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Ben Halpern
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What's the most excited you've ever been about a new technology?

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

Funny how this post got in right when I published my TenserFlow.js post. I've been so excited about having ability to play with machine learning algorithms right into browser that one day my daughter had to remind me she had heard it 4 times from me so far πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚

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Ben Halpern

Classic πŸ˜„

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Cubicle Buddha

Yaser, so it’s okay and normal that I talk to my newborn baby about TypeScript features while I’m rocking her to sleep?

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

Completely, you could even make a song out of it πŸ˜‰

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Alex Lohr

Sleep, little one,
type systems can be fun!
You'll catch the bugs in time you write
the code so you can sleep at night,
sleep, little one.

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Sunny Singh

This may sound lame, but server-side rendering. I initially didn't jump on the SPA (Single Page App) hype train because it felt wrong to hide content behind JavaScript, making SEO difficult. When I learned that React could actually spit out HTML on the server first, I got super excited to learn it. I'm super excited at how easy it is today too with Gatsby and Next.js.

I wrote about SSR on here actually.

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Damnjan Jovanovic • Edited

When SSD become available

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Ben Halpern

Oh yeah, that's a good one. I remember where I was when I first found out about SSDs πŸ˜„

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Damnjan Jovanovic

Thats pretty much uncover how old we are :D

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Ben Halpern

SSD had already existed for a long time before I discovered them, but when it clicked for me in that moment I knew it was going to have a big impact on my computing. I also immediately wondered why it wasn't already shipped as the default drive.

These days it seems like it is the default for most devices.

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Ben Halpern

I recall being incredibly excited about React Native. Not just React Native itself, but it felt like the nudge to really see what this React thing was all about in general.

When React first came around, Angular was already a thing, so was KnockoutJS and several other frameworks.

But I didn't think any of them were fleshed out very well. To me, jQuery was still the best way to get things done with JavaScript at the time. React really changed things. Everything that's come since has been heavily influenced by great ideas introduced by React.

(Not that you need a big JS library for every project, vanilla is often the best choice πŸ˜„)

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Hatem Houssein

The For-loop in my first month of programming. πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

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nickjj profile image
Nick Janetakis • Edited
  • Within the last ~6 months? LiveView with Phoenix for being able make a web app feel like it's a single page app without having to write any Javascript. Diffs of your server rendered templates get pushed over a websocket channel when things change but the initial render happens without Javascript, so you get SEO perks with no extra work.

  • Within the last ~5 years? Docker to be able to set up a web app and all of its dependencies on any major OS without having to mess around with version managers and service specific installation steps.

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rhymes

Phoenix LiveView is super interesting (though the idea behind is not new, it's a lot less expensive now) and I think it can't be easily replicated within languages that don't have "fearless concurrency" like Elixir :)

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Nick Janetakis • Edited

Yeah, I used Turbolinks for a long time in Rails. It's not quite the same, but LiveView seems like the next natural stage of progression towards creating responsive web apps.

Although in the project I'm working on now, I'm using both Turbolinks and plan to use LiveView together. Turbolinks still has its place for ensuring the head of your page doesn't get resent for each page view, and LiveView steps in for manipulating pieces of the DOM without changing the page (although push state is coming in a future LiveView release which makes things quite interesting).

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rhymes

Thanks for the details! I'm glad there's no single way to create a web app. Going all in with a SPA is not the only option to have a fast website :D

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David Wickes • Edited

Hmmm.

I've never been excited about new technology. I've been very excited about 'old' technology though.

  • REST architecture
  • Common Lisp
  • Unix design philosophy
  • FIFO files
  • C
  • dc

I distrust new technology - usually old ideas reimplemented badly. The craving for the new is particularly awful in the JavaScript space. At least with old tech you know it's going to work.

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Will Lawrence

.NET Core! My original training was in C#, and I love the >.NET ecosystem. However, a huge down side was this it was Windows only.

Now with Core, its cross platform. Visual Studio even runs on Mac now.

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Shad Mirza

Earlier it was React Hooks, thanks to hooks that the amount of simplicity is amazing now.
I'm also excited about TurboModules in react-native. It is going to change how react-native works forever. Imagine hybrid native app without the need of going through the bridge. It's going to be epic.

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Devin Handspiker-Wade

Docker. Just getting into it this year but so far it's GREAT.

  • Need to test a script? Start a container
  • Want to use a python script without filling your computer with needed libraries? Run it in a container.
  • Want a CD/CI to have the needed tools without installing them each time or just hoping? Create a standard image.