July 1, 2020

Web in June - The Mindless Newsletter by Agney Menon

and that's June.

Taking a month off from bragging about remote work, I would like to shine the spotlight an amazing JavaScript tool:

• esbuild - A JavaScript bundler written in Go. ESBuild is currently used in tools like vite and snowpack. It is reported to be a 100x faster than existing tools 😱. Are we ready to accept JS tools that are written in other languages faster than JS? What does it mean for other tools in the ecosystem?

Hey A new email client from makers of Basecamp launched this month, with focus on privacy. Putting the actual use case and marketing aside, Hey is build with very little JavaScript and 100% HTML over the wire, here's a Twitter thread. Some people like Rich Harris (who created Svelte) think that interface for apps like Github and Hey is proof why we should use modern web javascript frameworks.

Releases

• Cloudflare TV - A developer focused television programming from Cloudflare.
• OpenAI API - OpenAI is coming up with an API for their text generation engine. (Democratization of machine learning coming soon.)
• Snapchat Mini - Snapchat announced Minis, small HTML applications that can live inside Snapchat. Waiting for it to launch on Instagram.
• Tooling Report - Google team compares different tooling available for web developers, their costs and practices.
• Stripe Billing Portal - You can redirect the customer directly to this billing portal for them to upgrade/downgrade subscriptions, update payment methods, or view history. Much fewer pages to build 🎉
• Amazon Honeycode - In the last month's newletter, I mentioned how Microsoft was building an Airtable clone. This month, it is Amazon.

What am I building?

• Quick Read for Slack - A Slack app that can open ad free text versions of web articles inside Slack.
• Snowpack Svelte Tailwind community tempalte - A community template for Snowpack demoing usage of svelte preprocess.

Tutorials

• Container Technologies at Coinbase - Coinbase talks about why they are avoiding Kubernetes and how they substitute it.
• Analysing performance of Notion app - I love Notion app, but it's the amount of time it takes to open up is legendary bad. This performance report comes up with tons of suggestions.
• Alibaba Hooks - Alibaba open sourced their React hooks collection and there are some great ones in there.
• Foam on VS Code - Foam is a Roam Research clone that uses VS Code as a platform to build for a notes app. (Of course, Roam is not any notes app)
• HTTP Status codes as Rihanna GIFs - This ones a 💎

What am I watching?

Dark S03 is out on Netflix and it's of all the rage ⏳.

In Other News

• The Verge Guide to misinformation on Internet - Twitter and Facebook are taking some steps to tackle fake news on their platforms. But we all know how the lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes. The Verge has compiled a good guide to navigating the web.
• Employee Stock options in Ken - Employee stock options are something startups tend to throw around. What do they mean? Can they make you a millionare and more questions.
• Toxic Work Culture - As remote work has become a thing during the pandemic, many companies are starting to release survyes indicating that some of their employees are struggling. Could the reason be hidden elsewhere? Atlassian guide to identifying and navigating a toxic work culture
• Guide to creating communties - Developers often have communities in their cities or online that bring together people in same technology or interest. If you would like to build a community, this collection of resources is gold.