May 2023 Summaries

Inngest introduces Branch Environments to provide full-stack testing for every branch in a developer's workflow. This feature enables developers to create isolated sandboxes for each branch, allowing end-to-end testing without conflicts. The integration with platforms like Vercel and Netlify completes the full-stack picture by extending support to the database layer. With Branch Environments, Inngest creates an environment for every branch deployed, enabling reliable code execution in the background without requiring queue configuration. Developers can start using this feature by updating their project to use Inngest SDK v1.7.0 or greater and setting up the Inngest Vercel integration.

This article discusses how to develop reliable chained LLMs (Large Language Models) in production using TypeScript. Chaining LLMs is crucial for real-world applications as a single response from an LLM may not be sufficient. However, it exacerbates issues such as reliability, latency, costs, and infrastructure management. The author suggests using Inngest to manage these challenges without requiring any additional infrastructure or setup. By using the Inngest SDK, developers can create durable functions with retries, automatically persisted state, parallelism, and cancellation on any platform. This allows them to focus solely on their business logic while deploying chained LLMs in production within an hour. The author also outlines future plans for enhancing LLM use cases, such as a higher-level library for working with chained functions and integration with Langchain.

Next.js 13 introduced the App Router, which offers new features such as Nested Layouts, Server Components, and Streaming. The Inngest Dashboard recently redesigned using Next.js 13 and the App Router. Some key lessons learned from taking the App Router to production include understanding the two caches, leveraging streaming for improved page loading experience, handling URL search parameters in layout server components, utilizing the opinionated file structure, and learning new technologies with limited resources. The Next.js team has done an excellent job with their documentation, but as a relatively new technology, developers may need to be patient and persistent in seeking solutions.