DeveloPassion's Newsletter #19 - A Second Brain for Everyone

Welcome to the 19th edition of my newsletter. Before we dive in, I want to share a secret with you: I’m stressed. Truth be told I’m stressed all the time, like most of us, and not only because of Covid-panic. No, I’m stressed because I’ll be a dad again in about two months. And my wife and I are not ready yet. We still have quite a few things to buy, the birth list to prepare, the cards, etc. It’s also crazy to think that there’ll be ~9 years of difference between my daughter and my new baby. I’m stressed, but it’s good stress. It’s stress that causes ACTION, not panic. And stress like that is sometimes very positive & useful. I’m also so happy to be able to raise one more child in this world. It’s a wonderful life experience that I can’t wait to live again. If you find this newsletter interesting, then please do take a bit of time to share the link to my newsletter on social media: https://dsebastien.net/newsletter. With your help, others will also get a chance to discover and enjoy reading it. As an added benefit, it’ll also motivate me to continue the experience! Don’t forget that you can also follow me on Twitter, where I’m most active, and always available to answer your questions.

Since the previous newsletter, I have made quite a lot of progress on Dev Concepts’ third volume. As you probably know, that volume is dedicated to IT Architecture. There’s still some work for that one to be done, but I’m getting closer each day!

I’ve written a lot about communication protocols, and application integration. I’ve covered HTTP, WebSockets, message queues, and Web services. So far, in the section about Web services, I’ve written about what APIs are, reasons to use APIs, API Design, REST/RESTful/Web APIs, GraphQL, Server-Sent Events (SSE), WebSockets (WSS), and RPC. Next up are SOAP, SPARQL, and Webhooks. That part is quite DENSE as you can imagine ;-)

As I’ve mentioned in my latest weekly status update, I’ve clearly articulated the difference between REST, RESTful, and Web APIs, as well as why HATEOAS is so important. I sincerely hope that my readers will get to know the real REST architectural style and will build actual REST APIs. I’m not a “RESTafarian”, but I think that it’s really important to understand that REST is not about pretty URLs!

I’ve also covered the history of RPC APIs and explained why RPC is still useful. I’ve also explained why I consider that most REST APIs are actually RPC in disguise.

The backlog of ideas keeps growing, so I will certainly continue improving Dev Concepts for years to come! I’ve decided to add Linked Data, RDF, microdata, SPARQL & JSON-LD to the project backlog. I feel like LinkedData technologies are bound to grow in popularity in the coming years. I’ll tell you about that in a future edition!

To finish up, I wanted to let you know that I’ve opened the pre-orders for volume 3. At the moment you’re the only ones to know. The price is pretty low right now, as it doesn’t account for all the pages that I’ve added compared to my initial estimates. I’ll probably increase it before making the announcement on social networks.

By the way, I’m still looking for more reviewers. If you’re interested, then please reach out to me (by replying to this mail or sending me a DM on Twitter!). I’ll give you free access to the books/drafts in exchange for honest feedback & reviews that I can share publicly.

If you can’t afford it, then send me a DM on Twitter, and I’ll give you a free copy. I’m also interested in giving free access to the content in exchange for honest feedback, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to me ;-)

I’m writing Dev Concepts in public, publishing weekly status updates on IndieHackers, so check it out if you want to follow the project more closely: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/dev-concepts. You can already get the first volume as well as the second one; those two are already available.

If you’re following me closely, you know that I just won’t shut up about two things these days: Dev Concepts, and my Second Brain project. I’m psyched to announce that I’ve managed to convince three awesome developers to join my journey and turn my idea into reality! I can’t wait to be able to share the first prototypes with you all. I’m still looking for feedback about the idea by the way! Reply to this mail with your answers to the following questions:

Last month I’ve received a $50 bonus from Medium because I was part of the top 1501-2000 writers for the month. It’s not much, but it is incredibly motivating to keep going! As I’ve mentioned in the previous edition, I’ve started publishing content taken from Dev Concepts volume 1 on my blog, Medium, and HashNode. It’s something that I will continue doing for quite a while. It’s a great way for me to share those ideas with a much larger audience, and also to raise awareness about the project. These are the last pieces that I’ve published:

I’ve also decided to participate in the Medium Writers Challenge. I will try to write essays for at least two of the categories. I’ve started writing a piece about death, which is a very sensitive subject for me. My family had its share of losses in the past few years (>7 in our close circle). We’ll see if I can complete this in time…

It’s been a while since I’ve last covered Angular. In my defense, I don’t develop using Angular anymore at the moment. I’ve been going back to my roots with Java, Maven and the like, and I’ve also dived into other subjects recently. Still, Angular keeps evolving! Two new versions have been released recently: 12.1 and 12.2. I’ve quickly gone through the articles published by Ninja Squad; as usual they’re quite exhaustive:

My personal favorites are the improvements of the Angular CLI; specifically the introduction of a persistent build cache, and esbuild support. Combined together, those are bringing HUGE speed boosts! By the way, there’s an RFC about the persistent build cache; it will probably be enabled by default in the future, which is GREAT! There’s also another interesting RFC from Igor Minar, exploring the remaining use cases for Angular JIT compilation. Maybe JIT will disappear in the future, which will make Angular even lighter. Finally, there’s an interesting discussion about future template composition APIs that Angular will probably introduce. This will certainly make some scenarios easier to implement with fewer hacks!

Next.js 11.1 has been released recently. As usual, it brings an impressive number of new features and improvements. I don’t want to go through those in detail (check out the link above!), but I wanted to quickly discuss those that I feel are most important. The first one is the introduction of support for ES modules. That support is still experimental at this point, but it should become stable in v12. Secondly, there’s the introduction of support for SWC, which is a fast JS/TS compiler written in Rust. As pointed out in the release notes, SWC reduces build times in two, which is impressive. Vercel has actually hired the creator of SWC, DongYoon Kang. It’s super cool that open-source maintainers get more and more opportunities to make a living out of their passion. I find this particularly interesting because it’s a trend that I’m noticing; more and more build tools of the JS ecosystems are being developed using languages like Rust and/or are open to going down a similar path. I’m very about how things will unfold in the future, but there’s hope for us to have lightning-fast builds in the JS ecosystem! :) Again, this is not the whole story; check out the official release notes to discover more!

Here are some of the links that I found interesting this week: