of all webdev news you need to know! This time you’ll find 46 valuable links in 6 categories! Enjoy!
🚀 Read it!
- How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years: I’m not a natural “doomsayer.” But unfortunately, part of my job as an AI safety researcher is to think about the more troubling scenarios. by Joshua Clymer / ai, future / 68 min read
📰 Good to know
- The LLM Curve of Impact on Software Engineers: There is so much debate online about the usefulness of LLMs. While some people see giant leaps in productivity, others don’t see what the fuss is about. Every relevant HackerNews post now comes with a long thread of folks arguing back and forth. I call it the new Great Divide. by Sergey Tselovalnikov / engineering, ai / 5 min read
- You are using Cursor AI incorrectly…: I’m hesitant to give this advice away for free, but I’m gonna push past it and share it anyway. You’re using Cursor incorrectly. by Geoffrey Huntley / cursor, ai / 15 min read
- Patterns for building realtime features: Realtime features make apps feel modern, collaborative, and up-to-date. The features predominantly require sharing changes triggered by one user to other users, as the changes are happening. by Zak Knill / realtime / 7 min read
- How Do You Spend Your Time?: Career advice, or something like it. by Marc Brooker / career / 9 min read
- Summarizing our recommendations for software documentation: Last year, my coworker Suzanne and I got a case study accepted into an ethnography conference! She’s an anthropologist by training, and I’m a software engineer. How’d we wind up there? by Nicole Tietz / docs / 9 min read
- Do I Need This Node Dependency?: Advancements over time in Node.js are improving the out of the box experience. by Brian Muenzenmeyer / nodejs / 18 min read
- The Duolingo Handbook: How Duolingo works: 14 years of big learnings in one little handbook. by duolingo.com / duolingo, engineering / 4 min read
- Tech’s Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything by Francesco Gadaleta / engineering, ai / 7 min read
- State of React 2024: Results are here by stateofreact.com / react / 3 min read
- Introducing Fluid compute: Vercel introduces a new way to compute by Mariano Cocirio / vercel / 6 min read
- The European Accessibility Act for websites and apps: The European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect on June 28, 2025 - just 5 months from now. From that point, covered websites and apps of companies operating in the EU must meet accessibility standards. Only microenterprises are exempt. by Martijn Hols / eaa / 9 min read
- Understanding the trade-offs of using Tailwind CSS: Tailwind helps you build web pages quickly with a utility-first approach — but is it right for your project? Here we explore its benefits and trade-offs. by Scott Boyle / tailwind / 10 min read
- The Economics of Being a Founding Engineer: When I graduated from Georgia Tech in May 2023, Facebook was one of the largest employers of computer science graduates from my class. Their approximate starting offer for new grad software engineers in the Bay Area was $200,000/year, which included $50k/yr of Meta stock. by Daksh Gupta / startups / 7 min read
- Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji: Interesting! by Paul Butler / encoding / 6 min read
- I failed my Anthropic interview and came to tell you all about it so you don’t have to: Interesting insights from the interview process. by Andrey Goncharov / interview / 5 min read
- Move on to ESM-only: Post to motivate you to move to esm packages. by Anthony Fu / esm / 10 min read
- How I built an AI company to save my open source project: Learn about how timefold arised. by Geoffrey De Smet / startups / 20 min read
- Replace your JavaScript Animation Library with View Transitions: Bonus points: save space by removing the dependency! by Stefan Judis / animations / 17 min read
- Software Quality: Google defines software quality as including four types: process quality, code quality, system quality, and product quality. by Abi Noda / engineering / 6 min read
- Date pickles: Very good comparison of available date picker libraries. by Károly Török / date, picker / 3 min read
🧰 Tools
- Mail0: open source gmail alternative by nizzy / email
- JStack: Build seriously fast, lightweight and end-to-end typesafe Next.js apps by jstack.app / nextjs
- StockSnap.io: Beautiful Free Stock Photos. New CC0 images added daily, free from copyright restrictions. by stocksnap.io / images
- Consola: Elegant Console Logger for Node.js and Browser by UnJS / logs
- Human Regex: Human-friendly regular expression builder with English-like syntax. by Ridwan Ajibola / regex
- LocalSend: Share files to nearby devices. Free, open-source, cross-platform. by Tien Do Nam / sharing
- a0.dev: Like v0 but for React Native apps. by a0.dev / ai
- Ohm: A library and language for building parsers, interpreters, compilers, etc. by ohmjs.org / javascript
- React D3 Tree: React component to create interactive D3 tree graphs by Ben Kremer / tree, d3
- React Image Gallery: React carousel image gallery component with thumbnail support by Xiao Lin / react, images
- Share Button: A Web Component to share web pages using the native OS sharing options by David Darnes / sharing
- Visprex: Visualise your CSV files in seconds without sending your data anywhere by visprex.com / visualization, csv
- PostSpark: Beautify Screenshots by Dan / images
- FullSoak: a no-build TypeScript fullstack SSR-first framework for developing fast web applications with a shallow learning curve by fullsoak / deno, framework
- Litur: Find, collect and organize all the colors around you. by litur.app / colors
- Phase: Simple Animation For Product Designers by phase.com / animations
- Flexbox Labs: A web app for creating flexible layouts with the power of CSS Flexbox. by Praise Ogunleye / css, tailwind, layout
- Style Observer: Run JS when a CSS property changes. Any CSS property. by Lea Verou / javascript
- Oxidase: Transpiles TypeScript at the Speed of Parsing by branchseer / typescript
- Unduck: A fast, local-first “search engine” for !bang users by Theo Browne / search
🤪 Fun
- TabBoo: Add random jumpscares to sites you’re trying to avoid by tabboo.xyz / extensions, bwoser / 1 min read
📚 Tutorials
- How to build a library in React: In this post, I quickly wanna go over how to build a library in React. by Tiger Abrodi / react, libraries / 11 min read
- Intro to Wasm in Deno: JavaScript is a scripting language—distant from the machine code your CPU actually consumes. But JavaScript has a way to execute binary machine code, or something close to it, called WebAssembly. WebAssembly, or Wasm, is a low-level, portable binary format that runs at near-native speeds in the browser. by Andy Jiang, David Sherret / deno, wasm / 6 min read
- Designing backgrounds with LLMs and React: That’s so hot! by Ben Shumaker / backgrounds / 0 min read
📺 Videos
- Understand the Next Phase of Web Development: NDC London 2024 by Steve Sanderson / frontends