Pierced through the heart but never killed
If you think about it, me and Taylor Swift have a lot in common. We’re both in our thirties, we both suffer for our art, and we both know deep down that the new Carly Rae Jepsen record was the best album that came out last week.
Today, we’ve got sleepy foxes, unwanted gifts during Circle Time, and a stiff lower back.
Welcome to #130.
The Main Thing
Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
Node isn’t going anywhere
While Deno and Bun have been busy raising millions of dollars and humble-bragging about how “fast and secure” they are, good old Node.js has been plugging along, consistently releasing new versions with incremental improvements. If Node ever did stop to brag, they’d probably just say “scoreboard” to remind everyone that it’s still, “Node users: millions vs. Next-gen runtime users: not millions.”
We got another one of these not-so-major Node updates last week with the release of Node 19. There aren’t a ton of jaw-dropping new features here, but there’s a few highlights you should know about — especially if you snoozed the last three Node releases like an unwanted Mac OS update.
Let’s dive in:
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Watch Mode — Node now has a native
--watchcommand built in, which means our homienodemonno longer has a job. Fortunately, its Plan B has always been the Jamaican bobsled team. -
Keep Alive — Node now sets
KeepAliveto true by default (5 seconds), which apparently is enough time to satisfy most requests. -
Web Crypto API — No, not the kind that loses you money. The Web Crypto API (the one where you can perform basic cryptographic operations) is now stable.
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Latest V8: Not much to see here other than a number formatting utility called
Intl.NumberFormat. A V8 (the engine, not the juice) update is kind of like getting towels for your birthday — not very cool, but you appreciate not having to buy them yourself.
Bottom Line: Is Node as young and sexy as some of the shiny new runtimes? Probably not. But just like T-Swift, we all know that it’s not going away anytime soon.
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Our Friends
(With Benefits)
When you ask the junior devs to build a couple dashboards from scratch.
Retool might be black magic
You know it doesn’t have to be this hard, right?
It’s not 2013 anymore (RIP dubstep), and you don’t need three engineers spending a whole sprint on internal apps. Now in glorious 2022, you can whip up any internal tool you need in about 15 minutes with Retool.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen developers give a paid product this kind of love on Twitter. But since most devs hate building internal apps even more than they hate turning on their Zoom cameras for standup — I guess it makes sense.
Here’s how some of the best engineering teams in the world use Retool:
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Financial services like Brex, Plaid, and Ramp use it to build apps that underwrite loans, measure risk, and investigate fraud.
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Marketplaces like DoorDash and ShipBob use it to build back-office apps for sales and support teams.
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Retail & E-comm companies like Amazon and Peloton use it to build apps that manage returns, promos, inventory, and GDPR compliance.
What could you build? Try it out for free.
The Job Board
 | Software Engineer - Mobile | |||
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Come work closely with Phantom's founders to build their flagship mobile app in React Native – a crypto wallet that's already used by millions of people to access apps and financial services built on the Solana blockchain. |
 | Cloud Architect | |||
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Capco is the largest financial services consulting firm in the world, and they're looking for an experienced cloud engineer to lead new projects for their clients, which ranges from FinTech companies to global banks. | ||||
Powered By: |
 | Senior or Staff Front-end Engineer | ||
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Close.com is looking for 2 experienced individuals that have a solid understanding of React and want to help design, implement and launch major user-facing features. Close is a 100% globally distributed team of 65 high-performing, happy people that are dedicated to building a product our customers love. |
 | Lead Technical Architect | ||
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The UK Home Office is looking for an experienced engineer to help define, own, and contribute to its technical roadmap and strategy as they build applications and services used by the UK government and its citizens. | |||
Powered By: |
Spot the Bug
Sponsored by Jamstack Conf
Jamstack Conf is happening IRL in San Francisco next month, and it looks incredible. Use discount code “BYTES” to get 20% off.
const petName = 'Leo'
const placeholder = '{NAME}'
const reminderTemplate = '{NAME} is due for another visit. Please call us so we can set up a new appointment. We look forward to seeing you and {NAME} soon.'
const reminder = reminderTemplate.replace(placeholder, petName)
Cool Bits
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Amos created this Http course that nobody asked for. Because sometimes it’s fun to create stuff that nobody asked for — like when I made friendship bracelets for the kids in my 3rd-grade from all the hairs I painstakingly collected from the Circle Time rug during silent reading time.
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Sam Magura (2nd most active maintainer of the Emotion CSS library) wrote about Why he’s breaking up with CSS-in-JS. Et tu, Brute?
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Is it possible to measure developer productivity *without* pissing off everyone on your team? Sleuth says yes, and they made This Brief Practical Guide to prove it. It’s created by some of the founding team behind Jira, and it’s surprisingly good. [sponsored]
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James Sinclair wrote an article called, What if the team hates my functional code? And to think that all this time, I was just worried about them hating my personality.
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The React Native team led a discussion on GitHub asking, How can we improve React Native? For a while, someone kept spamming the comments with, “Web Components fixes this. Don’t give in to the JS industrial complex!!!” But thankfully, that person’s mom kicked them off the family computer once they used up all their screen time for the day.
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RestFox is an offline-first, web HTTP client that claims to be an open-source alternative to Postman. It’s also the name of the Wish.com knock-off version of StarFox that my mom got me for my birthday one year. But all you do is build different types of beds to see who can make their fox fall asleep the fastest.
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GitHub just announced a new-and-improved navigation to manage your GitHub Actions. Nat Friedman reminds you to please use it responsibly.
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SolidJS v1.6 was just released with support for partial hydration, out-of-order streaming islands, and more. Ryan Carniato named this release “Castle in the Sky” — which sent me down a Miyazaki rabbit hole where I re-watched every single Studio Ghibili film in one sitting without leaving this desk chair. It’s now 49 hours later. Yes, my lower back’s a little stiff, but I’ve never felt more alive. Thank you Ryan.
String.prototype.replace only replaces the first occurrence found in the string. If there could be more than one occurrence, use String.prototype.replaceAll which is new-ish as of ES2021.
const petName = 'Leo'
const placeholder = '{NAME}'
const reminderTemplate = '{NAME} is due for another visit. Please call us so we can set up a new appointment. We look forward to seeing you and {NAME} soon.'
const reminder = reminderTemplate.replaceAll(placeholder, petName)