How devs can adapt to the changing face of UI-building
Happy Saturday and welcome back to the newsletter! As always, read on for some of the best software engineering insights, opinions, and news, from Triplebyte’s Compiler blog and around the web.
//From Compiler
Everything about software UI is changing. Here’s what UI engineers can do to keep up.
Will the rise of magically-slick, no-code tools leave UI devs in the dust? Will AI and new paradigms involving wearables and gestures render today's 2D coders unemployable once these inevitable shifts take place? No and no, probably — as long as you allow yourself to adapt. Here are several ways the UI-building landscape will change, and precisely how you can stay ahead by either drilling down on or widening your expertise. (Or both!) read()
How I Build: Using Storybook and Angular to make UI components in isolation
Spaghetti CSS is a problem. If only we had a centralized system that allowed us to just code UI elements individually and then plop them wherever we liked. Oh wait... read()
How to avoid looking junior in an iOS coding interview
In iOS coding interviews, you're often asked to build some actual app functionality (typically with an emphasis on UI) using the iOS SDK. There are certain behaviors that tend to correlate with a lack of experience with the native tools and frameworks. Here's what they are, how to avoid them, and how to give yourself a leg up – especially if you're applying for a junior role but don't want to look junior. read()
//Around the web
🕶 GitHub has a dark mode now! If you’re into that kind of thing, go enable it on your account right now! This feature was announced during the social coding platform’s virtual GitHub Universe event this week, where it announced it would start letting companies invest in open-sources projects by funding GitHub Sponsors developers directly (💲) and it unveiled an automatic pull request merging feature (✅). read()
🏢 Go take the State of JavaScript 2020 survey. Have some opinions on the most-used and, let’s face it, most-griped-about programming language in the world? Make sure your voice counts in this year’s version of the State of JavaScript questioner, which is now live for devs to fill out. It’ll be fun to see if there’s any change from some of last year’s results, like React and Express coming in as the most loved frameworks and Angular … not so much. After taking part in the JS survey, make sure to check out the results from this year’s State of CSS, which just posted. go()
📊 “Excel is now a complete programming language.” Uh oh? It looks like Microsoft has unleashed functions in its spreadsheet software. Called LAMBDA, the company is claiming the feature brings one of its oldest products, already the “world's most widely used programming language” (because of the formulas and what not), to “Turing-complete” status. Twitter has jokes, of course, with one software engineering expert even going so far as to submit that if a paper pusher can figure out how to program a lambda in Excel, they can definitely handle Python. read()
😳 A not so Swift rewrite. This might not be feel-good weekend reading, but you’ll want to eventually check out former Uber engineer McLaren Stanley’s Twitter thread describing his previous company’s nightmare iOS app overhaul. Library maximums were reached, binary sizes were ballooned, and company VPs were nearly fired, but all eventually ended OK. The comments about the story over on Reddit are also required reading.
//Jobs
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