As a new Technology Radar release with a bunch of interesting techs, a few drew my attention.
Techniques
- Design Systems: a collection of design patterns, component libraries and good design and engineering practices that ensure consistent digital products. Consistency and shared components/design will help the team/organisation move fast.
- Lightweight approach to RFCs (Request for Comments): Keep the documents simple to be practical and enable fast-moving.
- Attack path analysis: Analyze risk from start to end rather than layer by layer. e.g. Coca, Wiz. Both examples are cloud security analysis providers.
- Automatic merging of dependency update PRs: Generate PR automatically when a dependency has an updated version to keep the app’s dependency the latest. e.g. Dependabot. If having automated Unit, Functional, and Performance tests, it’s possible to merge them automatically. Great technique, but not for everyone in practice unless a team adopts automated testing.
- Data product thinking for FAIR(findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data.
- OIDC for GitHub Actions: As security is getting more important, it’s useful techinique. It should be considered in most remote access between 2 resources.
- Provision monitors and alerts with Terraform. It’s good idea to standardize Infrastructure as code (IaC) with Terraform.
- Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Technique to utilize pretrained LLM and external knowledge at the same time. It’s useful for QnA.
- Risk-based failure modelling: Analyze risk by the factor of impact, likelihood nad ability detect.
- Semi-structured natural language for LLMs. When giving a structured input with the guidance of structured output expectation provide a better result.
- Tracking health over debt: this technique moved from Access to Trial.
- Unit testing for alerting rules: ex. Prometheus. It’s more about server monitoring rather than APM.
- Zero trust security for CI/CD: moved to Access from Trial.
Platforms
- CloudEvents: a specification for describing event data across platforms and systems
- DataOps.live: which automates environments in Snowflake. CI/CD for data products.
- Immuta: data security platform that makes it easier for large organizations to manage data policies.
- Orca: a cloud security solution
- Trino: open-source distributed query engine
- Azure OpenAI Service: Azure provides a ChatGPT-like API service.
- Kraftful: get the user feedback from multiple sources, analyze and identify feature requests, common complaints, etc. Great platform for understanding user needs.
Tools
- dbt: data transformation tool in ETL workflow, which enables modularity, testability and reusability of SQL-based transformation.
- Mermaid: Javascript-based diagramming and charting tool. Convert mark-down-like text to a diagram.
- Synk: Find and automatically fix vulnerabilities in your code, open source dependencies, containers, and IaC
- Chromatic: a visual regression testing tool to help catch UI regression in web app.
- GitHub Copilot: Must have tool together with BingChat. Btw, BingChat doesn’t find the best answer compared to Google, but it is still worth it when BingChat summarized the founding because it provide a great starting point.
- Insomnia: Alternative to Postman, which decommissioning Scratch Pad (Offline mode). CLI tool HTTPie looks useful, too.
- Mob: Fast git handover for remote pair/mob programming.
- Mocks Server: Live mock API.
- Yalc: local Javascript package repository.
- ChatGPT: Can be used in all stages of the software lifecycle.
- Codeium: AI powered coding assistant.
- GitHub merge queue: a Pull Request is queued in the temporary (sudo) main branch and pre-check if the merge will succeed in CI/CD.
- Google Bard: Google’s version of ChatGPT
- Llama 2: Meta’s free LLM. Code Llama is for coding.
- Open-source LLMs for coding: e.g. StarCoder, WizardCoder
Languages & Frameworks
- Playwright: go-to end-to-end testing framework. Easy to start, stable.
- .Net Minimal API: it will be a good choice for a simple, lightweight microservice.
- Ajv: a Json data schema validator. Zod can be used in Typescript.
- Dart: programming language developed by Google and got popular thanks to Flutter.
- fast-check: property based Javascript/Typescript testing tool.
- OpenTelemetry: capture and manage telemetry data across many services.
- Pushpin: Pushpin is a proxy server that pins client connections open, making it easy to build realtime API endpoints.
- Htmx: htmx is a library that allows you to access modern browser features directly from HTML, rather than using javascript.
- LangChain (or Semantic Kernel): LLM building framework.
- Llamaindex: LlamaIndex is a simple, flexible data framework for connecting
custom data sources to large language models. - promptfoo: a tool for testing and evaluating LLM output quality.