What You Missed in October 2024

Following his widely successful projects like Vue and Vite, Evan You has raised $4 million to enhance the JavaScript development toolchain. Meanwhile, FAANG companies continue finding innovative ways to screw us over, and AI, now capable of procrastinating and wasting time online, is finally ready to replace us.

These are just some of the most important tech stories that we need to talk about in this monthly update.

First, let’s get some of the October tech releases out of the way.

Deno v2

Deno reached its long awaited version two, and these tech release announcements are really getting crazy. This release comes packed with useful updates and an enhanced developer experience, all built on top of Deno’s core vision - a secure-by-default, zero-configuration runtime that embraces modern web standards.

The highlight is that Deno is now fully compatible with Node.JS, offering full support for package.json, node_modules, and private npm registries.

Next.js 15

Next.js 15 is now also officially stable and some key highlights include seamless upgrades with the new codemod CLI, improved caching defaults, React 19 support, Turbopack’s enhanced development speed, greater self-hosting control, enhanced security for server actions and improved TypeScript control.

Astro v5-beta

The competition in the meta frameworks space is pretty fierce and Astro also announced their version 5 beta release. One of the highlights is a new way to manage content in your project.

const articleCollection = defineCollection({
  loader: notionLoader({
    databaseId: "visible-id",
    auth: import.meta.env.NOTION_TOKEN
  }),
  schema: z.object({
    title: z.string(),
    description: z.string().optional()
  })
});

The content layer is a flexible and extensible way to interact with content, providing a unified, type-safe API to access and define your content.

On top of that, Server Islands are a new primitive allowing you to defer the rendering of dynamic content until after the initial page load. You can mark your components with the server-defer directive, which tells Astro to skip the rendering of this element in the initial server response.

<UserButton server:defer />

Java 23

Stepping away from the JS world, Java 23 was released a little while back, and introduces features aimed at simplifying development and enhancing performance. Highlights include support for primitive types in instanceof and switch, a new Class-File API, Markdown in JavaDocs, and the stable Vector API for efficient data processing. Structured Concurrency and Scoped Values improve multithreading, while new Module Import Declarations and simplified main methods aim to ease the onboarding of beginners

If you still believe Java is an old, boring language for the enterprise world I strongly suggest you take a look at what modern Java looks like in 2024. You are in for a big surprise.

Ruby on Rails Conference

Switching gears for a second, the annual Ruby on Rails conference took place in late September. This marks the 20th anniversary of the framework, and the highlight is the announcement of Rails 8 BetaR. The version introduces enhanced authentication and asset management along with caching improvements and background job handling.

The running joke in the dev community is that PHP and wordpress devs have the Lambo money, but let me tell you something, I really envy the life of Rails developers.

VoidZero

In other news, Evan You, the creator of Vue among other things founded a company dedicated to building an open-source, unified development toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem. This new approach aims to:

  1. Unify the development process by sharing a consistent Abstract Syntax Tree, resolver, and module interoperability across all tools, reducing redundant parsing and inconsistencies;
  2. Maximize Performance by developing the toolchain in a compile-to-native language, leveraging parallelization and efficient plugins;
  3. And enhance Composability with independently consumable components that can be customized and tailored.

Android

October also marks the date for a new Android release, but what I find more interesting is Google’s recent post highlighting the benefits of shifting towards memory-safe programming languages. This strategy has proven effective in reducing Android’s memory safety issues from 76% to 24% over six years by gradually transitioning new development to mostly Rust.

Meta Security

And, since we are taking security, it looks like Meta is finding new ways to mess with our data. This time around The Irish Data Protection Commission found that the company stored millions of user passwords in plain text on its servers. Initially, Meta reported discovering some passwords stored in plain text, later revealing that millions of Instagram passwords were also affected. This plain text storage made the passwords searchable by over 20,000 employees. Fun times!

Open AI DevDay

Finally the most recent Open AI Dev Day was pretty impressive with key announcements including the public beta of the Realtime API, speech-to-speech AI responses, vision fine-tuning for images, and text-based GPT-4o applications. While AI provides amazing features, I never thought AI could replace us. However, after I saw the latest Anthropic demo where Claude got bored and started procrastinating, I feel like this tech is finally ready to waste its time and resources in endless teams meetings.

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Until next time, thank you for reading!