WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest

Issue 144 - React gets a pink slip and ghost engineers

WeAreDevelopers Webdev & AI Day is on 10/12/2024. Check out the amazing lineup! 

WeAreDevelopers World Congress 9-11/7/25 - get 15% off using code devdigest

Hello fellow developer, last week I posted Paul Kinlan's article questioning the need for frameworks in an AI code generation world. Now we have a 40 minute Coffee With Developers edition where we chat about that topic. Frameworks make developers more effective but the final products are always HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Which means that AI agents creating framework code is a redundant step. Check it out!

CSS has a new logo in Rebeccapurple. It is not W3C sanctioned, though. There are two new W3C standard proposals to check: Device Posture API and better defined keyboard events. Keeping with web stuff, Eric Eggert has a great article on focusable elements and Steve Faulkner detailed information on how to write alternative text - an oldie but goodie.

GitHub is doing some housekeeping. They published a list of outdated issues on their public roadmap that won't be fixed and a notice of breaking changes for GitHub Actions. Great news is that they offer a Secure Open Source Fund of $1.25 million for 125 projects to keep them maintained. And there's a preview of Copilot Edits which allows the AI pair programmer to edit several files at once. If you want Copilot Chat to give you better results, you can index your repositories to tell it where the goodies are.

wearedevelopers

Bluesky is giving me all the good vibes right now. People share starter packs who to follow, show how to automatically post to it, host web sites on the platform, display posts as comments, and the company announced that they will not train AI on  user data. However, not all is great, the European Union accuses Bluesky of violating information disclosure rules and a dataset of 1M scraped posts appeared on huggingface for "Machine Learning research". This one is taken down again, but the web does not forget. Also, say hi to WeAreDevelopers on Bluesky!

Some tech bits in brief…

• Figma releases their Pattern Library

• Microsoft runs a security hack event with up to $4M in prizes

• Shopify show how they built their Black Friday Live Globe animation

• How machine learning can help us tell fact from fiction

Some tools for you: 

• Lexical is an embeddable text/code editor by Meta to rival Monaco + Codemirror.

• Viselect allows users to select elements using keyboard and by highlighting.

• Shellmate gives you an AI copilot experience in the terminal.

Work and Jobs:

Ryan Peterman is a 28 Year Old Staff Engineer at Google and shares how he managed to pull that one off. Kent C Dodds explains that AI is taking your job as automated applications and rejections make it harder to find jobs and to stand out with your CV. 

According to a Stanford research digging into the data of 50k engineers in 100 companies, 9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing and are Ghost Engineers (0.1x-ers). Even worse, 14% of those work remotely compared to 9% in hybrid roles and 6% in the office, giving remote work a bad name. 

Some companies to check out are:

Haufe Group - SMG Swiss Marketplace Group - Apryse - CARIAD - ROSEN Technology

Procrastination corner and Wonderful Weird Web

• 1 dataset 100 visualisations shows how creative folks can get.

• iPhones allowed to share unedited videos to Youtube and named them img_xxxx. Searching for these on YouTube is a lot of fun.

• A navigation bar component breaking depending on what monitor it is shown on.

• The Deep Sea scroll into the depth of the sea and see what creatures live there.