dpb Weekly - 17th April, 2024
The dpb Weekly is extended issue that contains insights and reviews of what’s happening in the tech world.
The dpb Weekly is extended issue that contains insights and reviews of what’s happening in the tech world.
It is an amazing time to be an Engineer. You have AI tools (Project IDX) to support you in developing, building, and publishing apps, and you have cross-platform frameworks (Lynx) to help you deliver your apps where your customers are.
While Copilot Vision aims to assist us in making the right choices by also gaining (opt-in) access to our screens, there are other ways to simplify our lives. One is to simplify the tech stack, and Render helps us do that.
Also, we migrate our organization to Platform Engineering to make our Engineers more productive. We should also migrate to a safer way to manage our infrastructure resources, secrets, keys, user credentials, identities, and access.
Mobile
#1 Lynx by TikTok
TikTok is exceptionally well known for the new trends they launch. Well, this time, they launched something different. They launched a cross-platform app development framework that targets:
Android
iOS
Web
The top three platforms are necessary for a product to be launched for customers. Flutter1, MAUI2, React Native, and other platforms all support these three platforms.
Learn more about Lynx here: https://lynxjs.org/blog/lynx-unlock-native-for-more.
#2 Project IDX joins Firebase Studio
Do you:
Have a fantastic idea for a mobile app?
Need a backend that hosts your services, databases, authentication, analytics, and more?
Want to explore AI to prototype and build this app?
Project IDX is here to help. Project IDX, an in-browser IDE based on the Visual Studio Code by Microsoft, has joined Firebase Studio to enable developers, designers, and Engineers to develop and deploy apps with ML capabilities from their web browser.
Check it out here on the Firebase website. Try out the Firebase Studio here, in-browser.
Cloud
#1 Render simplifies your stack
The founding members of the “cloud” concept have become giants, goliaths. It is challenging for someone new to join a cloud platform and excel at it, let alone learn the entire stack.
Render3 — I know the name sounds very strange — simplifies this for you by keeping the platform straightforward.
I have not yet tried out the pricing model or the overall experience for a few months, but looking at the tech stack4, it feels much simpler and easier to manage. A database is just a database. There are no gazillion products that just put your data in a B-tree.
DevOps
#1 Platform Engineering is taking jobs of DevOps Engineers
Just like DevOps Engineers took the jobs of Software Engineers and Infrastructure Engineers. Just like they took jobs of Mainframe Engineers, and them from others.
Platform Engineering is enabling organizations to maintain the complexity of their infrastructures. Most of these organizations recently (in the last 7-13 years) graduated from the startup phase to a scaleup or enterprise, and their founding Engineers have either left or become xVPs. This left new joiners to enter the Wild West of Unix machines, Jar files, scrambled plain-text files for network traffic rules, and more.
As a concept, Platform Engineering enables teams to abstract the complexity and enable Engineers to deliver value.
To be continued…
Read more: The Future Of DevOps: Platform Engineering And Autonomous Systems
#2
Security
#1 The Great Migration To Passkeys
Systems are unsafe, and organizations face daily data leaks, system hacks, and security challenges. Users and their accounts are unsafe; SMS-based authentication one-time passwords are terrible, as demonstrated by Veritasium in Exposing The Flaw In Our Phone System.
Learn more about passkeys and What Are Passkeys? What Is a Passkey? Passkey Authentication Explained.
Even though passwords and authentication are based on a secure password, they are safe. Still, humans make mistakes. *hand on heart* Have you repeated a password on different websites? Is your password “p@55w0rd”?
These are the challenges that Passkeys aim to resolve. Although they are a fresh concept, they are proving their value, and all enterprises are moving towards them.
AI
#1 “Copilot Vision is out now”
That’s one way to announce something.
It can literally see what you see on screen
The product is an opt-in feature in Microsoft Edge.
Source: Bluesky.
In my opinion, it was always possible for a product to see what we are seeing since it has access to it. What is unique about this is that it gives you an impressive AI talk experience. For now.
🎉 And just like that, we’ve just shared the first weekly version of the newsletter for daily programming bytes. The aim of this newsletter is to give you 5 minutes to read every week, so no spending extra time on the newsletter, but giving you useful resources and links to read further.
https://flutter.dev/
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui
https://render.com/
https://render.com/platform