Web in December - Mindless Newsletter by Agney
December marks 20 years since the birth of JavaScript - Our favourite language (I hope!). Here's some history to catch up on the 20 years:
- JavaScript - The first 20 years - A paper co-authored by creator Brendan Eich.
- Celebrating 20 years of JavaScript - Heroku Blog
- 2020 End of Year Thoughts - CSS Tricks - CSS Tricks asked leaders in Web Development about their thoughts on where the web is going.
Google was out for an hour last month - So was Youtube, Drive and Gmail. Everything failed and the world was still running - well kind off. As memes flooded the Internet, some people were truly lost.
https://twitter.com/joemfbrown/status/1338452107419148290
React Team went on their vacations for this year leaving us scratching our heads. A new RFC is now out: Zero-Bundle-Size React Server Components. This time, instead of random keywords, the team decided to put out a full hour Youtube video explaining the concept.
- React can render components on the server and send the resulting HTML via network
- The components on the server can access NodeJS elements and interoperate with languages that NodeJS can.
- It doesn't involve hydration and HTML is served to the client in a special data format that React library on the frontend can unpack - libraries like Ember have explored this pattern before.
Just hours after this left everyone head scratching and deep into PHP memes, Basecamp came out with another library that tasted like satire. Turbo is extracted from the magic that powers Hey! that we had talked about in previous newsletters. Turbo gives you the power of Single Page Applications while writing less JavaScript.
More JavaScript or Less JavaScript?
Releases
- Yari - MDNs new content platform with content being stored as Markdown.
- JavaScript Info - JavaScript Info has a redesign and lots of chapters.
- estimator.dev - 90% of browsers today can execute modern JavaScript. If your user matrix falls in that category, Google has a free tool to find how much you can save by shipping just the modern javascript.
- Squoosh v2 - Squoosh was one of the friendly simple image compression websites on the web powered by Google. In v2, there is finally a CLI version for it.
Tutorials
- CSS Tricks v18 - CSS Tricks is one of my favourite sites on Frontend Development. (and one that I have been fortunate to write for) Every design is special and on this v18, Chris walks us through the fun elements.
- Cornell's Advanced Compliers - This is bit long to be a tutorial, but here's a whole course on Advanced Compilers from Cornell University.
- Saying Goodbye to Google Fonts - With cache partitioning arriving in all browsers, it would be 💯% better to use self hosted fonts than Google CDNs.
- Writable getters - Lea Veou explores an object property pattern where the property has a default value unless set.
In the Spotlight 🔦
There has been some really great CSS-in-JS frameworks coming out. With these libraries, we can:
- custom CSS as CSS inline - no style objects
- build in conditionals
- grouping common styles
- no @ apply in CSS - create components
- no more enabling/disabling styles
Here's a more detail explainer on my blog.
Highlighting some of my favorites:
- twin.macro is a babel macro that transforms tailwind classes into your favourite CSS-in-JS library. This means zero run time.
- twind has CSS-in-JS build-in and with benchmarks faster than any other solution in ~11kB.
https://twitter.com/agneymenon/status/1343924987313340416
In Other News
- Github Wrapped - Like #SpotifyWrapped project but for Github.
- How Bad is your Spotify - You have already heard the uplifting things from #SpotifyWrapped (Did you know that was an intern project?. Now let the AI roast your music taste.
- No cookie for you - Everyone makes fun of 🍪 popups, they don't serve their purpose in most cases anyway. Github leads by removing cookies altogether. They don't serve ads, nor send data to third party services, so they might have got it easy.
Looking Forward
Happy New Year 🎉
Wish you a great 2021 ahead.