by sebastian de deyne
I occasionally send out a dispatch with personal stories, things I'm working on, and interesting links I come across.
I came across this post by Jason Fried (from Basecamp) about giving ideas a few minutes before shooting them down.
I’ve caught myself blurting out unnecessary negative opinions when presented with an idea. More often than not, I have more empathy towards the idea a few minutes later, and feel bad about my initial reaction.
Next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it.
Read Give it five minutes on signalvnoise.com.
In Selecting elements (part 1) we learned how to select elements from the DOM, and how to find elements inside other elements, both with our own $ and $$ helpers.
In part 2, we’re going to review two DOM element instance methods: closest and matches.
$ and $$, which are wrappers around document.querySelector and document.querySelectorAll.JavaScript frameworks are great, but overused. Adding small bits of interactivity to an interface shouldn’t mean installing kilobytes of dependencies or introducing complex build tools.
It’s time for a diet. I’m challenging you to build something without a framework, or follow along and learn something along the way.
Yee-haw, we released Mailcoach! Mailcoach is a self-hosted newsletter solution. My contributions were on the JavaScript side of things: I helped decide which tech stack to use, and implemented it.
After building apps with almost exclusively Vue and React the past few years, we decided to go with vanilla JavaScript for Mailcoach. There’s no frontend framework involved, but we’re pulling in some npm packages where needed.
I’m not going to dive into implementation details. I’m going to talk about why we decided on this stack and go in-depth on the structure of the application code, bundle sizes, and choosing external dependencies.
Dan Abramov shared a short post on some key principles the React team sticks to. Some solid general advice here, it’s not explicitly related to React.
Absorb the Complexity
Making React internals simple is not a goal. We are willing to make React internals complex if that complexity lets product developers keep their code easier to understand and modify.
Hacks, Then Idioms
We need to allow hacks using escape hatches, and observe which hacks people put in practice. Our job is to eventually provide an idiomatic solution for hacks that exist in the name of better user experience. Sometimes, a solution might take years. We prefer a flexible hack to entrenching a poor idiom.
These two stood out because they’re the opposite of how I generally need to think when building applications (although they make perfect sense in the context of something like a lower level framework). Either way, lots of food for thought in here.
Read all principles on overreacted.io.
Two weeks ago I shared my thoughts and doubts about the JAMstack. Today I came across an article by Mike Riethmuller, who seems to have a lot more JAMstack experience under his belt than me. Most of the article resonated with me:
Despite my enthusiasm, I’m often disheartened by the steep complexity curve I typically encounter about halfway through a JAMstack project. Normally the first few weeks are incredibly liberating. It’s easy to get started, there is good visible progress, everything feels lean and fast. Over time, as more features are added, the build steps become more complex, multiple APIs are added, and suddenly everything feels slow. In other words, the development experience begins to suffer.
[…]
The end result is we’ve outsourced the database, fragmented the content management experience and stitched together a bundle of compromises. That’s a stark contrast from the initial ease of setting up and deploying a JAMstack site.
Mike continues with a thoughtful analysis of the current state of the JAMstack, and intrudoces the idea of a “JAMstack Plus”, essentially bringing the best parts of JAMstack and monoliths together.
I don’t think JAMstack should defined by pushing all the complexity into the front-end build process or by compromising on developer and user experience. Instead, I think JAMstack should focus on providing lean, configurable static front-ends.
That said, lean and configurable static front-ends are kind of a niche requirement in my world. While the JAMstack is a great tool in this space, I do believe it’s in a hype phase.
Read the “The Rising Complexity of JAMstack Sites and How to Manage Them” on CSS-Tricks.
Have you ever made your own strawberry jelly? The recipe is straightforward: toss together 1 cup of strawberries (fresh or frozen), 1 cup of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of pectin (to thicken). Bring to a boil and let it cool.
Congratulations, you’ve made your own jelly! It also tastes 10x better than store-bought jars. You can tweak ratios and swap ingredients to your own delight, and it takes about 5 minutes to make.
Before we started making our own jelly at home, the thought never really occurred to me. I simply had the habit of buying jelly at the grocery store. Not knowing how to make jelly made me assume it was either diffucult or required a time consuming process. As it turns out, neither are true.
While I’d love to have a cooking blog at some point of my life, this one’s still about programming. Where am I heading here?
External libraries are like strawberry jelly.
Before you npm install strawberry-jelly, consider making your own. Having an entire ecosystem of packages at your fingertips is amazing, but dependencies come at a cost. The cost of not fully understanding or owning the code. The cost of a package being a general solution: it might be incomplete or too complete, adding unnecessary weight.
Making jelly is a worthy tradeoff because it’s fast and easy to make, and substantially better than the alternative.
I’m not asking anyone to stop installing dependencies altogether, but to think twice before adding an external helpers or toolboxes. Don’t install dependencies when they’re an easy solution, install them when they’re a better solution.
It’s that time of the year, for the Advent of Code,
and this time around, I’m solving puzzles with Node.
My prior attempts included Elixir and TypeScript,
but after a few days of tinkering, most challenges got skipped.
I’m going back to basics, this time to sharpen my blades,
by solving all given puzzles without libraries to aid.
Feel free to join in, we’ve only just begun!
Follow along on GitHub, or enroll to be part of the fun.
I very much enjoy building sites with static site generators like Hugo or Next.js. Static site generators provide a great developer experience, perform great out of the box, and simplifying DevOps makes me a happy camper.
In my experience, the JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is great until is isn’t. When the day comes that I need to add something dynamic–and that day always comes–I start scratching my head.
Back in the summer we were working on a new version of our package documentation site at Spatie.
Back then, all docs for all packages were stored as markdown files in a single docs.spatie.be repository. This made the website easy to maintain, but separating the docs from their code added unnecessary friction for contributors to also contribute to our docs when sending a PR.
We wanted to change things up and move the markdown files to their respective package repositories. This meant we had to come up with a way to aggregate files from multiple git repositories and serve them from a single website.
We ended up with an unsexy, procedural, 38 line node script to fetch all markdown files and copy them to a local folder. Then a simple static site generator does its thing and turn those markdown files into the website they were meant to become.
We could have built a custom web app, and the code would’ve been cleaner and have a pure architecture. Instead, we ended up with a script that fits on a 13" screen and a zero-config static site generator.
Don’t be afraid to choose a crude, simple, shop-built jig over a complex solution just for the sake of purity.