Article Roundup - February 15, 2019

What’s New in ES2019: Array flat and flatMap, Object.fromEntries
ES2019 has been finalized! Prepare yourself for a small handful of new JavaScript functions. All of the features will be available in Chrome 73. Node should be following along before too long.

Implementing Versioning & Audit Trails with SQL Server Temporal Tables and .NET Core
With important datasets, versioning and audit trails won’t be far behind. The ability to validate your data can be very valuable to a business, but at the same time, you don’t want to needlessly drive up costs with excessively duplicated data. Sure, you can roll your own audit trails. Or, you could let the database infrastructure handle it for you. This article focuses on SQL Server Temporal Tables, which were introduced starting in SQL Server 2016 and allows you to retrieve data in your versioned tables based on a point in time instead of it simply being “correct”.

How To Architect A Complex Web Table
Sometimes the old ways are the best: tables. They work well if you have a large amount of data that needs to be displayed and worked on. That’s all a spreadsheet really is, and they are still everywhere. This article talks through narrowing down the features you will support and building out a functional table interface for your data. It’s a bit more design focused then code focused, but if you don’t lay things outright and make it usable it won’t matter much what your code looks like.

On Being A Principal Engineer
Figuring out the career paths and which ones you want to take in any given organization can be tricky, especially if you want to stay technical. A company can have hoards of Junior Software Engineers and Software Engineers without any trouble. You can have numerous Senior Software Engineers too, but that seems to be where things change. Once you hit that point, organizations generally don’t seem to have many options. It seems like you either have to accept that as your fate or switch to doing something else. This article focuses around one of the roles an increasing number of organizations are adding that is above a Sr. Software Engineer: the Principle Engineer.