“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by“”
Hello, |LIST:NAME| Welcome to issue #355!
Not much to report for this week, except that I am back at trying to modernize my blog and move from Gatsby to Astro. The last time that I tried Astro (pre 1.0) I liked it a lot but it was missing many of the features that I wanted. Now I have to say I am pretty pleased with the level of maturity of this tool. If you want to follow along, I have a branch where I am regularly committing my progress, and I also made a quick demo-tweetof an effect I am experimenting with for the new home page design.
That's all from me... what's one cool thing you have been doing last week? Reply to this email and let me know!
As developers, one of the most daunting yet exciting things is that we must never stop learning! But can we do that effectively throughout our careers? This article (also available as a video) explores how human memory and learning work, the differences between beginners and experts, and practical steps we can take to improve learning, training, and recruitment.
Our beloved Dan Abramov of React fame is back with another inspiring blog post! This one discusses the differences between 2 different kinds of React: the kind that runs on the server and the kind that runs on the client. And yes, in its own way, it's about React Server Components!
Figuring out how to make a good color palette is something that can make or break the design of a website project. I have been fascinated by this topic and I always try to learn more. Last week, I discovered this awesome video that proposes a very practical and effective way to come up with great color palettes for the web. Check it out if you are trying to become better at design.
An NPM user named PatrickJS launched a troll campaign with a package called "everything," which depends on all public npm packages. What kind of chaos did that unleash?! Check this out because it's absolutely mind-blowing to see how silly ideas can break entire software ecosystems...
Benchmarking becomes more important as we build more and more applications and tooling for runtimes like Node.js and Bun. This article is about macro and micro benchmarking and explores options we can use today. The article includes code examples and a CodeSandbox to try and implement in our own applications.
If you use ElasticSearch but are disappointed by how much resources it needs, you might want to check out Tantivy: a new full-text search engine library inspired by Apache Lucene and written in Rust. It might be very early days for the project but it's very promising already.
How If you are building a website that can support multiple themes (e.g. Light and Dark variants) you might be using a combination of CSS Variables and a data-theme attribute. Now what if suddenly you want to have a section of a page that uses a theme and another one that uses another theme (maybe because you are actually showcasing all the themes in one page). This article has a solution for this problem and it's an excellent resource to get to understand more about how CSS works under the hood.
by David B. Copeland
As a Rails developer, you care about user experience and performance, but you also want simple and maintainable code. Achieve all that by embracing the full stack of web development, from styling with Bootstrap, building an interactive user interface with AngularJS, to storing data quickly and reliably in PostgreSQL. Take a holistic view of full-stack development to create usable, high-performing applications, and learn to use these technologies effectively in a Ruby on Rails environment.