The Spinneret: Issue #7

My Updates

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

Hey hey! It's me again. Sorry I'm a little late this month. I, uh ... had a baby. Well, I didn't have the baby. The person who lives with me did. In any case, there's a thin layer of poop on the sleep-deprived mess that is the current state of affairs in my house.

Despite all that, and despite the baby arriving nearly a month early, everyone is overall happy and healthy. And the oldest is pretty stoked about being a big sister.

What this means for this newsletter is ... hopefully nothing. My post frequency will go down dramatically in April, but then likely pick back up in May as I find a new groove. I suspect, though, that this is unlikely to affect the quality or format of the newsletter.

My Words

New blog posts and videos I published last month.

The two articles I'm most excited about this month are:

• Why Typescript and Svelte are a match made in heaven: This was a guide I put together for Sanity. I hadn't spent a ton of time with Sanity, Svelte, or TypeScript, so it was really interesting and challenging to explore them all at once. I really like what came out of it.
• The Good and the Bad of Component-Driven Development: There's nothing fancy about this article. But it puts me back on track for building out a whole suite of component articles, which will serve as the foundation for an exciting new project I'm considering.

As I look to figure out how to publish more content (that is meaningful), I've started by cleaning out some things I've had laying around for a bit.

• Dynamically Changing a Netlify Form Name
• Develop Long-Term Efficiency by Creating Conventions

Plus a new Quick Tip: Use a Code Spell Checker

A couple new WTF articles:

• WTF is PNPM?
• WTF is a Monorepo?

And I solved a few random problems:

• Git: List All Config Options
• Git: Set Default Branch to "main" on "init"
• How to Use PNPM in Netlify Build
• VS Code Spell Checker Not Working

My Reads

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

These were the articles from last month that caught my attention more than the rest:

• Write Music is probably more of a Find than a Read. But I love it. It speaks to me. It shows how important it is to adjust cadence when telling a story. I've worked hard to craft this natively in my brain over the years, but it's really cool to see it visualized like this.
• Human-Readable JavaScript: A Tale of Two Experts shows us that shorter isn't always better. I really like that idea, because it can be so easy to forget.
• Incremental Static Regeneration: Its Benefits and Its Flaws from Cassidy Williams is a great read. It's been the talk of the town in Jamstack land. As Jamstack sites have grown in complexity and capability, we really need to consider what "Jamstack" really means. That's not the point of this article, but this is one of the crucial topics that is necessary to understand before having the "Jamstack" conversation.
• Dogfooding your product is a bit of shameless plugging on behalf of my employer. I don't often share the articles my team writes because they tend not to be relevant to my audience and the side projects I work on. This one is different. This is a great look at the benefits of using your own product.
• SvelteKit is in public beta is an announcement I wasn't expecting. After exploring Svelte last month, I was ready to jump in and start playing with Sapper. Now it looks like SvelteKit is going to replace Sapper before Sapper v1 is released. In either case, I'm looking forward to digging into SvelteKit.

And here are some other quick hitters:

• The best approach to lazy load images for maximum performance
• CSS Auditing Tools
• 40 "Free Forever" Tools for Developers
• A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components
• In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu
• Quick Tip: Style Pseudo-elements with Javascript Using Custom Properties

My Finds

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

• Prisma is a Node-based ORM (a specific and shared syntax for accessing databases). Sequelize has long been the Node.js ORM standard, but Prisma looks promising. They have some explanation to how it is an improvement over Sequelize.
• ClickUp seems like a nice-looking Notion alternative that is focused more on team usage. That means it doesn't serve my particular use case, so I'm unlikely to tinker with it. But it looks snazzy.
• Mirage is another API mocking library. There are a lot of these around. Though this seems pretty slick.
• flatfile looks like it could be a useful to. But I gotta be honest, I have no idea what problem it is solving. It's not entirely clear to me what they're going after.
• HarperDB is another player in the rapidly-expanding DBaaS market.
• Coolify is a self-hosted Netlify/Heroku solution. But it seems odd to me. Isn't the point of Netlify and Heroku that they do the hosting for you? Well, it's probably useful to someone.

I also learned about a few things that have probably been around for awhile:

• Ansible and Terraform help manage deployment environment configurations.
• npm-check-updates will check for any eligible updates in the current package.

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See you next time!