July Engineering Monthly Round-Up

We started off the quarter strong, and as we push forward building some exciting products, we continue to bring you the most noteworthy updates from the engineering world. In this roundup, we look at what’s new with some tools we currently use, notes from the ones we’re watching, interesting reads, and more. So let’s take a look at what we were reading, watching, and discovering this past month.

News & Exploration

Prisma 5.0 and beyond

Prisma is unstoppable. At OAK’S LAB, Prisma is our main database connector and ORM selection tool, so it’s crucial to keep it up to date. And the Prisma team has been nonstop developing, fixing, and releasing new versions. The new release includes a number of changes including a new JSON Protocol and overall general improvements. Even while writing this, they have already released version 5.1. Check out the release notes in GitHub for more details.

Let’s understand React Server Components better

React is our preferred frontend library that we rely on daily. As it continually evolves with updates, we strive to stay abreast of the latest advancements and enhance our understanding of its new features and capabilities. React Server Components (RSC) have been out for a good amount of time, and understanding the fundamentals is really important so that we can make the most out of why and when to adopt RSC. The article above is brought to you by Vercel.

Is your web page bloated?

While building applications and web pages, we need to take care of how we are doing it and how we can best identify any potential issues. Web pages get bloated because of all the content that it contains, and it has the potential to hurt a business and, ultimately, the end users. You need to think about all the aspects of your web page: speed, search rank, user experience, etc. In the article above, take a deeper dive into some key takeaways on the issue.

Expo SDK 49

Expo is one of the libraries that our mobile teams use when we want to build applications fast. We also use React Native for mobile development on our startup projects. So, Expo and React Native form a great combination for mobile development, and it’s always great to see new versions of Expo released, helping our mobile developers much more.

Read & Watch

• Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it. 📰
• 10 Postgres tips for beginners 📰
• Why engineers should focus on writing 📰
• Make the Fetch API type-safe with feTS 📺
• Cost of JavaScript 📺

A Final Challenge

We’re closing it out with another engineering challenge!

JS Challenges are all about solving problems that arise from them. So, this time, let’s try to make our own implementation of Array, and we should be able to run this code block below:

1. array(...args) should create an array and return that array.
2. hire(...args) function should push to array.
3. fire(arg) function should remove a given element from the array
4. Extra 1: If you pass exact object that is in the array it will remove that.
5. Extra 2: It can take callback function to remove the element(s). Ex: office.fire((employee)=> boolean))
6. meeting(callback) should filter the array.

If you want to make it more challenging, you can make every function type-safe and typed correctly. Good luck and have fun.

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.

• Senior Frontend Engineer (React), Prague, Remote
• Tech Lead, Prague, Remote
• Senior Full Stack Engineer (Node.js / React), Prague, Remote
• Senior Backend Engineer (Node.js), Prague, Remote
• QA Analyst (Tester), Prague

That’s the end of the July 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.