Meteor: Back from the shadows

Gunnar Torfi — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 21:59:53 +0000

I went from wanting to rewrite our entire app to being optimistic about the future of Meteor. Here are the main reasons why I think the future of Meteor is bright.

Fullstack front-end frameworks

Blitz is a full-stack React framework. It reminds us of simpler times when for example PHP was used to server-side render websites. It allowed us to access the database and return the markup filled with the data necessary to display it. Fast forward a few years to see single-page applications become popular, along with a separate REST or GraphQL backend project. The drawback? You'd usually have at least one developer working on the front-end and a separate team for the back-end.

Blitz is built on the same principles as Meteor, but using the latest web technologies. The fact that Blitz is growing leaves me optimistic about Meteor's future.

Supporting the major front-end frameworks

Blaze is Meteor's default rendering system but React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte can also be used with Meteor. In fact, we are writing everything new using React with Typescript and will eventually phase out every Blaze component while benefiting from the power of Meteor.

Meteor 2.0

When React introduced Fast Refresh it shortened the feedback loop for developers, boosting the developer experience significantly. Hot Module Replacement is one of the new features introduced in Meteor's upcoming 2.0 release. For us, it decreased the rebuild time from up to 40 seconds down to 2 seconds - a 95% decrease! Tree Shaking is also coming in the 2.0 release that removes unused code at compile-time, resulting in smaller bundle sizes for the end-user.

Conclusion

Have you ever tried Meteor? If you tried it a long time ago, a lot has changed. I recommend you give it a spin for your next side-project.

Have any questions? Hit me up on Twitter 🐦 gunnarthedev

Is M1 a good choice for developers?

Gunnar Torfi — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 11:53:19 +0000

Being an Apple fanboy I decided to buy the new MacBook Pro M1 when my old Intel model gave up on me. I ended up with the 13" 8GB RAM version. So far it has been a smooth transition apart from a few hindrances.

🖥️ No support for two external monitors

That there is not support for multiple external monitors is stated on Apple's website so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. I've always had just one external monitor and have used the MacBook on a dock, so this won't trouble me at all.

📦 Homebrew

Homebrew is one of those tools that without a doubt make your life easier but isn't essential to have. There are ways to make Homebrew work on M1 based Macs, but I didn't bother going through the trouble.

🐳 Docker

Docker offers a beta version for M1 so I decided to download it. At first, it got stuck in the "Docker Desktop is starting" phase but after a simple quit & relaunch it started up nicely. So I decided to deploy a new update to our backend in our QA environment (a deployment in our Kubernetes cluster on GKE) and that's where I ran into the first serious issue.

🐛 standard_init_linux.go:211: exec user process caused “exec format error”

I'm no expert on low-level engineering so I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what this means but I believe it has something to do with the Docker image being built with a different architecture than the machine trying to run the image. I haven't spent time finding a workaround, so I let my colleague build the backend for me 🤷‍♂️

🕸️ A safety net

Rosetta lets you run applications using the Intel architecture that eases the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon processors. To enable Rosetta for an app simply right-click the app icon → Get Info → Open using Rosetta.

📈 Chrome vs Safari

I noticed my computer was getting immensely slow so I opened up the Activity Monitor. There I saw Chrome was eating up so much CPU & Memory so I decided to open the same tabs in Safari - the difference was gigantic! I went from barely being able to type to my computer not breaking a sweat.

Conclusion

Everything feels more snappy on the M1 than it did on my previous Intel model that in my opinion makes up for the troubles described in this post. I'm excited about the future of the M chips and how the competitors will answer with this great innovation from Apple.

Do you own a Mac with the M1 chip? How is your experience so far in terms of compatibility?