Cool Links Vol. 4: October, 2024

🎃 Happy Halloween! 🎃 As the spirits prepare to walk among the living, I bring you some Cool Links to read while enjoying your candy. Or, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere like me, to read while taking your allergy pills because Spring is in full throttle.

This month's links are pretty much all web-related, but some are not specific to devs. It's been a busy month, so I haven't really had the time to read about more varied topics 😅. Maybe next month!

Tech

You should be using an RSS reader, by Cory Doctorow

There's really nothing else I can add to this argument that Cory hasn't already said. But really, RSS is the best way to follow a publication or a person there can be. It's the best way for you to actually have control of what you read and decide when to do so.

Nothing Left to Solve, by Louie Mantia

I don't know if you've heard, but The Browser Company, the company behind the Arc Browser (which I've been using for a couple years as my main browser) has announced that they've pretty much given up on monetizing it and will just keep it working as-is in the future, with no new development.

This article reflects a bit on how it seems that tech companies seem to be running out of problems to solve, which results in great products that can't find their footing (outside of small niches) due to not really changing much about their user's lives.

Dev

The Static Site Paradox

The web is, at its core, just links to HTML files with some CSS and JS on top. That’s how it was years ago and how it technically still is.

Over the years, things became more complex and many layers of abstraction were introduced. A lot of web developers have never had any real contact with the core of the web.

So we ended up on a place where it’s much easier to find and use an overly-complex, bloated solution for websites than just having the bare minimum (that usually works better).

Isn’t that wild? In the author's words:

“the web doesn't belong just to software engineers. The more we make the web complex, the more we push normal users into the enclosures that we like to call social networks.”

I’ve been a web developer for over 10 years now and I can afford the luxury of building my own website - a static, simple, lean one. People with less or no coding knowledge can’t have that. They need to use tooling that ships so much code and complexity if they want to have their own. Or, even worse - they’ll stick to social media platforms instead. 😱

HTML for People, by Blake Watson

Building on the previous paradox: did you know that HTML was originally meant to be understandable and writable by anyone?

Before us web devs came along and scared people off, HTML was actually seen as a very simple way of structuring and linking data.

And it still is! This course aims to teach HTML to people with no technical knowledge, so they’re able to build their own simple web pages (or just mess around with existing ones, which is really fun).

nvm Desktop

nvm (Node Version Manager) is one of the best tools in my web dev toolkit. It allows you to keep multiple versions of NodeJS installed, which is usually a must if you swap between different projects all day. I’d even say it’s worth it even if you only have one version, since installing NodeJS via nvm is way easier than the official way.

This is a way of using nvm with a graphical interface, in case you’re not too fond of CLIs (or simply prefer a simple GUI instead).

State of CSS 2024

These "State of" results are always fun, if only for the graphics alone. This one has pretty good data though, as 2024 was one of CSS's best years, with Container Queries, :has() (which allows for Quantity Queries), native nesting, native page transitions, and more.

Svelte 5 is alive

I've been growing increasingly unhappy with JavaScript frameworks as of late, but I still have a soft spot for Svelte. Svelte is what my blog is built with, and it's always been a pleasure to use. Version 5 significantly changes some of its core features, apparently for the better. I'm excited to upgrade eventually (and really glad that they kept backwards compatibility).

Wrapping up

This post is going to be on the first edition of my new newsletter! I set it up as a mirror of this blog, at least initially, so people can get notified whenever I write something new.

If you're interested, you can subscribe to it. There's not gonna be any exclusive content in there, so you're not missing anything if you don't. The blog is still going to be my main way of publishing.