For faster declaration emits, TypeScript now caches whether internal symbols are accessible in different contexts, along with how specific types are to be printed. This improves general performance in code with fairly complex types. Other performance enhancements in TypeScript 4.4 promise faster path normalization and path mapping, along with faster incremental builds. Also, optimization has been added for source map generation of very large output files.

The TypeScript 4.4 beta can be accessed through NuGet or via NPM:

npm install typescript@beta

General availability of TypeScript 4.4 is planned for late August, following a release candidate earlier in the month. Other new capabilities in TypeScript 4.4:

• For control flow analysis of aliased conditions, when TypeScript sees that a constant value is being tested, it will do extra work to see if it has a type guard. If the type guard operates on a const, a read-only property, or an unmodified parameter, then TypeScript is able to narrow that value property. Different type guard conditions are preserved, not just typeof checks.
• Spelling suggestions now are issued in plain JavaScript files. These suggestions can provide a clue that the code is wrong.
• TypeScript 4.4 is experimenting with editor support for inlay text, which can display information such as parameter names inline in code.
• Index signatures for symbols and template string patterns now are permitted.
• A new flag, –useUnknownInCatchVariables changes the default type of catch clause variables from any to unknown. Another new flag, –exactOptionalPropertyTypes, specifies that optional property types should be interpreted exactly as written.

TypeScript 4.4 follows the May introduction of the production release of TypeScript 4.3. Among other improvements, the TypeScript 4.3 release allowed developers to specify types for reading and writing to properties.

It’s time that we changed this—and not out of some hazy notion of fairness. No, you’re going to want to pay your docs writers more once you realize just how much value they create and unlock.

Panning for gold

Matt Klein knows something about the value of great developers. He’s the founder of the popular Envoy project and runs a team of developers at Lyft. Perhaps for those same reasons, though, he places an even greater premium on great documentarians or docs writers:

“Finding a good technical writer is about 100x more difficult than finding a good engineer. I think they should be paid more.”

Chef Product Manager Tim Smith details why: “It really doesn’t matter what you build if no one can figure out how to use it.” Developers agree, and so routinely rank documentation as their top task to help them be productive. Docs says Human Security’s Bethann Noble, “are a fundamental part of the product.” You don’t have good docs, you shouldn’t ship.

Even so, when GitHub polled developers on how open source projects do with documentation, 93% complained about incomplete or confusing documentation. The situation may be better for proprietary software because people are getting paid to write those docs. But the problem remains: They’re likely not getting paid enough.

According to Indeed’s salary data, the average base salary for a US-based software engineer is roughly $104,000. That’s pretty close to what a U.S.-based docs professional makes, according to the Write the Docs Salary Survey 2020 data. The top quartile of software developers makes a lot more than $104,000. But what about the top 25% of docs writers? Nope.

In a conversation with Datastax Chief Strategy Officer Sam Ramji, Google Technical Writer Patricia Boswell argues that great code needs a great story to frame it, to make it accessible to even the most technical audiences:

“No matter how technical a topic is, the framing is always the story. You can make something more approachable by framing it as a story. Code used to be scarce and worth the bother to decipher. Now code is “abundant,” and the scarcity is in articulating a story compelling enough that someone stops what they already know and what they’re already doing to come hang out with you and check out your stuff and spend enough time developing a little bit of competence to use it and become a member of your community.”

That requires good writing. It requires good docs.

Docs become even more important when the docs, not code, are the primary interface (like, for example, a developer engaging the underlying code through an API). But a great docs writer, notes Boswell, isn’t the

“kind of person who only wants to describe how [the software] works.” Instead, they’re “somebody who describes how it is used. And in order to do that, we tie all of these vision pieces together. So we create this narrative that ties the market vision and the functional vision and the user experience. We’re partnering with UX to make sure that we’re documenting the experience, and then it just flows from there.”

If that capability sounds valuable, that’s because it is. Not only are great docs writers helping others to understand why they should use software (by crafting that overarching story or narrative), but they’re helping the would-be user to situate themselves in how they’ll use the software within that overarching narrative. There’s a tactical element to all of this, but it’s a deeply strategic role.

It’s also a role that’s hard to source, according to Klein. This means, if you want a great documentarian, you need to be prepared to pay up. Yes, perhaps even more than you pay your best developers. Without equally good docs writers, relatively few people will ever know you even employ great software engineers.

THE BACKLASH

Not long after Copilot’s launch, some developers started sounding alarms over the use of public code to train the tool’s AI.

One concern is that if Copilot reproduces large enough chunks of existing code, it could violate copyright or effectively launder open-source code into commercial uses without proper licensing. The tool can also spit out personal details that developers have posted publicly, and in one case it reproduced widely-cited code from the 1999 PC Game Quake III.

Hi. I know you’re excited about copilot.

GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you for copilot after you help train it further.

It’s truly disappointing to watch people cheer at having their work and time exploited by a company worth billions.

— Brian P. Hogan (@bphogan) July 2, 2021

Cole Garry, a Github spokesperson, declined to comment on those issues and only pointed to the company’s existing FAQ on Copilot’s web page, which does acknowledge that the tool can produce verbatim code snippets from its training data. This happens roughly 0.1% of the time, GitHub says, typically when users don’t provide enough context around their requests or when the problem has a commonplace solution. The company’s FAQ says:

“We are building an origin tracker to help detect the rare instances of code that is repeated from the training set, to help you make good real-time decisions about GitHub Copilot’s suggestions.”

In the meantime, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has argued that training machine learning systems on public data are fair use, though he acknowledged that “IP and AI will be an interesting policy discussion” in which the company will be an eager participant. The tool also has defenders outside of Microsoft, including Google Cloud principal engineer Kelsey Hightower. He said that developers should be as afraid of GitHub Copilot as mathematicians are of calculators.

Southeast Asian-based developers will be able to pitch games to the publisher and receive up to $10,000 in funding.

Alongside financial support, the fund will also provide mentorship, consultation and project management to assist with the creation of prototypes or minimum viable products.

Developers will retain ownership of the IP for all supported projects, but Toge will have the right of first refusal to sign those projects to a publishing deal. The company said on Twitter.

“In order to help marginalized and underrepresented game developers of Southeast Asia turn their game ideas into reality, we want to provide a safety net for you to experiment and iterate.”

Toge Productions
proudly presents

✨🌱 TOGE GAME FUND INITIATIVE 🌱✨

If you're from Southeast Asia and you're looking for a fund for your game project, submit your pitch deck to us and get up to 10K USD!

For more info
➡️ https://t.co/DRIqPRRBFZ#indiegame #gamedev #indiedev pic.twitter.com/7eGer0kfmK

— Toge Productions 🌱 (@togeproductions) June 8, 2021

The company said that the Toge Game Fund Initiative has no deadline and developers will be able to apply at any time.

Possibly an important piece of information is the launch of the improved Microsoft Groups Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. According to the Microsoft group program supervisor Archana Saseetharan,

“This primarily allows builders to construct apps simpler and sooner — and to construct very highly effective apps tapping into the wealthy Microsoft stack. With the up to date toolkit, we allow flexibility for builders. We wish to meet builders at the place they’re at.”

The toolkit affords help for instruments and frameworks like React, SharePoint and. NET. A few of the updates the crew enabled with this launch are integration with Aure Features, the SharePoint Framework integration and a single-line integration with the Microsoft Graph. Microsoft can also be making it simpler for builders to combine an authorization workflow into their Groups apps.

Photo Credits: Microsoft

The crew additionally launched a brand new Developer Portal for Microsoft Groups that makes it simpler for builders to register and configure their apps from a single instrument. ISVs may also have the ability to use the brand new portal to supply their apps for in-Groups purchases.

Different new Groups options for builders embrace methods for builders to construct real-time multi-user experiences like whiteboards and undertaking boards, for instance, in addition to a brand new assembly occasion API to construct meeting-related workflows for when a gathering begins and ends, for instance, in addition to new options for the Teams Together mode that can let builders design their very own Collectively experiences.

There are a number of different new options right here as effectively, however, what all of it comes right down to is that Microsoft needs builders to contemplate Groups as a viable platform for his or her companies — and with 145 million day by day energetic customers, that’s doubtlessly a profitable approach for software program companies to get their companies in entrance of brand new viewers.

Like everyone else, the game industry has also been coloured by the pandemic, and 44% of all game developers surveyed had the feeling that the game they worked on was delayed because of it. 49% thought it was not late, and the rest answered that they are not working on any game at the moment. In 2020, 33% answered that COVID-19 had delayed their work, which means an increase of 11 percentage points.

However, it should be pointed out that this only indicates the number of developers who have worked on overdue projects, and it does not take into account whether the participants are working, for instance, on the same project. However, 2021 has enough delay to fill its long lists, and it has influenced headlines like Cyberpunk 2077 and Halo Infinite.

According to the 2021 State of the Game Industry report, participants encountered difficulties working remotely in terms of collaboration and communication, which was a contributing factor to the delayed headlines. Despite this, the majority of developers say that working from home did not affect their creativity or productivity, while 35% saw working at home as an improvement.

Chris Saxon

Most applications store a wide variety of text such as names, addresses, and descriptions. When searching on these values, often you want letters in the values to match the search pattern disregarding the case.

In Chris’ latest post, you can gain more information on how to perform both Case-insensitive search and Accent-insensitive search, how to sort rows regardless of the case or accents and how to define search and sorting roles for a column. Chris also explains how to ignore case or diacritics before Oracle Database 12.2 and how to create indexes for fast searches.

Chris’ job is to help you get the best out of the Oracle Database and have fun with SQL. To help you with this he blogs at ALL THINGS SQL. He also creates videos combining SQL and magic on YouTube at THE MAGIC.

After their cancellation last year, Google announced that I/O 2021 will be virtual and free to attend. This developer conference is the company’s biggest event of the year and will run from May 18-20.

Google I/O 2021 will feature Consumer and Developer Keynotes — focused on “company and product news” — followed by Technical Sessions for “product announcements and how to adopt new features.” These will be scheduled throughout the three-day event and available on demand. The full lineup will be made available in late April.

Users will have to register for Workshops that are instructor-led and feature Q&A, while Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions will be an “opportunity to ask Google product experts questions.” Meetups “casual, open forums hosted by Google that enable attendees to connect with each other” — will also require registration and reservation.

Registration is now open and provides access to live Q&A during Sessions, Workshops, Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, personalized content, badges, and chat in I/O Adventure.

How to solve Google I/O 2021 puzzle

Photo Credits: 9To5Google

In announcing the existence of I/O 2021, Google-like in past years — is shielding the actual dates behind a puzzle. This year’s “punch card” is available here, and the solution is below:

1. “Sophie Germain”
2. Spell out “Hello World” using a punch card
3. “Ada Lovelace”
4. Complete the punch card
5. Complete
6. Complete
7. “Grace Hopper”
8. Arrange cards back-to-front: blue, red, orange, green
9. “Christine Darden”
10. Tap the “sort” button, rearrange functions from 1-6, use arrow keys to navigate to column 79, click “sort” again, repeat until column 70 while making sure functions/comments are arranged from top to bottom, and then “submit”

In the following release, we will comment on the new app launch, the new video and camera capabilities, the new permission for exact alarms, and more. Here are the updates that we’ve listed.

• Improved app launch experience

In Android 12 there is a new app launch animation for all apps from the point of launch, a splash screen showing the app icon, and a transition to the app itself. The new experience brings standard design elements to every app launch, which will be customizable so apps can maintain their branding.

• New call notification template 

Incoming and outgoing calls are important to users and they need to be easy to see and manage. In Android 12 all call notifications are improved so that you can give them more visibility and scannability, and improve their consistency with other notification components. If your app handles calls – such as a dialer app or chats app with video calling – you’ll want to try the new CallStyle template.

• New permission for exact alarms 

Alarms are an important way for apps to schedule work. In most cases, apps should use inexact alarms. Android manages these alarms to minimize wakeups and battery impacts, such as through Doze and App Standby. For cases where you need alarms with precise timing – for example, alarm clocks and timers you can use exact alarms instead. Apps targeting Android 12 that want to use exact alarms will now need to request new permission, SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM. There is also users visibility over the apps that have this permission and letting them a grant and revoke it from Special App Access Permissions in Settings.

• Better web linking 

Android changed the default handling of links that aren’t verified through Android App Links or manually approved for links by the user. Now the OS will directly open them in the default browser, rather than showing a chooser dialogue. If you want to ensure that only your app can handle links from your domain, you can use App Links. There are also new ADB commands to help you configure and test your links.

• Rich haptic experiences 

There is now informative haptic feedback for UI events, immersive and delightful effects for gaming, and attentional haptics for productivity. It will include expressive effects like a low tick that take advantage of the broader frequency bandwidth of the latest actuators. Game developers can now access multiple, different actuators independently in-game controllers to deliver the same effect synchronously or different haptic effects on multiple actuators. You can try these APIs to the fullest on Pixel 4 devices now.

Video encoding improvements 

Android 12 standardizes the set of keys for controlling the range of the video Quantization Parameters (QP), allowing developers to avoid vendor-specific code. The new keys are available in the media format API and also in the NDK Media library. Video encoders must specify a minimum video quality threshold to ensure that users don’t experience extremely low quality when videos are complex.

• Camera2 vendor extensions 

Many of our device manufacturer partners have built custom camera effects—such as bokeh, HDR, night mode, and others—that they want apps to use to create differentiated experiences on their devices. The extension APIs expose exactly the same set of effects as in Camera X, and those are already supported on many different devices, so you can use them right out of the box.

• Quad Bayer camera sensor support 

Many Android devices today ship with ultra-high-resolution camera sensors, typically with Quad / Nona Bayer patterns, and these offer great flexibility in terms of image quality and low-light performance. In Android 12, there is a new platform APIs that let third-party apps take full advantage of these versatile sensors. The new APIs support the unique behaviour of these sensors and take into account that they might support different stream configurations and combinations when operating in full resolution or ‘maximum resolution’ mode vs ‘default’ mode.

Photo Credits: 9To5Google

• Faster machine learning

Android 12 highlighted the key areas so that developers can make the most of ML accelerators and always get the best possible performance through the Neural Networks API. In terms of performance improvements – there are more than halved inference call overhead by introducing improvements such as padding, sync fences and reusable execution objects. ML accelerator drivers are updatable outside of platform releases, through Google Play services. This will make it easier for developers to take advantage of the latest drivers on any compatible device.

• Standardizing GPU compute 

Android is deprecating the RenderScript APIs in favour of cross-platform GPU compute solutions such as Vulkan and OpenGL. Now you can have confidence that your high-performance workloads will run on GPU hardware, and many devices are already shipping with only CPU support for RenderScript. The existing APIs will continue to work for the time being. Android has open-sourced a library for RenderScript intrinsics such as blur that uses the highly-optimized intrinsics platform code.

• Better debugging for native crashes 

Android 12 will give us more actionable diagnostics because there will be crash dump files called tombstones to debug our native crashes, and they contain the information required to diagnose a variety of issues. This includes unwinding through ART, integrating with fdsan, and recording all the stacks involved in a GWP-ASan, HWASan, or MTE crash. Now we’re giving your app access to its tombstone files through the App Exit Reasons API. When your app uses `ApplicationExitInfo` with `REASON_CRASH_NATIVE`, you can now call `getTraceInputStream()` to get the tombstone data as a protocol buffer.

• More flexible backup configurations

Android’s backup service lets users restore or migrate their data to a new device effortlessly. Apps are central to the experience, enabling users to easily transfer app data and continue where they left off. The backup service supports both cloud backups to Google Drive and device-to-device transfers, and developers can take advantage of these with minimal changes in their apps.

App compatibility

In Android 12, most app-facing changes opt-in are made to give you more time, including updated tools and processes to help everyone get ready sooner.

Now is the time to try these new features. For complete information, visit the Android 12 developer site.

The library helps to check forms in React, as it is minimalist and is not dependent on many things – it is effective, easy to use and requires less code-writing compared to other form libraries. If you are not a React Hook Form user, then you should totally check on its newest 7th version. If you are already a consumer, you could view the manual of migration from v6 to v7.

React Hook Form 7 is mainly focused on the following aspects:

• (DX) Strict typed form
• Reduce package size
• Performance enhancements
• improve API’s simplicity and consistency

The aim of React Hook Form is to make the lives of the developers easier. Besides the fact that there are fewer codes to write, its unneeded re-renders have been eliminated as well.

You can read more about React Hook Form and its latest stable version HERE.

If you already use RHF, then you can check out the instructions on migration from v6 to v7 HERE.

You can also watch a short explanatory video about React Hook Form, made by one of the creators of the library – “Bill” – and get to know more about why he called the new version “developer-friendly”.