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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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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 😂😂😂

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Ben Halpern

Classic 😄

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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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Yaser Adel Mehraban

Completely, you could even make a song out of it 😉

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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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Cubicle Buddha • Edited

Well you can probably tell how excited I am about Dependabot by the expletive in my title for this recent article: dev.to/cubiclebuddha/omfg-dependab...

Also, when I first found TypeScript I was so incredibly happy that I could have all of the dynamic object building nature of JS and still get solidly good IntelliSense. I’ve become a bit obsessive about TypeScript since then haha.

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Paweł Borawski

Death of VR.

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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 😄

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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 😄)

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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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Vuild • Edited

This moment.

youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

I made a BTTF smart shoe with Android from a Heely once upon a time. It was more exciting than most things. 😃

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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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Sm0ke

GatsbyJS,
.. they succeed in implementing that PRPL pattern as an artist.
GraphQL seems to be a show stopper at first look, but really useful after learning the basics.

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Michael Caveney

It's amazing how much boilerplate work Gatsby abstracts away, how many tools it offers, and the sheer love and effort the community puts in.

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Sm0ke

Gridsome also, looks promising. It's the Vue.js cousin of GatsbyJS.

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Nicolò Rebughini

Because of past job, when GPGPU computing became available. Being able to leverage the power of cheap-ish GPUs to augment CPU bound processes like video and 3D rendering: that to me felt like a huge democratisation of rendering because of how insane were some benefits for the little money you could spend.