What You Missed in September

Let’s start with a quick win that open source had over big tech.

Elasticsearch is Open Source

For a bit of context, back in 2021 Elasticsearch license became more restrictive due to issues with cloud providers like AWS offering the search engine as a service without collaborating with Elastic. This was met with criticism from the open-source community. To address the concerns, Elasticsearch got more permissive licensing options.

Postgres 17

September also marks the release of Postgres 17. This is a big milestone, and the new version introduces major performance enhancements, including memory optimizations for vacuum processes and improved concurrency for high workloads.

It offers new SQL and JSON features, logical replication improvements, and expanded support for partitioned tables.

Deno 2

And, since we are talking about big releases Deno 2 was just announced. This is the largest update since 1.0 and it brings major changes and philosophical shifts.

The release enhances dependency management, with new commands like deno add and remove, while simplifying permission handling.

$ deno add npm:express
$ deno remove @std/testing

Overall, Deno 2 focuses on a better developer experience and on a stronger Node.js and NPM interoperability.

Angular - The Future is Standalone

On the web dev front, Angular is making a bold move. Granted, we all saw this coming since the Angular team is focusing on modernizing and simplifying the dev experience. Standalone components allow for a more modular approach, enabling developers to write smaller, more focused units of code.

Vue 3.5

Vue 3.5 was also released and this version introduces several enhancements with no breaking changes. Key updates include significant performance optimizations in the reactivity system, improved handling of reactive props, and new server-side rendering features like lazy hydration. Custom elements gain new APIs, and the developer flexibility was improved thanks to other various small updates.

OpenAI o1

In other news, Open AI introduced a new type of AI designed to give more thoughtful and detailed answers. It works by taking a little extra time to think before responding, aiming to provide higher-quality, more accurate, and carefully considered outputs. These improvements are visible in coding as well, and O1 was paired with Devin, to get big tech one step closer to taking our jobs.

Open AI it’s not all bad, and in September they actually took a stab at another industry villain. Next JS is by far the most widely used meta framework, and Vercel has a big say in the future of React, so Open Ai’s move to dump Next in favor of Remix is a really interesting one.

Anyway, let’s move to something we all are interested in - money.

How to hit $1 million?

In a recent article, Caleb shares how he hit $1 million in GitHub Sponsors by focusing on providing value through projects like Livewire and Alpine. His success came from creating helpful educational content, engaging with the community, and building genuine relationships. So there you have it. There is hope outside Jira boards, tight deadlines and endless scrum meetings.

ECMAScript

Back to the JS world, after nine years of annual JavaScript updates, the TC39 committee has tweaked the process to make rolling out new features faster and smoother. Since JavaScript is so widely used, a huge number of ideas and proposals are submitted to evolve the language. So, in order for all these proposals to be discussed and vetted as early as possible, a new stage 0 was added in the list of steps each feature has to go through in order to be included in the Ecmascript standard.

Express V5

Finally, Express, the popular Node JS web framework, had a new major release after 10 years. Version 5 provides native support for promises, a better way to use async await in routes and middleware, better support for HTTP 2, and improved error handling.

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Until next time, thank you for reading!