Stay ahead in web development: latest news, tools, and insights #54

weeklyfoo #54 is here: your weekly digest of all webdev news you need to know! This time you'll find 37 valuable links in 6 categories! Enjoy!

🚀 Read it!

• Do not use secrets in environment variables and here's how to do it better: We developers are well too fond of using environment variables to set application configuration and often use it to store secrets and other sensitive information. / secrets, security / 28 min read

📰 Good to know

• Good Retry, Bad Retry: An Incident Story: You can learn a lot about retries in this article. / retries, engineering / 25 min read
• What is the history of the use of foo and bar in source code examples?: Also used in weeklyfoo! / foo, bar / 32 min read
• 7 questions I get asked frequently as an EM: With some answers / leadership / 5 min read
• Is Age Really a Factor in Tech?: Silicon Valley has a reputation for youth worship. The 'move fast and break things' mentality often translates to a preference for younger, supposedly more adaptable workers. / career / 6 min read
• The Disappearance of an Internet Domain: How geopolitics can alter digital infrastructure / domains, tlds / 14 min read
• Automattic is doing open source dirty: The whole story around Automattic and WP Engine is like a drama series. / opensource / 4 min read
• Announcing Deno 2: Next major version of Deno / deno / 16 min read
• Software Engineer Pay: Heatmap for the US / career, pay / 1 min read
• The Internet Archive is under attack, with a breach revealing info for 31 million accounts: A pop-up message said the online archive has suffered ‘a catastrophic security breach,’ as its operators say the site has been DDoS’d for days. / breach, security / 6 min read
• 14 Code Snippet Image Generators to Turn Your Code into Stunning Visuals: I was using Carbon for a very long time. But in the meanwhile there are lots of other tools doing the same with more features! / code, images / 8 min read
• JS13kGames Winners announced!: Behold, the winners of the 13th edition of the js13kGames competition are here! From 187 entries submitted this year, each packed into a 13 kilobyte zip, you’ve chosen the absolute best. / games / 1 min read
• 18 Interview Questions answered by Angular Experts: Not long ago, Daniel shared 18 interview questions on LinkedIn, Twitter and Discord. Questions crafted in a way to identify real Senior Angular developers. Using this opportunity we have asked Angular Experts to answer some of these. / angular, interviews / 34 min read
• Dev Starter Pack: The essential startup starter kit. Get discounts for several SaaS products. / saas / 2 min read
• Nightmares on npm: How Two Malicious Packages Facilitate Data Theft and Destruction: Our threat research team breaks down two malicious npm packages designed to exploit developer trust, steal your data, and destroy data on your machine. / security, npm / 8 min read

🧰 Tools

• one: One is a new React framework for web and native, built on Vite. / frameworks
• Open Source CSS Variables: CSS custom properties to help accelerate adaptive and consistent design. / css
• sq: sq is a command line tool that provides jq-style access to structured data sources: SQL databases, or document formats like CSV or Excel. It is the lovechild of sql+jq. / cli
• Jazz - Instant Sync: A new way to build apps with distributed state. / sync
• Easings: Test common easing curves on a range of interfaces. Or generate your own custom bezier curve. / animations
• git absorb: git commit --fixup, but automatic / git
• mymind: All your notes bookmarks inspiration articles and images in one single, private place. / organizing
• player.style: Video and audio player themes built with Media Chrome, for every web player and every web app framework. / video
• Brisa: Build web applications with speed and simplicity / frameworks
• dbx: dbx is a lightweight sql editor and database client built for forward-looking developers / databases
• PlaceholderJS: A free placeholder service designed for developers. Integrates seamlessly with React & NextJS. / placeholders
• Statichunt: Statichunt is the largest directory of 3900+ themes, starters, UI kits, and tools for Static Site Generators. Find the perfect starting point for your next project and save hours. / themes, design
• Text Behind Image: Create text-behind-image designs easily / images
• setup-ci: CLI to spin your CI/CD for react-native! / cli, ci

🎨 Design

• 21 UX strategies to maximize user engagement without exploitation: Discover the most effective behavioral design frameworks, learn how to drive daily active user growth and retention, and gain practical insights for developing sustainable, ethical strategies that keep your products engaging without becoming exploitative. / ux / 14 min read
• Icon Usability: When and How to Evaluate Digital Icons: Effective icons depend on recognizability and interpretation. Evaluate them with methods appropriate for your specific research questions / icons / 14 min read
• How to Pair Fonts: A Practical Guide: Some really good practical tipps. / fonts / 23 min read

📚 Tutorials

• Plain Vanilla: An explainer for doing web development using only vanilla techniques. No tools, no frameworks - just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. / javascript / 2 min read
• Building a Single-Page App with htmx: People talk about htmx as though it’s saving the web from single-page apps. React has mired developers in complexity (so the story goes) and htmx is offering a desperately-needed lifeline. / htmx / 15 min read

📺 Videos

• Web Components: Little Bits: Web Components are a way to enrich standard HTML with new behaviours by creating custom elements! Join me as I share my experience of developing complex design systems as well as custom open-source tools, all with the power of Web Components / web-components
• I BUILT a GAME in TypeScript TYPES!: In this video we will do something completely useless but extremely funny. We will build a fully functional tic-tac-toe gaming only using TypeScript types. / typescript
• The Best TypeScript Features You're Not Using: TypeScript is great - and it's getting greater! The language and its tooling is constantly evolving to catch more bugs, let us write more robust types, and generate better dev tooling for everyone. / typescript

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