August Engineering Monthly Round-Up

Ugur Oruc

Tech Lead

The summer is slowly winding down, and as we continue to build exciting products, we bring you the most noteworthy updates from the engineering world. In this round-up, we look at new releases with tools that we currently use, interesting notes on the ones we are watching, inspiring reads, and more. So let’s take a look at what caught our eye this past month.

News & Exploration

Announcing TypeScript 5.2

At OAK’S LAB, we use TypeScript every day, so it’s important to keep our knowledge up-to-date. And a new version is out. The latest beta release includes “using” declarations and making sure sources are managed correctly, an upcoming ECMAScript feature called decorator metadata, and more. Check out the article above to read more about what the latest release entails.

Caching in Next.js (App Router)

With the App Router landing on Next.js and React Server Components, developers have been confused on how the caching and App Router work within it. So, Tim Neutkens (Maintainer of Next.js) has written an explanation about it. Since Next.js is one of the frameworks we use to build products, it’s important that we understand new concepts, and this article helps us understand these concepts. You can also check out the GitHub discussion for a deep dive on caching and revalidating.

JavaScript is weird

How much do you trust your JavaScript skills? While it is a great programming language, it doesn’t always behave the way you think it might. In the test above, you’ll be shown 25 quirky expressions and have to guess the output. Be surprised (and aware) at just how weird JavaScript is. And as a bonus, we are sharing a video about that as well.

Modernizing Packages to ESM

ES Modules are gaining more popularity and a community within the JS ecosystem that is transitioning toward them. One of the widely used packages in the ecosystem is Redux. Mark Erikson (Maintainer of Redux, Redux-toolkit, and more) writes about his opinions, experiences, and “hard-earned lessons” learned switching packages to ESM. This is a new concept that we are keeping our eyes on.

CAPTCHAs vs ML bots

As engineers we want our websites to be visited by humans. Since the ML and AI space is growing every day at such an unexpected rate, we need to know the capabilities of bots so that we can either use them to our advantage or defend ourselves against them. One example is the study above, which shows that bots are better and faster than humans in solving CAPTCHAs. So what's next for making sure visitors to the websites are not robots? Read more about the evaluation at the link above.

Read & Watch

A Final Challenge

We’re closing it out with another engineering challenge!

This month's challenge is all about types. We want to implement a type called Last<T> which will give us the last value in the array as a type. Let's check the example:

This challenge is coming to you from my favorite place to test myself and solve some challenges. Find more here: Collection of TypeScript type challenges with online judge.

Our Jobs

Do you want to shape the future and help build companies from scratch? Here is a list of job openings available right now at OAK’S LAB.

That’s the end of the August 2023 Engineering Monthly Round-Up. Thank you for reading, and we hope you've enjoyed the articles, videos, and insights we shared. We look forward to seeing what this year brings our way. If you have any comments, suggestions, or other interesting material to share, please feel free to comment below or email me directly at ugur.oruc@oakslab.com. Thank you again, and we’ll be back next month.