Web in February - The Mindless Newsletter by Agney Menon
It's officially February and it's a leap year. Years of studying programming has somehow got me to linking leap years with a program to check if it's a leap year.
CSS Tricks is one of those publications that I have followed throughout my career. From the days I spent tinkering templates in college to building professional web apps for clients, CSS Tricks has been a constant companion. Some of their talented ensemble of authors are the ones that inspired me and whom I wish to emulate. To publish an article for them and have an author page is truly dream come true.
When Iowa Caucus App failed, it bought up how these applications are created in front of the whole world, and Boy! it wasn't pretty. There are already multiple articles that refer to what went wrong with it and why. It is surely an interesting trade off that Goverments have to make when it comes to quality vs price. While there exists quality standards with many of the existing architectures, none of them hold up for software and we need to invent some. The incident reminded me of this XKCD Comic.
Releases
- Angular 9 - Angular is now on v9 and the first release with a full blown Ivy compiler and optimisations. This release promises a lots of size improvements for large scale angular applications.
- Ionic 5 - Ionic releases with the Angular update to bring iOS 13 controls and Android Material updates.
- Ant Design - AntD remains my favorite React UI Framework and is a simple plug-in for any admin panel type application. 4.0 brings dark mode, smaller size among other improvements.
- Worker Sites - Cloudflare already did the work for serverless computing on the edge. Why wouldn't they extend to static sites?
My Content
- Replacing Styled Components with 1KB alternative - Goober is a 1KB alternative to the CSS-in-JS libraries styled-components and emotion type libraries.
- Fast track to Dark mode - My blog finally has dark mode and I talk about the process on my blog.
Tutorials
- Good First Issues - Github is leveraging ML to find first issues and make first contributions easier.
- Scaling the Hotstar Platform to 50M users - Hotstar might not seem on the same level with Netflix and Amazon Prime. But IPL shortly on it's heels, Hotstar has to deal with the scale as any other platform. They provide some insights on this blog.
- Accessible Autocomplete - Adam Silver writes about building an accessible auto-complete and let's just say this is one of the hard ones.
What am I learning?
I started with KeystoneJS this month and ran into an issue with creating database tables in my first try. After trying n number of times, I ran across an issue and submitted a PR for it. KeystoneJS has not started making sense for me yet, but so far so good.
In Other News
- Use channels, not messages - More and more people are starting to work remotely and Slack and Teams are how people communicate now. Arkency discusses why they prefer channels to messages. This something I have heard my current company CEO evangelises and I'm sure there are some points in here that everyone can take home.
- YouTube creators are planting trees everywhere, they have reached their current goals and have upgraded to plant a trillion trees. I wondered if that is really the way to go and now I start to see scientific findings on the same.
- Cassidy Williams is one my favorite speakers and developer evangelist people. She talks on this podcast with tips on public speaking, conferences and public speaking.
What am I doing?
I watched an Oscar nominated Jojo Rabbit - A heartfelt comedy (could be tragic depending on how you look at it) about a young boy's journey to fight his upbringing with his imaginary friend Hitler (played by my favorite Taika Waititi) and a jewish girl.
I watched Arming the Rebels - Tobias Lütke - Founder of CEO - A podcast where Tobias talks about building Shopify to arm rebels against Amazon. But he goes into more wisdom about building a company and entrepreneurship. When asked about hiring he says, "If everyone in the team looks like you, find someone else.", he talks about talent acceleration teams at his company and developer velocity.
I read The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo. Julie was the manager of the design team at Facebook and has assumed the position from the time it is a small startup. Julie puts into words what being a manager and lists steps to excel at it. As she is moving on from Facebook this month, looking forward to her doing it all over again.
What are some interesting stuff you are reading/writing/watching/building? Let me know your suggestions/improvements by replying to this newsletter or find me on Twitter
Until next month,