Byte Brief: Your Monthly Tech Summary #4

This monthly digest offers a comprehensive overview of the latest trends in the world of technology. With a primary focus on JavaScript, architecture, and sometimes on engineering management topics.

JS Nation 2024

In June, I attended the JSNation conference. Kudos to the organizers for a fantastic event. Here are my top three highlight topics from the conference.

• https://portal.gitnation.org/contents/testing-do-more-with-less
  Eugene provided an excellent talk on testing approaches for Node.js applications.
• https://portal.gitnation.org/contents/how-to-make-your-open-source-project-popular
  An amazing talk on privacy, delivered with a great sense of humor
• https://portal.gitnation.org/contents/10-years-of-independent-oss-a-retrospective
  Evan shares his experiences as an open-source developer over the years

React

• https://open.nytimes.com/enhancing-the-new-york-times-web-performance-with-react-18-d6f91a7c5af8
  The New York Times’ journey to React. If you’re still using an old version, you’ll see how beneficial the upgrade was for them
• https://tonyalicea.dev/blog/understanding-react-compiler/
  Explore how the React Compiler optimizes performance by automating manual tasks, caching values, and memoizing functions, enhancing your React app’s efficiency and your understanding of its core architecture
• https://jser.dev/2024-05-11-introducing-rie
  This article provides insights into how React internals operate, along with links to useful tools that can enhance your investigation process
• https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/29898
  With the React 19 release on the horizon, this is a Github issue to keep an eye on

Performance

• https://betterstack.com/community/guides/scaling-nodejs/profiling-nodejs-applications/
  Great guide on how to profile Node.js applications
• https://trigger.dev/blog/event-loop-lag
  Journey of uncovering and addressing reliability and performance issues in our Node.js application, which were traced back to Node.js Event Loop lag.
• https://nodejs.org/en/learn/asynchronous-work/dont-block-the-event-loop
  Here’s another excellent article on the topic of event loop lag (which I’m currently fighting with too)
• https://blog.jiayihu.net/comprenhensive-guide-chrome-performance/
  In depth guide to analyzing JavaScript performance using Chrome DevTools

Architecture

• https://quastor.substack.com/
  A brilliant Substack with numerous design system case studies
• https://medium.com/codex/how-pinterest-scaled-to-11-million-users-with-only-6-engineers-a0f62cea62b8
  Are you as curious as I am about how Pinterest scaled to 11 million users with only 6 devs? Then you should read it

Extra

• https://www.alexmolas.com/2024/06/06/good-code.html
  Thoughts on What It Means: Bad and Good Code
• https://engineering.fb.com/2024/06/12/data-infrastructure/training-large-language-models-at-scale-meta
  Article about how Meta trains their LLM