Personal automation, ditching jQuery, and writing global state? 😲
I’ve got some developer goodies for you in this newsletter issue, so I hope you enjoy.
💬 Personal automation
As with most weeks, I participated in #DevDiscuss — a discussion on Twitter hosted by the DEV community.
This week’s topic was personal automation, and I chimed in on what is probably my favorite developer tool:
Prettier is a tool that automatically formats your code. This means that spaces, line breaks, and semicolons are added to your code every time that you save your file.
It does not replace ESLint because it won’t warn you about code quality errors (such as unused variables). However, it allows you to focus on what your code does versus how it looks, and is perfect for developer teams.
🎙 Ditching jQuery
I also recorded a new podcast episode this week titled Ditching jQuery.
In this episode, I explain why jQuery was great in the past but is no longer needed for building modern web apps that work in all browsers today. I also provide some ways in which you can actually ditch jQuery.
📝 Global state in React
There is a new article/tutorial that I wrote titled Sharing state using React’s Context API.
This actually came from a discussion I had with Kyle McDonald about managing global state in React apps. Most people will reach for a library like Redux but in Kyle’s case he was looking at a new one called Laco.
While Laco looks really great, reaching for any library to accomplish a simple task may cause technical debt in the future. You should be aiming to accomplish a task easily with less dependencies.
Luckily in newer versions of React, a new API is available called Context which allows for shared global state. Unfortunately, it’s not quite easy to figure out and use. This is why I wrote a tutorial and also created an example on CodeSandBox.
🗂 Tab Dump
I keep a ton of browser tabs open with useful resources that I have yet to look at or save somewhere, so why not share it with you?
- HEY META - Quickly check & build your meta tags
- Stein - Use Google Sheets as your no-setup data store.
- Newsletter Guide - A 201 guide for taking your newsletters to the next level (I should probably read this 😅)
📅 Upcoming Week
That does it for this one! This upcoming week I hope to look into React Hooks and share my thoughts after using them. I am also planning on releasing some new features for IronMic so definitely check it out if you’re a podcaster.