Theme for this week is the state of Javascript in 2022.
THREAD covering the @Meta Quest Foo Fighters concert in VR: Before we get to the Javascript stuff, an interesting look at the state of Meta’s metaverse experiences. Read this thread, then compare it to what Epic is doing with Fortnite. I’m not sure how everyone sees this, but Epic seems much further along with the Metaverse than Meta - and sans VR glasses. To me, all of this reinforces that Metaverse talent is going to include a lot of engineers with multiplayer game backgrounds. Most of the scaling issues in the concert are scenarios the Fortnite or COD ops/product/engineering teams have had to consider. That also seems harder than introducing VR into the mix…
The Last Days of MySpace: While we’re picking on Meta, found this thread by Cory Doctorow interesting. I’m wary of his main point, that Facebook may follow the arc of MySpace (I think it’s just too big to have the precipitous fall barring some external changes - think antitrust). That said, there’s something interesting here about human relationships and how intrinsic limits in how we think about and process those relationships are product problems that no one has figured out at scale. It’s been on my mind a lot during this sabbatical - this notion of smaller, overlapping social networks that better model different ways we trust people. Hopefully more on that at some point in the near future.
The State of JS 2021: Easily my biggest frustration with the Node/Javascript ecosystem is just how many, many, many, many, many choices there are for every layer of the application stack. And each of them have different structures, different tradeoffs, and a lot of hand wiring in many cases. I miss the way Rails just said, here’s everything you need, feel free to swap things out - and the whole ecosystem more or less aligned with those defaults and optimized around those defaults. I mention this because a survey like this is both helpful to get a sense of where there is general alignment in the JS community while also giving a window into where the community is going.
Carbon Design System: IBM has an open source design system, which I ran across in my dev research because there’s a solid Svelte implementation. Looks interesting, gets spoken of positively in a few forums that I’m lurking in.
