Article: “AI and the Rise of Mediocrity”

AI thrives when our need for originality is low and our demand for mediocrity is high.

Article: “Examples of Great URL Design” by Jim Nielsen

UX for developers. Little details:

• marketing: slack.com/is/everything-in-one-place
• context: stackoverflow.com/questions/16245767/creating-a-blob-from-a-base64-string-in-javascript/
• functionality: github.com/django/django/compare/4.2.7…main

Article: “Stop Saying Best Practice”

“Best partices” usually go into these buckets:

• Community Pattern: What makes this a “best practice” is because when everyone sees it they know exactly how and why it is there.
• Readability Pattern: example is between using reduce (commonly known to be un-readable) vs. for .. of ... loops.
• Performance Pattern: doesn’t always give you the courtesy of being the easy way to write it. […] Never shy away from heavy documentation on these patterns
• Guardrail Pattern: So enter the guardrail pattern of assigning all of our numbers, even one off ones, to a variable.

Article: “Goodbye, Clean Code” by Dan Abramov

Walk through of a classic abstraction refactor. One co-worker’s code looks like it can abstracted with more functions:

• DO NOT refactor it, especially without asking the other person why the code is as is.
• Code won’t be extendable. Requirements might change in the future, your abstraction won’t cover them, you’ll have to update your function with edge-cases, it’ll get ugly!

Article: “Everything about SEO is obnoxious” by Chris Coyier

It feels like it is a trend (or only on the blog I’m following), but people seems annoyed at the current state of the web.

It’s gotten bad enough that the trust has eroded. We collectively have a feeling anything you Google for doesn’t deliver you the best results, it delivers you a pile of whoever is winning the SEO deathmatch at the moment.

One example I witness was to look up the some articles about what is a “senior software engineer”, and the results on the search were linked in, jobs and random blogs from interview/hiring companies (which I don’t trust, their contentis to get better SEO).

Article: “10 hard-to-swallow truths they won’t tell you about software engineer job”

• You will rarely get greenfield projects
• Nobody gives a f*** about your clean code
• Get used to being in meetings for hours
• They will ask you for estimates a lot of times
• It will be almost impossible to disconnect from your job
• You will profit more from good soft skills than from good technical skills

Article: “6 tiny wording tweaks to level up your communication as a software engineer”

• “Would you be open to…” instead of Can you…”
• Adding “because” to any request
• “Can we…” instead of “Can you…”
• “What do you think?” at the end of your suggestion
• “It seems like” for stalemates in conversation.
• Changing the order of “but”

Video: “Simplifying Server Components” by Mark Dalgleish

RSC are hard to understand. Mark walks us through the details of it in a good abstract way.