Better Programming’s “Best of 2022” List — Last Updated by an AI
This issue of Coffee Bytes was initially written by a human — Anupam from Better Programming before ChatGPT took over the reins.
Hey everyone, happy new year!
We hope you had a relaxing time to end the year. If you’re already in full swing into 2023, we have compiled a list of our best stories and some of my favorite reads from the previous year (depending on when you’re reading this).
A lot transpired in the programming space in the past year. From building Wordle clones to using ChatGPT to create or iterate over just about anything, 2022 was a year packed with tech announcements across languages and frameworks. Perhaps, it was the last time we would use non-AI tools to interact as we know it.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
January — Wordling
Wordle, the online puzzle game, took the internet by storm, and seemingly everyone was building their own bots and tools to optimize their chances of winning.
To kick things off, Javier Frias offers a slightly different approach to the task we’d commonly solve using programming languages. He goes full serverless mode and leverages BigQuery to find the best three words.
Meanwhile, Simon Archer has a script to transfer our Wordle save state/stats between browsers and devices.
February — Smart Contracts Analysis and Some Delightful UIs
2022 was a wild ride for the Web3 community… but there are plenty of fascinating learning materials to take inspiration from — like Nazar Ilamanov’s smart contract breakdown guide to understand Uniswap and Sicong Zhao’s analysis on decoding Pepsi’s NFTs.
For iOS developers looking to create interactive user interfaces, check out Andrew Zheng’s guide on integrating popovers (his open-source library has got nearly 1K stars), while Sarah shows us how to create interactive view corners in SwiftUI using gestures.
March — Go 1.18, React 18, and the Future of Microfrontends
Go 1.18 saw the addition of generics to the language. Pedro Costa shows off the power and limitations of Generics in Go 1.18 through a Map/Reduce API example — all while answering the most important question for Gophers — Are We There Yet?
At the same time, Henry Steinhauer explores how to write generic helper functions while Noah Schumacher builds a fully-functional Set type using Go 1.18.
Forging ahead, we’ve got the much-talked-about React 18 update. Jennifer Fu guides us through the new hooks and helps clarify the double mount effect in Strict mode.
To end this section, Luca Mezzalira shares his focus for 2022 on the microfrontends ecosystem — in arguably my favorite reads from the year gone by.
April — Python Inside JavaScript
April was jam-packed with announcements for the Python community. Sophia Yang from the Anaconda team is here to give us the first glimpse at PyScript, a JavaScript framework to run Python in your browser.
Talking of Python, Yong Cui does a quick tour of the new type annotation features introduced with 3.11.
For Ethereum developers, Rodrigo Herrera Itie helps clear the MEV concept through an example that shows how to avoid a front-running bot.
May — Google I/O 2022
For Android developers, a roundup of the notable changes in Android 13 by Daniel Galpin is available on their blog, while Yanneck Reiß has some insights from migrating his app to the latest version.
On the web side, Maya Shavin explores the new HTML Dialog Element introduced in the I/O event.
Going tangential, Bill sketches an illustrative guide to show how Terraform works. I haven’t dabbled much with Terraform, but the visual intro does make it easier to understand.
June — WWDC 2022 and ES2022
Okay, onto the buzzword of the month: WWDC 2022. Lots of iOS goodies were announced, and here’s a roundup of the prominent WWDC 2022 guides that might interest you… but more importantly, is SwiftUI powerful enough? Nick McConnell shows us how to implement NavigationStack and Michael Long dissects lists and tells why they’re broken.
There was plenty of “what’s new in JavaScript,” especially after the release of ES2022. Here’s Thomas Guibert highlighting six new features.
July — More in JavaScript and Google’s New Programming Language
Plenty of new tools were introduced in the JavaScript ecosystem, and when bun.js finally rolled out, Jose Granja already had a benchmark comparison versus other runtimes.
Likewise, Jennifer wrote a full guide on Fresh, a web framework written for Deno.
On the other side of the spectrum, Google released Carbon, an experimental programming language. Lorenzo Zarantonello has an introductory guide on the language syntaxes, while Erik Engheim compares an object-oriented approach in Carbon, C++, and Go by creating class or type hierarchies.
August — The Rise of AI-Art Generators
August 22 was when Stability.AI rolled out Stable Diffusion to the public. Ng Wai Foong wrote a tutorial to fine-tune it using Dreambooth. Later, Justin Muller and Paolo Rechia wrote guides to deploy Stable Diffusion Models on AWS Sagemaker and AWS Lambda, respectively.
From the “future”, Victor Murcia has a guide to Use Stable Diffusion AI to Generate Pokemon Images.
Moving ahead, Walter Schulze discusses the importance of having a foundation in math in a piece titled “A Programmer’s Regret: Neglecting Math at University” — which resonated with a lot of readers.
To end this section, Ashraf Raji shows off his latest project for software content creators — a Mix Between YouTube and Visual Studio Code. This article explores why he built it, what his Thomas Edison moment was, and offers a peek into the architecture. You can learn everything about a new teaching and learning style for programmers.
September— Wails and Rust
Rust has been on the rise in popularity, and for good reason. There were many guides and tutorials published on topics ranging from new features in Rust like:
Tauri v2 was released around this time, and Dotan Nahum compared Tauri and Electron by building desktop tray apps, while Ed Rutherford wrote Hello Tauri.
For Gophers, it looks like Wails v2 is making a real racket in the web development world. Here’s a quick look by Ed again — Build a Desktop App in Go Using Wails and React.
For the AI curious, read Isabelle Ilyia’s guide on supplementing creativity with artificial intelligence.
October — The Fleeting Month
The Jetbrains’ team launched Fleet in public preview. It’s still new on the block in the grand scheme of IDE things — and Percy Bolmér is here to give us a first look at it.
For time travel lovers like me, Jose Granja wrote his own version of Fleets last year when Fleets was in its infancy stage — Is it a VS Code killer? Let me know your thoughts, here or anywhere!
JavaScript devs, alert! Denny Scott is back this year with a better way to useMemo and useCallback — a case against the overgeneralized application of a particular approach.
November — Spring, Mastadon, DuckDb, and More
The Spring development community has been abuzz with activity, with lots of new project releases to keep up with. Wenqi Glantz has a guide to walk us through the exciting new features of Spring Boot 3 GA, including support for GraalVM native image.
I must admit, I’m not quite sure where that bird-based social media platform is headed, but something about this new Community Notes algorithm has caught my attention. And who better to shed light on this enigma than the Maximilian Strauss? He’s here to give us a glimpse into this algorithm’s inner and outer workings and how it will shape how information is presented on Twitter.
Clive Thompson took us back into the fast (reader: past?) and shed light and ideas on some little-known algorithms — this one’s for the historians.
Boldly moving into the future as always! Mastadon has been the new favorite for social networks. Kris Nóva tells a story of migrating her Mastodon instance to a staging environment and shares what she learned in the process. Meanwhile, Martin Heinz provides a crash course while Phil Nash takes us on a trip into the Fediverse. From Metaverse to Fediverse, it’s been one whirlwind of a year.
Peeking into the Duck is Chang She — duckdb + lance for computer vision tells us how to make machine learning model inferences into SQL. Talking of ML models and SQL, want to write dozens of Python models from SQL tables? You can always use regex and learn even more from Alberto Valdez.
Back to DuckDB, what’s the hype about it? Oliver Molander dives deep into the craze.
Architectural lovers will enjoy a guide on The Architecture of a Modern Startup by Dmitry Kruglov, while graphics programmers are in for a delight as Will Howard shares how to build stunning WebGL Dot Spheres as we see on the GitHub landing page.
DALL-E API saw the light of day. Here are three versions of it:
- Communicate Data More Effectively Using the DALL-E API by Bill Cava
- How to Use DALL-E API in Swift — Image Generation in SwiftUI by November’s version of Anupam.
- Exploring OpenAI DALL·E APIs With Next.js by Jennifer Fu
Did we miss anything?
Reader: Yes, Martin’s article has a missing link… aadd November was full of tech releases but you included stuff from January 2023. You forgot to discuss OpenAI Whisper by James Briggs, and dunno what else. August missed christianschuller’s Add an AI to your Discord server using OpenAI GPT 3.
Also, the length of sections is increasing month-by-month — sometimes, it’s random. Are you losing track of time and mixing ’n’ matching information.
You could’ve highlighted Isabelle Ilyia’s excellent write-up on BabyGraphQL!AI: Thanks for more training data. I’ll keep a note of this and keep editing.
December — ChatGPT
From building Wordle clones to generating clones of our own thoughts, ChatGPT took the internet by storm, and Better Programming has a few interesting guides in no particular order:
- Pair Programming With AI: Writing a Distributed, Fault-Tolerant Redis Client Using ChatGPT by Sailesh Mukil
- How ChatGPT Wrote an Android App
- Too Lazy to Build a Rust Game Alone? Ask ChatGPT to Join You by Loris Occhipinti
- Automatic Commit Summaries Using OpenAI’s Language Model by Itay Knaán-Harpaz
- How ChatGPT’s Coding Skills Got Me Drunk by Gal Bashan
That’s all. Thanks for reading.
