August 2025 Recap
In August, I completed my field and form libraries and released the first version of each. They initially garnered some positive feedback but their usefulness to the wider community remains to be seen. In the meantime, I plan to continue building practical examples with the libraries in order to find and improve any shortcomings.
Frontend Mentor currently has 5 free challenges involving forms, from newbie to advanced, that I will be implementing to test-drive the libraries and hopefully extract useful insights. I've already started building Contact form and there's been a lot of new and interesting things I've discovered that's not even form related.
From the blog
- Announcing elm-field - Describes
dwayne/elm-field, an Elm package for constructing valid data from unreliable string inputs. The package provides aFielddata structure that models the non-UI related aspects of an input field that's useful for building forms.
Other work
- I refactored
dwayne/elm-l-system-studioto usedwayne/elm-field. See commit: Use elm-field. dwayne/elm-stack- Extracted a stack data structure since I've needed this abstaction several times in my previous work. Evaluating Infix Expressions provides a nice example usage of stacks. It uses two stacks to evaluate infix expressions based on Dijkstra's Shunting Yard Algorithm.
Picks
- Flake templates - I've been building a lot of Elm packages lately and much of the initial work to setup a project has been repetitive. Flake templates has been helpful in allowing me to standardize how I want to get started on various projects, including Elm packages. Now I just do
nix flake init --template git+ssh://git@github.com/dwayne/templates#elm-packageand all I have to do is focus on writing what's specific to the package. My templates are in a private repository at the moment but I might make them public in the future. - Astro and
hmsk/vite-plugin-elm- I've been using Astro together withhmsk/vite-plugin-elmto manage the example websites I provided for my packages. Both tools have been easy to setup and a pleasure to use.
That's it for today. I wish you all the best this month and remember, make haste slowly.
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