[BAWD #95] The Rise of ChatGPT and Design Systems

Dec 12, 2022

Hello, dear friend 👋🏾,

I trust you had a blissful week and that you’re getting ready for the holidays 🎄. I’ve missed you! I was away for a while due to an influx of activities I had going on. But I’m back now and hope to continue sending you letters every week. Thanks for your patience!

A lot has happened in the past weeks, and I’m tempted to put everything into today’s letter, but instead, I’d summarize as much as I should :). Btw, here’s a friendly reminder that you can play the popular T-Rex dino game on your Chrome browser (both on desktop or mobile) without waiting for your internet connection to break by typing chrome://dino in your browser tab.

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Featured Technical Articles ✍🏾👩🏽‍💻

Transform Shipping Rates at the Edge with Next.js Advanced Middleware by Colby Fayock.
Useful Front-End Boilerplates And Starter Kits by Cosima Mielke.
Using Path Matching in React Router by Tania Rascia.
Micro Frontends in NextJS with Webpack 5 by Kevin Wang.
How Uber Optimizes the Timing of Push Notifications using ML and Linear Programming by Vinay Sharma, Rémi Torracinta, Giacomo Lamberti, and Britton Overall.
An Interactive Guide to Flexbox by Josh Comeau.
How to Use Next.js Middleware by Chris Nicholas.
Postgres: a better message queue than Kafka? by Pete Hunt.
Information Architecture for Courses and Educational Products by Joel Hooks.
How to choose between Next.js CSR, SSR, SSG, and ISR by Theodorus Clarence.
Testing API Calls in useEffect using React Testing Library and Jest by Tania Rascia.
Commerce Layer’s CDN caching strategy at the edge by Seth Bindernagel.

Featured Productivity Articles ✍🏾🦅

Is Critical Thinking a Soft Skill? by Althea Need Kaminske.
How to Improve Your Focus and Concentration by Mike Manson.
The Day You Decided to Take the Leap by Lawrence Yeo.
How to Stop Lying to Ourselves: A Call for Self-Awareness by James Clear.

Product of the Week ✨

Create T3 App is the best way to start a full-stack and typesafe Nextjs web application from the command line.

Good Tidings 🔊

Amidst the numerous hiring freezes and layoffs, here’s a great list with over 1000 companies currently hiring.
Whether you're interviewing or an interviewer, these three articles can help you get started and ace your next one.
You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, the intelligent GPT-3 chatbot released some time ago by OpenAI that can answer questions and generate different kinds of text. In 5 days of release, it amassed over 1M users and is proving very useful, while some people are concerned about AI taking their jobs.
On another note, more tools have been built around ChatGPT that can be useful for software engineers. For example, you can use showGPT to create/use templates with prefilled code questions or chatgpt-vscode, chatgpt-chrome-extension, website summarizer, share-gpt, and much more.
In the spirit of AI news, several image-generating/editing AI platforms have emerged, like Lensa and Astria, which uses text-to-image diffusion models like Dreambooth for a subject-driven generation. To learn more, you can read this paper by Ruiz, Nataniel, et al.
The large, small, and dynamic viewport units have been added to CSS to account for mobile viewports with dynamic toolbars.
Atomic design is a methodology web developers use for creating design systems in five levels of atomic design. You should read this to learn more or read this design system guide.
Here’s a free introductory course on cryptography for programmers of all ages and skill levels.
Looking for a solid and comprehensive Deep Learning for Computer Vision course? I’ve got you; check this playlist out.
You can now get discounts on some programming and software tools/services.
Interested in speaking at conferences but need help creating and structuring your submission for CFP proposals? Then, you should check this out.
Here’s a guide that teaches professional developers how to transform component libraries into design systems and set up the production infrastructure used by leading front-end teams.
If you’re a student (at any level), you can apply to get the GitHub Student Developer Pack and access the best developer tools and courses for FREE.
Here’s a curated list of project-based programming tutorials you can use to learn how to build applications from scratch.
Need support for your learning? Every month, you can get funding for your learning needs (internet subscription, computer device, or courses) from anonymous people who care.
Here's a recommendation of the top five websites to find remote jobs for different fields in tech.
Joe's Jobs curates the best web, product, engineering, design, DevRel, and open-source startup roles.

Dev Term of the Week 💾

Secure Shell (SSH) is a cryptographic protocol for securely operating network services over an unsecured network. Learn more here (text) or here (video).

Book Recommendations 📚

The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin.
All of Grace by Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner.
Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI by Abdulazeez Adeshina.

Featured Tweets and Videos 😍

Here are some tweets I think are cool and some of my favorite videos from YouTube this week.

Matteo Collina @matteocollina

The docs are code too!

Roy Derks @gethackteam

Stop learning tech for what is not on track for your career. Learn tech you can use now.

дэн @dan_abramov

if you’re maintaining an open source project and you’re not using gh pr checkout <number> via github cli you’re kind of missing out

Bọ́lájí Ayọ̀dejì @iambolajiayo

Someone asked this question some months ago, and this was my response. Thought to share it for anyone who'd find it useful now.

A screenshot with text:

“How do you recover when you fall?

Depends on the type of fall.

How do you recover when you spill water from a cup on the floor? You grab something to clean the water, take the cup up, tidy it, and you keep the cup in a better position where the spill would be avoided next time.

This doesn't necessarily mean you won't spill the water again, but each time you do, you'd learn how to avoid spilling the same way as the last until you end up not spilling water at all (expertise) or start spilling yogurt instead (growth).

I can't tell you how to recover, but you'd know what to do based on the type of fall. Your goal is to clean up your mistake and do “something” to reduce or eliminate the chances of it happening again.”

⬇️: Dressing Up as ICONIC Programming Languages

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⬇️: I Became The World’s Richest Man For 7 Minutes

⬇️: Refactoring the Web with Angie Jones

Quote of the Week 💙

“Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it” –Andy Rooney

Shout out to my amazing Patrons: Maya Shavin, Angie Jones, Sarah Drasner, Samson Goddy, and Obinna Odirionye.

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That's all for this letter. See you next time, and stay safe!

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