🔥 Tech Blips #22.2
Every month I try to summarise some techniques, tools, languages and frameworks or platforms on the cloud and web horizon that are worth taking a look at.
TL;DR in this technology newsletter:
- Techniques: Architecture Decision Records (Adopt)
- Tools: GitHub Copilot (Trial)
- Language and Frameworks: Next.js (Trial)
- Platforms: Vercel (Adopt)
An Architectural Decision (AD) is a software design decision that addresses a functional or non-functional requirement that is architecturally relevant.
An Architectural Decision Record (ADR) records a single architectural decision, as is often the case with personal notes or meeting minutes; the collection of ADRs created and maintained as part of a project constitute the decision record.
A variety of possible ADR templates can be found on the following GitHub repository:
Often ADRs are documented near the source code and the entire decision set is also stored under version control such as Git.
There are tools like adr-tools that help you write ADRs and treat Architecture Decisions like code.
Tools like Structurizr (mentioned in Tech Blips #22.1) support visualization of the decision log.
GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that helps you write code faster and with less work.
It pulls context from comments and code to suggest single lines and entire functions instantly.
Take a first look of GitHub Copilot in the following video 👇
GitHub Copilot is based on Codex, a generative, pre-trained language model developed by OpenAI.
It is available as an extension for IDEs like Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio or IntelliJ.
Next.js is a flexible React framework that gives you building blocks for creating fast web applications.
You can use React to build your UI, and then gradually adopt Next.js features to solve common application needs such as routing, data fetching, and integrations - all while improving the experience for developers and end users.
Although React is relatively unopinionated about how you build and structure your applications, there are several ways to build applications with React. Next.js provides a framework for structuring your application and optimizations that make both the development process and the final application faster.
Next.js provides features for both the development and production stages of an application.
Since each environment has different considerations and goals, there is a lot to do to move an application from development to production. For example, application code needs to be compiled, bundled, minified, and code split - this is where Next.js comes in.
Vercel is a cloud platform that allows developers to host web applications that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and require no supervision.
Vercel makes it easy for front-end teams to develop, preview, and ship delightful user experiences where performance is the standard.
By connecting the Git repository to Vercel, you can easily deploy the main branch to Vercel domains - and Vercel does all the work:
- Instantly deploy your web application to a global CDN with a single click or commit 😀.
- Ensure your site is always online by intelligently monitoring and automatically scaling front-end capacity, and
- Taking care of SSL certificates or HTTPS on your behalf.