Week in Review - Week 21/20

Hello 👋🏻.

Welcome to my "Week in Review" series. Each week I'm going to share what I discovered, learned, and tested with you. This series will be my own digital garden one day. Let's sow some seeds and jump right into the review.

This week was all about CSS and moving my newsletter from Convertkit to Mailerlite. At work I further optimized our React component and JavaScript utility library and got in touch with ES6 generators. Haven't really used them before, do you?

Let's see what else I have on my list for you.

⛓Things I learned, found and tried in week 21/20 🔧

• Catalin Pit told me that Convertkit's modern theme does not work with dark mode... This was the final reason to move. The overall experience is not what I expected - they are doing great; it just doesn't work for me. Mailerlite is my new newsletter tool. Let's see what I say about them in a few weeks.
• Have you used generators and iterators already? Tbh, I don't. One of my co-workers showed me how powerful they are. You can read more about them on MDN, javascript.info and Digital Ocean. You can use generators to recursively traverse a nested data structure for instance - here's an example.
• I changed my default font. Fira Code was replaced by JetBrains Mono. Other developers also suggested Dank Mono, Mono Lisa, Operator Mono, Victor Mono, and Cascadia Code.
• Niall Maher hosted his Codú Community meetup on Tuesday. His guest was Jhey, CodePen Pro, and a friend of Niall and me. He was talking about Pug before he let us watch how he created balloons 🎈🎈🎈 with animations from scratch. That was insightful, my friends! Here are some of the tools and insights Jhey shared with us:
  • understand vmin and vmax
  • make complex shapes with clip-path
  • here's a clip-path playground Jhey created (and another fun one).
• Learn X in Y minutes (thx to Niall Maher)
• This one is really fun (thanks Eddy): whatthef**kismystack! Mine is S3-TravisCI-Ember.js-Firebase-AngularJS-Node.js 😂
• After being part of Jhey's workshop I wanted to dig more into the CSS animation topic again. Learning how to create pure CSS loaders with animations refreshed my knowledge quickly.
• It's really nothing special but yesterday I quickly created a simple animated Pokeball on Codepen :D. During my little practice I discovered https://cssgradient.io/ and https://gradientgenerator.com/ again. They are helpful.
• My first contribution to the DefinitelyTyped repo is waiting for approval - YEAH!
• Tailwind Starter Kit and tailblocks were two inspiring resources I used this week. 🚀

You see, Jhey entertained me almost my entire week. Especially when I add his book recommendation "Refactoring UI" (book, blog post) to the list. I bought the book two days ago. It is fantastic. Thanks again for the recommendation my friend. I recommend reading it - especially when you want to create top-notch interfaces.

One more thing - last week I forgot to share my learnings from attending the micro.sphere.it #1 Frontend Engineering event. Especially Zack Jackson's talk about Webpack 5 Module Federation got me hooked. Zack and I talked on Twitter already but seeing Webpack 5's Module Federation in action was very interesting. This is going to be very helpful IMHO. Watch the talk and you'll know what I mean.

This is it for week 21/20.

See you next week - same place, same platform. 👋🏻

Thanks,
Stefan

Do you have fancy tools you want to share with me? I'm always ready to try new things! Just comment below, mention me on Twitter, or send me a DM. That would be awesome. 🥳

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