Monthly Web Developer Digest March 2020

Hello everybody,

I hope you and your loved ones are all safe, and you handle staying at home okay. It's scary and challenging times; I wish you all the best.

To not worry all day, I try to keep myself very busy, and I check the latest news and numbers only in the morning and evening. And it's the beginning of April, so here we go with my digest of exciting things in March 2020.

/uses – developers' computer setups

I came across uses.tech. It is a collection of developers' computer setups. The different ways of working are fascinating. Every now and then, I go there to find out about new tools and workflows.

If you're curious about what I use for daily development, I added a /uses section to my site, too.

CovApp - an application built with doctors

The Berlin Charité (a well-known German hospital) is running an online application called CovApp. The app offers visitors a risk assessment for COVID-19 by answering a few questions. People with mild symptoms are guided to stay at home instead of getting in to get tested. This way, the number of new infections can be reduced.

I was involved in open sourcing the code base and bringing it to the public. If you know people working for hospitals, you might want to have a look at it.

👉 github.com/d4l-data4life/covapp

Three excellent articles to read

• Feedback Ladders: How We Encode Code Reviews at Netlify
• My findings after browsing the web without a User-Agent header for one week
• How To Make Life Easier When Using Git

Three useful projects to have a look at

• Awesome actions – A curated list of awesome GitHub actions
• act – A CLI tool to run your GitHub Actions locally
• gqless – A GraphQL client without queries

This month I learned

• npm install supports local modules (More "Node.js" learnings)
• "Hard CSS gradients" can be shortened not to include redundant values (More "CSS" learnings)
• YouTube offers RSS feeds for channels (More "tool" tips)
• text-transforms affect screen readers, too! (More "accessibility" learnings)
• git branch can show more than only the name of branches (More "git" learnings)

This month's devsheets

• Conic CSS gradients
• Shorter CSS gradients by removing redundant values
• image-set in CSS
• Element.insertAdjacentHTML in JavaScript
• z-index in CSS grid
• Intl.NumberFormat in JavaScript

You can find more DevSheets on Twitter under #devsheets.

A talk to watch over lunch

Not a tech talk: Five years ago Bill Gates gave the TED talk "The next outbreak? We’re not ready". He analyzed the Ebola crisis and recommended that the world better get moving. According to him, it would be important to get ready for the next virus outbreak.

It's sad to acknowledge that smart people foresaw the worldwide COVID-19 crisis, and still, the world was not ready for it.

A quote to think about

Chris Ferdinandi was on the "Greater than Code" podcast. They talked about "Vanilla JavaScript sites" and how "not using a JS framework" can make your sites faster and more accessible.

This month's quote is a short and sweet mantra I'd love more web developers would consider.

Old doesn't mean obsolete.

A song that makes you stop coding

"Solitary Daze" has everything I love in good electronic tracks. It has strings, a rolling beat and it makes me goosebumps. This month I stopped coding and had to listen to this track by Maceo Plex & Gabriel Ananda.

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And that's it for the content of March 2020, friends! 🎉 👋

Have a great April (and stay safe at home)!

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