Monthly Digest January 2020

Hello everybody!

I hope the year's rolling smoothly for you. I decided to make this newsletter a little bit shorter and more condensed. This change will lead to me saving some time but also enable me to increase the frequency of it. Let me know what you think about that.

Let's dive right in!

Because I never find the right online-tools when I need them, I scratched my own itch and built tiny-helpers.dev. It is a collection of free single-purpose online tools for web developers. Enjoy!

You can add tools, too. ;)

• Facebook's Off-Facebook Activity tool is now available to everyone

  A scary look at what data Facebook uses to optimize its advertisement machinery

• Should you self-host Google Fonts? written by Barry Pollard

  An extensive explanation of why you should self-host your fonts

• Smaller HTML Payloads with Service Workers written by Phil Walton

  An interesting approach to using service workers

• big-list-of-naughty-strings maintained by Max Woolf

  A list of strings which have a high probability of causing issues when used as user-input data

• clean-code-javascript maintained by Ryan McDermott

  Clean Code concepts adapted for JavaScript

• mermaid

  Generation of diagram and flowchart from text in a similar manner as markdown

• There is an MDN short URL to access the docs [Productivity]
• CSS Grid can be used to stack elements [CSS]

• How to stack elements with CSS grid [CSS]
• A custom properties fallback trick [CSS]
• Modern event listener config options [JavaScript]
• Inferred function names for arrow functions [JavaScript]

In the talk, Draw the docs, Alicja Raszkowska shared her journey of switching the focus of her daily development job. The talk is interesting because of two things. First, "drawing docs" resulted in a very cool project. And second, Alicja gives great advice on how to get buy-in for your ideas inside of your company.

When I tweeted that I'm overwhelmed by cutting-edge technology, I found out that a surprising number of people feel the same way. In that spirit, this month's favorite quote comes from Shawn Wang's article Collapsing Layers: Doing Less to Do More.

The future of technology is less layers, not more.

Yesterday, I was at a solid 2 hours and 45 minutes concert of the Stereophonics. They even played songs that I used to play when I still played in a band. If you're planning to learn the guitar, too, Have a nice day is an easy-to-play song to get started.

And that's it for the content of January 2020, friends! 🎉 👋

Have a great February! And if you have any feedback about this newsletter and this more condensed version, please let me know.