Web in November - Mindless Newsletter by Agney
December is here ❄️☃️
Release of the Year 🍎
November is the month that is probably going to be remembered for Apple's groundbreaking processor upgrade. Apple has moved on from Intel processors to manufacture their own that they call M1 chipset. The first reviews have come in for the first Macbook Air and Macbook Pro and it's very promising.
But should you get an M1 chip? Here's a website to find out. Catch up with all updates on Apple's One More Thing event
Social Networks and Homogeneity
There were two major feature releases from social networks last month:
If I just told you the features of existing social networks, would you able to guess which social network I'm talking about? Probably not. Axios has a checklist of features that you can check out. It's difficult when Twitter and Snapchat come out with these features because it wasn't extra features that got them here, it was the restrictions on existing features.
Releases
- Safari 14 and Big Sur - With Big Sur comes one of the largest updates to Safari which Apple claims to be 50 percent faster than Chrome for loading popular sites. Oh! and Flash is dead.
- Angular 11 - Comes with lots of bug fixes and triaging. The new feature in Automatic font inlining makes me wonder how much control is too much.
- Tailwind CSS v2.0 - After lots of improvements on minor versions, Tailwind has a large update with a color palette and dark mode support. Did I tell you about the trailer? If you love Tailwind, Sid's release for Tailwind Devtools might also be worth checking out.
- Chakra UI v1 - Chakra has been one of the major accessible UI frameworks in React world and they are finally on their v1.0.
Tutorials
- Why use GraphQL - Most articles with this title over years have talked just about overfetching and underfetching on the REST side of things. Jens Neuse brings out more of the tooling build around GraphQL in support of it (which I do think is the strongest part)
- React component code smells - When you are in an endless refactoring loop, it's hard to tell when your component sucks. But luckily, Anton has some tips.
- Monument Valley in CSS - Julia Miocene creates this absolute beauty with just HTML and CSS. It's a reminder for days when we forget what's possible.
- Intent to remove Server push - Server push was one of the most talked about features for HTTP/2. Servers could now dictate priorities of resources being fetched or push extra files onto the browser. But the implementation of this got so convoluted that nobody actually used it and now it's going to be removed from Chromium.
- The link to change password - If you have checked out Chrome's password security checkup, you might have noticed that there is a link to change your password. How did Chrome know the app's change password URL? Like most things Google, because the app said so.
In the Spotlight 🔦
Lots of people have tried to mimic Firebase over the past few years and failed. However, one competitor who have showed lots of progress over the course of past few months is Supabase.
Supabase is fully open source and build on the Postgres database. They have released their 1.0 this month and it's super awesome.
In Other News
- A Deep Fake series - The creators of South Park have released a bizarre series with characters generated by Deep Fake AI.
- Pocket's Best of 2020 - The reading list application Pocket has their Best of 2020 collection out with some amazing articles.
- Salesforce buys Slack - Some say it was only a matter of time, when a Trillion dollar company is at your doorstep and giving their services for free, how would Slack hold fort? If you have been paying attention to Salesforce acquisitions (Heroku, Mulesoft, Tableau, Quip and now Slack) you will know where they going.
Looking Forward
December is the month of advent calendars.
- Advent of Code - If you like coding puzzles, Advent of Code starts on December 1st at midnight EST (UTC-5)
- Perf Calendar - Tune into the web performance in December.
- Advent with Nuxt - Ben Hong's Advent calendar with some NuxtJS.
- Scrimba's JavaScript Advent - Scrimba presents 24 days of JavaScript challenges. Every day, the winner gets a Scrimba Pro subscription.