[Dev Catch Up #36] - LLM-as-a-Judge, Upgraded Claude 3.5 LLM, Node.js Event Loop, Text to Container in React, DocETL, and much more.

Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the trends including, a bunch of exciting developments and articles.

Welcome to the 36th edition of DevShorts, Dev Catch Up!

I write about developer stories and open source, partly from my work and experience interacting with people all over the globe.

Some recent issues from Dev Catch up:

• Llama 3.2, Molmo Multimodal Models, Infinite Queries

• Microsoft's Drasi and bitnet.cpp, next-safe-action library

• Qwen2.5, xLAM-1b, TanStack Router, Nvidia's Minitron SLMs

• OpenAI's Realtime API, Deep-learning for ETA

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Must Read

• The LLM-as-a-Judge system forms a strong evaluation suite to evaluate the performance of a RAG application. This article gives us insights on the bolstering of a RAG application that provides meaningful insights to farmers in the form of a chatbot with the help of this evaluation system.

• Anthropic unveiled upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Haiku with the groundbreaking ability of computer use. Developers can direct Claude to use computers like the way humans do. More information on the LLMs with this new capability can be found from this official article. 

• Event loops in Node.js are core to the performance of the framework because it can leverage the kernel and help the framework to perform asynchronous and non-blocking operations. This article explains the inner workings of event loops, its importance, and best practices. 

• Managing server-side state is fundamentally different than managing client-side because it is static and immutable during a single render. However, NextJS provides a bunch of tools that help manage the server-side state. Learn more on how server-side state is managed in NextJS from this article.

Now, we will head over to some of the news and articles that will be at a place of interest for developers and the tech community out there.

OSS Highlight of the Week

• We celebrate great open-source projects and this week that crown is going to DocETL. It is a tool for creating and executing data processing pipelines that offers a low-code, declarative YAML interface to define LLM-powered operations on complex data. Try it out from its official GitHub page and leave a star if you like it.

  

Good to know

• Perfect fitting of a text in the form of single metrics like issue counts, average response time, etc., within a container in React.js is a challenge. Here is an article explaining how Sentry dealt with that challenge regarding one of their products while trying out multiple approaches and attempts.

• Recently, IBM launched a family of AI models named Granite 3.0 which are purpose-built for business. Faired up among other LLMs in the leaderboard, the Granite LLMs are designed to ensure scalability and trust in AI-driven applications. Learn more about the models from its official documentation.

• React hooks are functions that let a developer use the framework’s features within its functional components without writing classes. Here is a guided tutorial on creating a custom react hook to handle keyboard shortcuts.

• Nvidia’s Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct improved its ranking recently in the Chatbot Arena leaderboard and outperformed several frontier models like GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus. Learn more about the model from its Huggingface page.

Lastly, we will take a look at some of the trending scoops that hold a special mention for the community. 

Notable FYIs

• AI is slowly gaining ground on the user-experience front and it will completely change the way of using computers. This podcast from Latent Space involves Drew Houston, who gives a defined picture on that and also discusses the lessons learnt from building AI for a large user base.

• useActionState is a custom-built hook in React that developers create to manage specific action-based state transitions. Here is a detailed article explaining the true nature of that hook while using it in an application.

• Testing practices are one of the critical components of software development because it ensures that an application works as intended and meets the standard. This article provides some of the best testing practices in Node.js.

• Hugo is one of the fastest and popular frameworks for building a website. Upgrading Hugo can be a challenge to someone who has never played with it. This article contains some wonderful notes that will help any developer while upgrading the framework.

• ECMAScript Modules or ESM are the modern and official way of writing and sharing JavaScript. CommonJS was the legacy standard for the same and this article sheds light on migrating the syntax of a legacy CommonJS project to one that supports ESM.

That’s it from us with this edition. We hope you are going away with a ton of new information. Lastly, share this newsletter with your colleagues and pals if you find it valuable and a subscription to the newsletter will be awesome if you are reading for the first time.