Stay ahead in web development: latest news, tools, and insights #35

weeklyfoo #35 is here: your weekly digest of all webdev news you need to know! This time you'll find 54 valuable links in 7 categories! Enjoy!

🚀 Read it!

• Hiring (and managing) cracked engineers: Cracked - Term used for people who are insanely good at something / career, productivity / 8 min read
• Three Laws of Software Complexity (or: why software engineers are always grumpy): Nah, we're not always grumpy ;) / engineering / 4 min read

📰 Good to know

• Essays on programming I think about a lot: Great list of articles for software development. / productivity / 18 min read
• Raw hours: Pretty quick read, but so much truth in it. / productivity / 2 min read
• Write code that you can understand when you get paged at 2am: A hymn to writing understandable code. / coding / 6 min read
• Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h: Crazy story. / cloudflare / 12 min read
• What are you getting paid in?: Interesting view on salary and other things you are paid in. / career / 7 min read
• New Magic For Animations in CSS: Some simplifications for animations / css / 5 min read
• Should I Use jwts For Authentication Tokens?: Short answer: No - but there's also a long answer ;) / auth / 16 min read
• Instead of 'auth', we should say 'permissions' and 'login': Good idea! / auth / 4 min read
• The Disappointment Frontier: Keeping your team far from reality can cause a big fat mess. / performance, management / 12 min read
• React Conf 2024 Recap: All you need to know from React Conf / react / 7 min read
• Slash Pages: A guide to common pages you can add to your website / pages / 4 min read
• Email.ML: Minimalist temporary Email / email / 1 min read
• Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal: My conspiracy theory on why software estimation is such garbage / productivity / 5 min read
• So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors: Implications after introducing 429s for too many requests. / api, rss / 7 min read
• Introducing the CSS anchor positioning API: That could solve a lot of issues. / css / 15 min read
• How Large is a 160 Bit Number?: What an enjoyable read! / numbers / 12 min read
• A little DevTools snippet to check broken links on a webpage: Handy snippet to check all links on a web page. / snippet, href / 4 min read
• 4 Software Design Principles I Learned the Hard Way: If there’s two sources of truth, one is probably wrong. And yes, please repeat yourself. / engineering / 8 min read
• I Sold TinyPilot, My First Successful Business: About an ex-Googler that started his own business and sold it. / startups / 18 min read
• How we used esbuild to reduce our browser extension build times by 90%: Including type checks! / ci / 22 min read
• Astro 4.9: Next minor release of Astro / astro / 6 min read
• Client-side rendering: A case study of CSR. / csr / 42 min read
• Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL: Prior GraphQL advocate does not recommend GraphQL anymore. / graphql / 13 min read
• Inbox ten: Useful adjustment to Inbox Zero / productivity / 8 min read

🧰 Tools

• LO: small programming language targeting WASM that aims to be as simple as possible / wasm
• Vector Pattern Generator: Create vector patterns. / vector, patterns
• sig: Interactive grep (for streaming) / cli
• Ark: A headless library for building reusable, scalable design systems that works for a wide range of JS frameworks. / react, web-components
• Univer: Univer is an open-source alternative to Google Sheets, Slides, and Docs / office
• Pattern generator: Another pattern generator / shapes, patterns
• Features.Vote: Drive your product's growth with clarity by letting users post and vote on the features they want. / features
• pic-smaller: Pic Smaller – Compress JPEG, PNG, WEBP, AVIF, SVG and GIF images intelligently / images, compression
• TypeHints: These are answers to all the questions I had as a beginner in TypeScript. / typescript, learning
• dolt: Git for Data / data, database
• RAGapp: The easiest way to use Agentic RAG in any enterprise / ai, rag
• Fontsource: Self-host Open Source fonts in neatly bundled NPM packages. / fonts
• bau.js: Reactive library and components for building web user interface / ui
• encore: Encore is the Development Platform for startups building event-driven and distributed systems. / infra
• earthly: Fast, consistent builds with an instantly familiar syntax – like Dockerfile and Makefile had a baby. / ci
• gh-dash: A beautiful CLI dashboard for GitHub / github, cli
• CSS Pattern: Explore 144 CSS-only patterns made with CSS gradients and optimized with CSS variables. / css, gradients
• Art Style Gallery: AI prompts / ai, prompts
• JS Hacks & Creativity: This is awesome! / javascript
• SVG Gobbler: Open source browser extension for finding, editing, exporting, optimizing, and managing SVG content. / svg, extension
• React PDF: Display PDFs in your React app as easily as if they were images. / react, pdf
• delve: AI to chat / ai

🎨 Design

• Best Practices For Naming Design Tokens, Components And Variables: This post is dedicated to naming conventions, tips, and real-world examples that help you name things in a robust and flexible way. / design-tokens / 10 min read
• How Canva Activates Users: See the user onboarding flow of Canvas / onboarding / 2 min read

🤪 Fun

• qlock: A JavaScript Quine Clock - loving it! / quine / 1 min read

📚 Tutorials

• serverless-postgres: MVP for a Serverless Postgres using Oriole, Fly Machines, and Tigris for S3 Storage. / postgres, serverless / 6 min read

📺 Videos

• Act On Press: John Carmack's Hot Take On UI / ui
• The Most Dangerous Phrase: This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2023. / solid, scrum

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