is this project still maintained?

We know some of you are on edge about losing your beloved Twitter. The good news is you still have Bytes. That is until a self-serving billionaire throws the bag at us, then you’re on your own.

This week we’ve got the philosophy of The Lorax, Fullmetal Bachelor-hood fan fic, and #SweatySteve.

Welcome to #136.

The Main Thing

Show me the GitHub Universe

Hey Github

We knew that last week’s GitHub Universe 2022 was going to be a banger when they kicked things off with a hardcore, Guillermo Rauch Steve Jobs-style keynote. And while I’m more of a sweaty Steve Ballmer kind of a guy (#SweatySteve), there were some nice announcements.

Like your performance reviews at work, the focus of this year’s conference was on improving your productivity. Specifically, GitHub announced a bunch of updates to things like Projects, Actions, and like a failed web3 startup, they’re going all-in on AI.

Here are some things that caught our attention:

• “Hey GitHub”: Move aside Alexa, GitHub Copilot now has a voice-to-text interface that can take plain text and turn it into code. You activate it in the usual Github fashion – by saying “+1” and “is this project still maintained?” over and over until it answers you.

• 60 free hours of Codespaces: One of the more annoying limitations with Codespaces was that you could only use it on 2 projects before you had to start tossing your hard-earned nickles at Satya and Bill. But with this update, you can use Codespaces for free for up to 60 hours a month, which makes it useful for quick fixes, debugging someone’s PR, or coding on your iPad (👋 there are dozens of us).

• Code Search: Search on GitHub has always been…terrible. Fortunately, our friends in the Octoverse have heard our cries and are rolling out a brand new search engine with filters for language, path, owner, repo, and more. And they’ve added features like cmd + click to navigate imports.

Bottom Line: Ever since it was acquired, GitHub has been cranking out more and more useful features for developers. I gotta admit, life under our Microsoft overlords is prettttty good. Thanks #SweatySteve.

Our Friends
(With Benefits)

When you ask the junior devs to build a few dashboards from scratch.

Retool is basically magic

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 devtool this much love before. 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:

• Financial services like Brex, Plaid, and Ramp use it to build apps that underwrite loans, measure risk, and investigate fraud.

• Marketplaces like DoorDash and ShipBob use it to build back-office apps for sales and support teams.

• Retail & E-comm companies like Amazon and Peloton use it to build apps that manage returns, promos, inventory, and GDPR compliance.

Try it out for free and see what cool stuff you can build in an afternoon.

The Job Board

	Senior or Staff Front-end Engineer
	100% Remote React
	Close.com is looking for an experienced React developer to help design and implement major user-facing features. Close is a 100% globally distributed team of 65 happy people, dedicated to building a product our customers love.

	Senior Full Stack Engineer
	Remote friendly TS $160-210k base
	Motion is looking for experienced TypeScript engineers to build the next generation of productivity tools. You'll inform key frontend architectural decisions that help Motion scale the next 2 order of magnitudes, create delightful user-facing features, and improve application performance. We are an ambitious team of 15 people distributed remotely across North America.

	Software Engineer - Frontend
	Remote React + TS $150-$250k
	As a frontend engineer at Phantom, you’ll help create delightful user experiences, contribute to cross-platform client infrastructure, and craft web3 developer SDKs for Phantom's crypto wallet that's used by millions.

Spot the Bug

Sponsored by Datadog

They created this free one-pager on how to configure and monitor e2e tests *without* pulling your hair out. It’s a quick read that’s surprisingly helpful.

function factorial(n) {
  if (n === 0 || n === 1) return 1;

  for (const i = n - 1; i >= 1; i--) {
    n *= i;
  }

  return n;
}

Cool Bits

1. Speaking of GitHub, Guillermo Rauch sleuthed out that the new GitHub repo UI uses React after being the poster child for Web Components for years.

2. Speaking of Web Components, in The Story of Web Components we break down why we think they haven’t gained meaningful adoption – despite every opportunity to.

3. Speaking of adoption, Frontend Mastery wrote a great deep dive on The evolution of scalable CSS, which will make you really happy that you haven’t had to visit CSS Zen Garden the last few years (we hope).

4. In this wonderful article, James breaks down Why would anyone need JavaScript generator functions?. A question I’ve been asking myself since 2019 when everyone tried to gaslight me into thinking Redux-Sagas were the future.

5. Blessed is an unofficial guide to the entire Rust ecosystem, so you can finally catch up on all the lore behind Salad Fingers’ favorite programming language.

6. The Node team just released an in-depth document on Node.js Security Best Practices. You probably won’t follow most of these, but at least you won’t be able to blame Node anymore.

7. Nanda answers my prayers by breaking down something I’ve been longing for since I was a little boy, rebuilding Babel.

8. Saharan created bubbles — a fun, interactive bubbles experience that they created with their own custom physics engine. My college roommate used to brag about how he created a “physics engine” to power his own “interactive bubbles experience”, but that was just a really pretentious way of describing a duct-taped gas mask bong for smoking low-quality weed.

Spot the Bug: Solution

Sponsored by Datadog

For loops work by assigning a value to the variable for each iteration, but variables defined with const can’t be reassigned. Instead, we should use let to define our variable.

function factorial(n) {
  if (n === 0 || n === 1) return 1;

  for (let i = n - 1; i >= 1; i--) {
    n *= i;
  }

  return n;
}