The Spinneret: Issue #8

My Updates

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

Last month I launched Unmute alongside three fellow nerds I know and love, Becky Blank, Brandon Blank, and Ryan Cayabyab.

Unmute is a storytelling platform for underrepresented folx in the tech community. We're not really sure what it's going to end up being, but for now we're planning to host a series of (free) events for the community.

This project is the culmination of two things in my life: 1) My desire to use my privilege to help those less represented in the industry, and 2) A way to get back into storytelling after discontinuing the ridiculous podcast I ran for a few years.

My Words

New blog posts and videos I published last month.

As expected, April was a slow month for me. We welcomed our second child early in the month, and I didn't really find a groove to writing again until the month neared its end.

Of the four articles I published, I'm really excited about two:

• In 10 Unspoken Truths on Being a Developer, I added some commentary to a particularly valuable series of tweets from @laurieontech.
• Components: They Take a Village is helping me get back into the habit of writing about components, as I mentioned last month.

And here are a couple other quick hits on JavaScript:

• Converting FormData to JSON in JavaScript
• Incrementing Variables in JavaScript

My Reads

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

I found so many great articles in April that I started wondering if I should be running a weekly newsletter. There's a lot to get through here, so I tried to bucket them for you.

Product Updates

Here are a few updates from products I've come to love:

• Netlify began talking about Distributed Persistent Rendering as an approach for achieving faster builds without losing the benefits presented by the Jamstack. I love this idea, mostly because it works to better define what is (and what isn't) a Jamstack site (an idea I'm exploring for a post later this month).
• Netlify then released early access for a new feature that implements DPR, On-demand Builders.
• Sanity talked about their Content Lake. I really like reading Sanity's stuff because they think about content management different than most CMS providers. They put the content before the website.

Headless CMS

For some reason, I came across a large number of articles in the headless CMS space. There's some overlap here, but all worth a read (or at least a skim to see if it's relevant to you):

• Don't Lose Your Head: Evaluating Headless
• Going Headless: Use Cases And What It's Good For
• How to develop the right content modeling strategy

Static Site Generators

We can't talk about headless CMS without a little bit of SSG:

• A Complete Guide To Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) With Next.js
• A Deep Dive Into Eleventy Static Site Generator
• When NOT to choose Next.js

SEO & Performance

Odds and ends on the subject:

• An In-Depth Guide To Measuring Core Web Vitals
• Jamstack SEO Guide: The Ultimate Guide For Beginners
• Make Your Jest Tests up to 20% Faster by Changing a Single Setting

Fun with JavaScript

JavaScript is ... weird. Really weird. Here is a collection of new resources to help you understand and work efficiently with JavaScript:

• 3 Ways to Make Better Use of the JavaScript Console
• 7 JavaScript Features You Probably Don't Know
• 8 JavaScript Tips & Tricks That No One Teaches
• JavaScript best practices to improve code quality
• Solving a Mystery Behavior of parseInt() in JavaScript
• Vanilla JavaScript Code Snippets — Smashing Magazine

On the Human Part

Something I don't talk about enough is the process of getting a job (i.e. making money) in the tech space, which is ... a whole thing. Here are a few articles in that vein:

• 6 Different Ways I Make Money as a Software Developer — You Can Too
• 50 JavaScript Output-related Interview Questions
• Seven Mistakes To Avoid In Your Technical Interviews

Case Studies

I don't usually like to read case studies. They are often super self-back-patting pieces, when I want to read to learn something. I found these two to be particularly insightful because they teach more than they promote:

• Choosing A New Serverless Database Technology At An Agency (Sponsored by Fauna)
• Moving Backlinko.com to Headless WordPress and Next.js (Bejamas)

My Finds

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

I also found a lot of new tools this month. These are listed in alphabetical order with a quick snippet about each.

• CodeTour: VS Code extension that allows you to record and play back guided tours of codebases, directly within the editor. Not sure I'd use it, but it's a cool idea.
• Clerk: Simple and beautiful user management. It appears to be an auth solution for front-end projects. I'm definitely interested in looking more at this.
• Explosiv: The most lightweight, yet fully featured static-site generator you'll see.
• FoalTS: Node.JS framework for building web applications. Is it yet another framework? I'm not sure, but I have a project in planning stages and am likely to start evaluating Node.js frameworks soon, so I'll let you know if I learn anything interesting.
• Hyperapp: The tiny framework for building hypertext applications. I've seen some talking about this as a React killer. I'm skeptical, but it is off to a good start.
• Mine: The Future of Data Ownership. Okay, now this one I tried out. And it is equal parts awesome and terrifying. It's also only going to be free for a limited time.
• Nodemailer is a module for Node.js applications to allow easy as cake email sending that pairs nicely with Ethereal, a fake SMTP service. I used these in combination for an upcoming tutorial.
• Porter: A modern app platform in your own cloud. It's basically a way to orchestrate AWS in such a way that it behaves like Heroku. We're using it at Grouparoo. And so far, so good.
• StepZen: A GraphQL API for Any Data Source in Minutes. This seems to follow the approach I took in my Next.js conference talk, Everything is a CMS! I've requested an invitation but haven't played around with it yet.
• Supabase: The Open SourceFirebase Alternative. This is super intriguing for me. I haven't had a need to play with this yet, but have been looking for an excuse.
• Vite: Next Generation Frontend Tooling. It appears to be a build tool for JS projects. Very interested to try this out.