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Jordan Bragg discusses using entry-points, breadth-first scanning, and operation tagging to demystify the domain, see where to dive deeper, and uncover what technical debt may exist.

We are talking with Philip Howes about how to get value from your ML model as fast as possible. We will also talk about how to improve your deployed model, and what tools you can use when setting up ML projects. We conclude by discussing how stake holders should be involved, and what makes up a complete ML team.

In a web-based service, a slowdown in request processing can eventually make your service unavailable. Chances are, not all requests need to be processed right away. Some of them just need an acknowledgement of receipt. Have you ever asked yourself: “Would I benefit from asynchronous processing of requests? If so, how would I make such a change in a live, large-scale mission critical system?”

The panelists discuss teamwork from a variety of perspectives, from a traditional office setting to remote-first to a hybrid one, and how to be successful in a productive hybrid team.

At QCon Plus November 2021, Nora Jones, CEO and founder of Jeli, talked about how to build production readiness reviews (PRR) with emphasis on context and psychological safety. Her talk focused on the particulars of a PRR process that relates to incidents.

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InfoQ Homepage News Preact Joins the Crowd and Bakes in Reactivity Primitives with New Signals API

The Preact JavaScript framework recently released Signals, a new set of reactive primitives for managing application state. Like other frameworks (e.g., Svelte, VueJS), the React-compatible framework lets developers associate parts of the user interface with state variables independently of the UI’s component tree. Alleged benefits of the extra 1.6KB: fast re-renders that are independent of the shape of the UI component tree and excellent developer ergonomics.

The Preact team explains the rationale behind the new API as follows:

Over the past years, we’ve worked on a wide spectrum of apps and teams, ranging from small startups to monoliths with hundreds of developers committing at the same time. […] We noticed recurring problems with the way application state is managed.

[…] Much of the pain of state management in JavaScript is reacting to changes for a given value, because values are not directly observable. […] Even the best solutions still require manual integration into the framework. As a result, we’ve seen hesitance from developers in adopting these solutions, instead preferring to build using framework-provided state primitives.

We built Signals to be a compelling solution that combines optimal performance and developer ergonomics with seamless framework integration.

Most popular JavaScript frameworks have adopted a component-based model that allows building a user interface as an assembly of parts, some of which are intended to be reused and contributed by open-source enthusiasts and other commercial third parties. In the early years of React, many developers credited component reusability and ergonomics (JSX, simplicity of conceptual model) for its fast adoption.

In large-enough applications, some pieces of state are often required by unrelated components of the user interface component tree. A common solution is to lift a given piece of state above all components that depend on it. That solution and the corresponding API (often called Context API) however may result in unnecessary rendering computations. The number of components which must be synchronized with a piece of context state may be fairly small when compared with the size of the component tree to which the context state is passed. A change in context state will however trigger the recomputation of the whole component tree:

(Source: Preact’s blog)

In some cases (e.g., very large component trees, expensive component renders), the unnecessary computations may lead to performance issues. Preact’s Signals API seeks to eliminate any over-rendering:

Beyond framework integration, the Preact team also claims excellent developer ergonomics. The blog article provides the following implementation of a todo list application (cf. code playground):

While the provided example does not showcase how reactive primitives eliminate over-rendering, it nonetheless showcases the key new primitives. The signal primitive declares reactive pieces of state. The computed primitive declares a reactive piece of state as computed from other reactive pieces of state. The value of the reactive pieces of state may be accessed with .value.

Developers debated on reddit the importance of performance in today’s web applications and compared ergonomics with that of React, other frameworks’ reactivity primitives (e.g., Vue 3, Solid), and other libraries (e.g., Redux, mobX, jotai, recoil).

Others worried that with this new API Preact was straying farther away from React. One developer said:

Hooks and Classes are the supported and encouraged architecture to utilize and Preact’s Signals move intentionally away from that, further defining them as a unique framework, NOT a “React add-on”.

Another developer on reddit mentioned the need for guidance and additional examples:

The problem here is that you’re going to get a lot of confusion around how to performantly utilize signals and so people are going to use them wrong all the time, unfortunately.

Preact self-describes as the “fast 3kB alternative to React with the same modern API”. Preact is an open-source project under the MIT license. Contributions are welcome and should follow the contribution guidelines and code of conduct.

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