What are you learning?
Heya,
Quick question for you – what are you learning right now? I'd love to hear about it: reply to the email to let me know. I'll share some of my favorite answers in the next issue of this newsletter.
It's been a busy week and a half here at Bytesized Code – a new website launch, a new YouTube tutorial series, and, of course, planning for Byteconf Season Two - Byteconf GraphQL, streaming on September 25th.
I've also been spending a ton of time thinking about this mailing list! I'm very motivated to make this single weekly (ish) email in your inbox super valuable – as someone super sensitive to distractions online, I've found a few key email newsletters have been a great way to get hyper-focused content recommendations. In that vein, I'm going to start adding a few pieces of content to each issue of this newsletter – a particular few things I'm reading, watching, or generally enjoying out of the massive number of new articles, tutorials, videos, etc about programming online.
On that note, I mentioned a new website launch at the top of the email. Think Serverless is a new website I've launched with my buddy Stuart Sandine, where we share stories from people and organizations in the trenches, using serverless technologies to build awesome stuff. If you're interested in serverless development, check out our first interview with Yan Cui, a developer known online as theburningmonk:
https://thinkserverless.dev/yan-cui/
If you're interested in staying up-to-date on Think Serverless, a little call to action here - we have a new mailing list where we'll be sending new interviews, as well as interesting links and content on serverless. Check it out here.
I've also started a new YouTube series over at Bytesized Code to help developers get up and running with "full-stack serverless": a development paradigm focused on shipping full web applications (HTML, CSS, JS on the frontend, and JS on the backend) on top of serverless platforms.
The first part of the series is a four-part tutorial on building a simple todo list application, with full data persistence, built on Cloudflare Workers. If you're interested, check out the video:
On the Byteconf front: I'm continuing to prep for September's Byteconf GraphQL stream. I'm in talks with a couple folks doing really interesting work with GraphQL, and I'm excited to announce the speaker lineup here in the next couple weeks. Keep an eye out for an RSVP link, as well as more information around timing, where to catch the stream, etc.
Here's a few things I've been reading this week that I found interesting:
Google engineer Philip Walton has a great explanation of native JavaScript modules, and includes a brief explanation of how to opt-in your JavaScript project to building native modules using Rollup. It was fascinating to hear that Philip's site is already using modules, and it's awesome to hear that newer build projects like Rollup are really pushing the boundaries of how JavaScript projects can be distributed on the web.
- "How to build a plugin system on the web and also sleep well at night" - Rudi Chen @ Figma (article)
Figma is a really incredible piece of software – it's a fully-featured (and free!) design tool running entirely in-browser. One of the most impressive features Figma has is a full plugin system, allowing developers to build out new functionality for the tool, still all in-browser. In this post on Figma's engineering blog, Rudi Chen shows how the Figma team built a solution for plugins to run in-browser, without falling back to eval or similar dangerous common approaches. This was my first exposure to the Realms proposal, which introduces an API to JavaScript allowing for sandboxed JS code, perfect for plugins, isolated code, etc. It's super interesting!
This isn't a new video (about a month old), but I've recently been nerding out on Jeff Delaney's Fireship YouTube channel – it combines really interesting web dev content with tight professional editing. It's a joy to watch! This episode of the channel takes a pretty common topic (web scraping) and tackles a few ways to do it using Node.js. It's a fun watch, and I highly recommend any of the other videos on his channel as a follow-up once you finish this one!
Thanks again for joining the list, and look forward to more info on the upcoming Byteconf GraphQL stream soon!
Kristian Freeman - @signalnerve