January 11, 2025

December 2024 - Bryan's Briefing

December 2024 - Bryan's Briefing

Hey friend,
it has now been one year of doing this mail letter! This is the 12th edition.

I would love to say that doing this for one year now has been completely life changing, but it hasn't. It's still nice to stay in contact with you though and reflect on the things I've been doing each month :)

Currently recovering from a cold again.
For New Years and Christmas I travelled through Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Had a good family holiday.

Now looking for a second examiner to finally start writing my bachelor thesis.

🌱 Cool Content I Made

Didn't publish anything during the holidays, but worked on my web development guide page at the start of the month.

1. Ways to build a website - Overview of good tools to build a website, from drag-and-drop builders, to CMS tools to coding.
2. Building a NavBar component - Using simple HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript to build a navigation bar, a how-to guide.

The pages on writing scalable CSS have also been updated:

• CSS Reset
• CSS Variables
• CSS Utility Classes

❤️ Cool Stuff By Others

🍿 Videos

• General life lessons by Simon Alexander Ong - General life lessons, a self-improvement kind of video.
• Building a electronic real-time chess board by From Scratch - Lightweight and simple entertainment video, still fun to watch.

🛠️ Apps

• Computer TLDraw by TLDraw - The TLDraw team made something awesome. Using the TLDraw canvas and integrating natural language computing into it, one component can generate text (or images) which is then passed on onto a different component. Their blog showcase gives you a good idea of what it can do, but there's also a quick video.
• 2024 JavaScript Rising Stars by Michael Rambeau - Looking at JS project with the biggest growth during 2024.
• State of JS 2024 - Seeing the "rising stars" of JS made me interested in what the actual numbers for things look like in the state-of-js report. Found the overview of what AIs people use interesting.
• Ethan Sholly's favorite self-hosted apps launched in 2024 - Self-hosted apps are great since they allows you to own your data, and do things how you'd like to. Found this list of self-hosted apps nice.