Welcome friends 👋
This first issue is about picking frontend frameworks. In the last few years I've worked with many different frameworks. Some I loved, some felt confusing, others took quite some time to learn. With every framework I learned, I got a step closer to understanding that the right question to ask is not What is the best framework? but rather What is the framework for?.
React certainly is a good choice for single-page applications and cross-platform apps, but you don't need it for every little use case. Angular is not as popular as it used to be, still it's a great choice for large-scale applications and a solid software architecture. Ember really focuses on developer productivity, while Preact shines with its tiny library size. Svelte on the other hand is lightning fast by optimizing the compile step. Every framework comes with advantages and disadvantages and sometimes the best solution might be no framework at all.
If you want to dive a little bit deeper, I recommend reading this article, which breaks framework choice down into four major parts: Timing, technical features, community as well as consequences of the choice. It demonstrates that the choice is not purely about the features, but also about the people around. Who contributes to the framework, who is your team, what is your own technical knowledge and what is the problem you're trying to solve?
In the end, what will make a good application, is not the framework itself. A good framework choice will take more than just the technical aspects into consideration.
-- Lisi
Links & Tools
Awesome Web Animation
Website
This site is a nice collection of resources for doing web animation. It has book recommendations and lots of different libraries you could use to create animations.
What Web Can Do Today
Website
A great site that shows the available Web Apis in your current browser. It also lists detailed information once you click a specific API.
What I worked on this month
This month has been quite busy. I've been working on some internal applications for Storyblok. Then I wrote mutiple articles about Netlify, Vercel and Next.js. At our Storyblok event I gave a talk on headless eCommerce. Finally this week I got to work with my team on some fun animations for our landing page, which will hopefully go live next week 💖
I recommend
The Non-Designer's Design Book
Frontend Development often requires visual skills. When I was teaching media design, I recommended this book to the students to learn about basic design and typographic principles.