The Spinneret: Issue #9

The evolution and redefinition of the Jamstack.

My Updates

Notable changes in my life, on my website, and in other projects.

You're going to see lots of changes over the coming months. I'm a tinkerer at heart and it's time to do some tinkering. I'm putting into question everything I do with the goal of coming out more focused. Ultimately I'd like for you to have a better understanding of what you're getting if you follow me, which includes subscribing to this newsletter.

I suspect The Spinneret will evolve along with these other changes, but that it will be for the better — that you'll get more out of it.

As always, keep the suggestions coming. You are my early subscribers and what you say holds a lot of weight in these decisions.

My Words

New blog posts and videos I published last month.

As I'd hoped, I got back into publishing regularly in May. The article that got the most attention was The Evolution and Redefinition of The Jamstack. This was my commentary on how the Jamstack has evolved and the words we should be using to describe it today. It received a lot of criticism and led to many great discussions.

Tutorials

Also, a handful of tutorials:

New Definitions

And a few new definition type posts:

My Reads

Articles and news I read last month that I found interesting, with some commentary.

Here are my favorites from last month, in case you missed them:

How to be good at Code Reviews is some great advice. In my experience, there's so much potential for teaching and learning through code reviews. Maybe more than any other part of the process.
Building A Rich Text Editor (WYSIWYG) seems ... odd. Aren't there enough already? Yeah, but I really liked this because it was a great learning experience — to understand how these things are often constructed. And it also demonstrates that it's in your power to build one, especially if it needs to perfectly serve your users. (Still, if an out-of-the-box solution works, stick with it.)
Auto-Generated Social Media Images caught my attention because I've had an issue written for some time on this exact scenario. As I look to make some changes to the blog, I suspect I'm going to employ something like this.
JWT should not be your default for sessions was a great read. I don't do much with authentication these days, although I suspect I will again soon. But I just like the way this is written — it enforces the idea that the simple solution is often perfect, and that resonates with me.

In the News

Netlify acquired FeaturePeek, and with it introduced a big new feature — interactive deploy preview reviews. I haven't played around with this yet, but the idea is super exciting.
Notion released their API! And Chris Coyier had some nice things to say. I'm currently trying to decide whether or not I stay with Notion. Either way, the API is exciting news!

A Few Others

My Finds

New tools that I've recently discovered. They aren't necessarily new.

I really didn't do much poking around last month. The only new thing I came across was Podium, which promises an easy experience composing microfrontends. I haven't really dug in, so I can't perfectly articulate its value, but if you have several distributed front ends, I'd suggest at least poking around a bit. And here's an article that looks to be a nice intro guide.

That's all for now! See you next month!