Monthly Digest - December 2018

It's been a while since I sent this newsletter...

Life got busy in 2018, and now it's time to work on my resolutions for 2019. In 2019, I want to spend more time with things that make me happy (like reading fiction) and doing fewer things that make me tired (like late night coding sessions).

Writing this newsletter makes me happy, so let's dive right in!

Making Things Better: Redefining the Technical Possibilities of CSS

The slide deck "Making Things Better: Redefining the Technical Possibilities of CSS" by Rachel Andrew starts with a history lesson on CSS tables but very quickly goes into new CSS capabilities of today and tomorrow. She covers flexbox, grid and new CSS properties I've never heard of. It's fascinating to see where CSS is heading and what new cool things are in the CSS pipeline.

Web platform feeds to stay up to date

RSS is becoming a thing (again), and if you're looking for blogs and RSS feeds to subscribe to Sime Vidas provides a massive list of RSS feeds available on GitHub.

Highly recommended to stay up to date. 👌

The holiday season kept me busy, and I only made it to one documented learning this month.

(I will have a lot of time in January, though, get ready... 🙈)

A preceding space prevents dangerous commands from going into the session history

Did you ever execute a command accidentally by pressing the arrow keys to access previous commands one time too much? I learned how you could run commands and not save them in the session history!

I read more and more "people-related" articles lately and the article "Are you a manager? Shut up!" by Gal Zellermayer is a quick piece explaining why we don't always need to be the one speaking. The ability to listen is not only important as a manager but also applies to situations with colleagues, family, and friends.

I am in a hate/love relationship with Twitter. Unfortunately, it's not a place where everybody is kind to each other (does this place even exist on the Internet?). Emily Freeman wrote an article explaining her thoughts on Developer Relations as a job profession including a few paragraphs on social media critique and rants.

I do see the value of public critique but haven't figured out for myself what's the best approach. That said, the following quote resonates profoundly with me.

If I slam a product or service I don’t like on Twitter, I’m publicly making a whole lot of engineers who put a lot of work into it feel like shit.

Web workers are a supported technology for years. The support even goes down to old IEs. Recently they get more attention. More and more frameworks are starting to work on implementations to move heavy computation into workers to free the main thread and avoid jank.

In the talk "JavaScript Concurrency and the DOM" Kristofer Baxter and Malte Ubl give an excellent overview of what web workers are and introduce worker-dom, a new library which provides an interface to do heavy the computation in a worker while applying changes to the DOM. Pretty cool stuff!

On the positive side of things about Twitter – the Cardigans' "Favorite Game" said "Hello" in my Twitter feed randomly and well... that's a hell of a song!

So that's it for the beginning of January. I wish you all a good start into 2019!