One benefit of working from home and the resulting lost sense of time is that every weekend comes very fast.

Software Engineering 🌐

Introducing Crank – Brian Kim

The entire React lifecycle […] could be expressed within a single async generator function.

An interesting experiment to move away from pure functions in React framework to side effects with async functions in Javascript. It was quite astounding to see how component lifecycle methods nicely map to a generator function.

blurhash: A very compact representation of a placeholder for an image. – Dag Ågren

blurhash is easily the most exciting library I found this week. With just a pre-calculated short string (20-30 characters), you can create a beautiful placeholder image.

Versioning fields in GraphQL – Leonardo Losoviz

We can create our field with an argument called version, through which we specify which version of the field to use.

I never thought of versioning subsections of a schema with a version argument. However, I still expect that the work of defining a contract, communicating changes, and program-managing the changes will not go away. Because those are human problems, not technical ones.

Typing functions in TypeScript – Axel Rauschmayer & Augmenting Interfaces in the Global Scope in TypeScript – Marius Schulz

These two Typescript articles taught me two things I always get confused about: How to overload functions, and how to type the global scope in a type-safe way.

People ❤

Seniorless — 5 Reasons You Should Hire More Juniors – Gabriel Grinberg

I was in similar shoes when I was leading a team at a startup. I didn’t have the budget to hire senior engineers, so I instead turned to junior engineers and developed them. Contrarily, I concluded after two years, if your project is time-sensitive, and needs less uncertainty, not more, you should consolidate the headcounts and hire fewer, more senior engineers.

Carta’s covid-19 layoff – Henry Ward

I don’t want to celebrate this article since a lot of people just lost their jobs. However, I do appreciate a CEO of a company taking full responsibility for the decision to lay off.

Business 💸

COVID-19 Global Impact Charts – Luke Wroblewski

An eyeopening set of graphics showing how our society has changed because of the pandemic. Would you have guessed we sleep more now that we don’t need to commute?

The third wave of open source migration – Donald Fischer

for any technology-driven organization that hasn’t embraced the reality that the modern application development platform is a polyglot mix of open source languages, frameworks, and packages: the time is now.

The calculations will differ by organization. The crisis probably put cost-saving at a higher priority. Eventually, it comes down to build vs. buy and tradeoffs between paying the price now vs. later, and immediate benefit vs. future flexibility.