Fresh Reads

You may have seen Andrej Karpathy talk about "LLM Wikis." They turn your unorganized thoughts into easy-to-navigate notes, wikis, or visualizations. It's an incredibly powerful tool for researchers, software developers, scattered notetakers... basically everyone. Here's the…

So... I'm building a notes app. And it's called Hubble Note.What is it?Hubble Note helps you remember everything you wrote down. It combines your notes, your chats, and your web browsing into a single tool, backed by a smart little assistant called Hubble. It's as simple as…

I listened to the DHH x Lex Fridman podcast this past week. It’s 6 hours long, and genuinely I wish it were 10+. There are phenomenal lessons in here about the beauty of programming language design, the power of open source, the importance of family… just go listen to it. I was…

Python seems to have a million different options to set up an environment. So I did what any good developer does: I asked Claude. Here's the checklist I used.SetupPrerequisite: you'll want to have python3 installed on your machine.Create a virtual environment in your current…

This article is sponsored by Fauna. If you are interested in producing similar content, apply to Write with Fauna.Serverless and GraphQL have become pretty prolific buzzwords in the backend space. They each serve (heh) fairly different needs; the former takes the infrastructure…

"SPA" has been a hot topic ever since "modern" JS frameworks like React hit the scene. They promise all sorts of benefits like dynamic user interactions, lightning-fast load times, solving world hunger, etc. (okay that last one is a stretch...)But have you ever stopped to wonder…

Messing with JavaScript objects is pretty easy these days. Destructuring syntax is convenient and the spread ... operator helps with merging objects together. But what about grabbing just... a portion of an object?This question deserves some visuals. Let's jump into the problem…

Using JS to show and hide something is a web dev rite of passage. Heck, it's the first demo that comes to mind when you think about "state management" (just behind building a counter 😆).But when you do the classic "hide whenever X variable is false," there's some accessibility…

If you're like me, you've probably been stretching CSS variables / custom properties to their limits while building your own design systems. But this "silver bullet" can lead to a nasty roadblock: you can't use them in media query declarations.To clarify, this is the behavior…

If you've been building websites for a while, "optimize your images" probably sounds like "eat your veggies." It's good for your website's health, it'll make your SEO big and strong... but compressing every image by hand doesn't sound appetizing to me 🤢So we're going to talk…

You know the inspirational phrase "skate to where the puck is going?" Well, in web development... it feels like the puck is teleporting across the rink at Mach 30 sometimes.That's how I felt diving into how ES Modules work. Turns out, there's been some huge shifts right under my…

I started my first full-time job as a programmer this year, which means I've been picking up a lot of new tricks in a pretty quick timeframe. Naturally, I started automating the workflows I use day-in and day-out 😁Stop me if you've seen this workflow before:I picked up a ticket…

I've resolved to make 2021 my biggest year of learning yet. My blogging game has been pretty sporadic up until now... but I've finally decided to go all-in on the learning in public mantra with 1 post a week!I used to believe blog posts had to be shining nuggets of wisdom only I…

If you've run the guantlet of array methods in JavaScript, you've probably hit this roadblock a few times:Wait, how do I use the reduce function again?I actually led a JS bootcamp with this topic for my college's Hack4Impact chapter (material 100% free-to-use here!). Questions…

Hover states are probably the most fun a developer can have when a designer isn't looking. You've seen the basics at this point; fade-ins, growing and shrinking, color shifts, animated rainbow gradients, etc etc etc.But there was one animation that inspired me recently (props to…

I hit a snag recently trying to test a localStorage helper written in React. Figuring out how to test all my state and render changes was certainly the easy part (thanks as always React Testing Library 🐐).But soon, I found myself wondering... is there an easy way to "mock" a…

Okay, I'll be honest: I have a serious problem with notetaking apps. I've whipped through every service imaginable for a few months each... but I've never truly felt "at home."I think this is my problem above all: I need to write something down, but I don't know what magical…

At long last... the great dumpster fire that was 2020 is no more. There's certainly a lot I'd like to leave behind us. But like a phoenix rising from the ashes, I want to highlight some amazing tools and practices that actually made my life better as a web developer 🚀I wrote a…

We built the new Hack4Impact.org in a month-long sprint once we had designs in hand. To move this fast, we needed to make sure that we used tools that played to our strengths, while setting us up for success when designers and product managers want to update our copy. As the…

I saw a short think piece by @urielbitton recently on why people should "stop using CSS frameworks." It was meant to start developer discussion more than anything, since there are definitely merits to rolling your own design system from scratch. Still, with a title like that, it…

I've been building a lot more static sites recently, and every one of them needs the same thing:A nice and responsive navigation bar with logo on the left, links on the right 💪For mobile screens, collapse those links on the right into a hamburger menu with a dropdown 🍔Hit all…

Ah yes, state machines. That thing David K Piano keeps tweeting about, or that CS concept that pops up in college once a semester (and seemingly never returns...). As the frontend world gets more and more disatisfied with Redux, state machines are one of many concepts devs are…

⚠️ Warning: Potentially controversial opinions ahead! Turn back now if Gatsby is your lord and savior, and you serve to protect the React dogma.So I just finished building my shiny new personal site ✨ I thought about using fancy, component-driven frameworks like Gatsby to stay…

This blog post introduces several new terms you may be unfamiliar with: griddazzle, gridify, getting "griddy" with it, etc. I recommend using context clues for these definitions.I'll be honest, I was a flexbox diehard myself a while after CSS Grid took hold of page layouts. Even…