Articles

Move fast, break things

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You probably heard of this before.

It seems to be quite popular in the web development, indie-hacking, and startup worlds.

But it’s a horrible mindset to adopt.

Why I love the web

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I love the web for the possibility and connection it gives.

Each one of us—reading this or not—is connected to the magical web infrastructure through our phones, tablets and desktops.

Everything is just one click away.

Everyone is just one screen away.

So we get to make a bigger difference than we think we can.

Yet, most of us shy away from this connection, preferring to hide behind our fears and insecurity. And all we end up discussing are technology stacks… (at least that’s what I see most developers doing).

I think we can do way more.

The web is a big place

We can have conversations about the topics that are important to us.

This can include development, design, building stuff, dreams, goals, music, and everything else.

We don't have to limit our conversation topics to just "JavaScript", or "Frontend Development", or any man-made category that your blog seems to be revolving about.

When you give yourself the chance to explore topics, you honour your connections to each of these topics. You build a better relationship with them — and the people who may care about that particular topic.

You only have to do two things:

  1. Start the conversation
  2. Keep talking about it

But what if nobody cares?

Somebody does—and that somebody is you.

When you allow yourself to care, magic happens. You allow yourself to spread the magic we call "you".

Even if nobody cares about what you care about right now, eventually somebody will, if you care enough to keep talking about it.

Because someone out there on this vast planet is probably going to care about the same thing as you — and the only distance between you two (and possibly many more) is that you don't know of each other (yet).

When you share, you offer up a chance for like-minded people to find you. And when you're connected, you're both in a better place than before.

So start talking about the things you care about.

It's Not Spam

What you care about is not spam.

At the very least, it's not spam for the people who can connect with you on that angle. It's not spam because they care about the same subject as you do.

But for everyone else, it is spam.

The people who can connect with you on the things you care about will only begin to show up if you continue having conversations about these things.

What's more important?

Finding a connection to your passion and the people who revolve around them? Or pandering to others' whims and criticisms?

Don't be afraid of sharing what you care about.

It's already spam. Yet it is not.

We stand for far more than we allow ourselves to show

The internet says you should either be this or that, not both. Put yourself into a box so others can better understand you, they say.

That's bullshit.

People will always seek out what they wish to understand or know more of. Begin with a topic you care about and people will naturally begin to gather around it.

  • Stop limiting yourself.
  • Stop being limited by others.

Be more vocal.

Share what you care about. Show your actions on these things too. Let your magic shine through.

We'll all be in a better place tomorrow if we begin doing this today.

Analytics and Ads

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True to my word, I spent the last two weeks diving into analytics and advertisements — mostly the tracking part of it.

On Spam

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Everyone has different ideas on what spam is — what is spam to me might not be spam to you.

The dictionary definition for spam is messages that are irrelevant, unsolicited, and often promote a product.

Some people go to the extreme and say that spam is just self-serving content. (This is definitely not true because all content is self-serving).

After sitting down and pondering it through for a bit, I think I’ve come to realize what spam actually is.

Splendid Layouts in here!

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Happy Chinese New Year (if you’re celebrating it! 🍊).

I’ve been hard at work over the past week (even today!) to bring Splendid Layouts to you, as promised in my last email.

Splendid Layouts

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If everything has gone according to plan, I will be launching the complete version of CSS Layout Patterns today.

Unfortunately, things didn't go according to plan.

Though I must say it didn't go according to the plan in a good way.

My CSS of Late

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As I transition from a "Web Developer" into someone who just wants to build applications, I'm realizing that I don't like to dig as deep into the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript anymore.

Instead, I just want to combine them in ways that will make my next job — building stuff — easier.

3 Techniques to learn JavaScript effectively

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If you know how to study JavaScript effectively, you will be able to master it within months. If you don’t, you’ll take way longer than necessary.

Today, I’m going to reveal three techniques that I have used to help myself and many others master JavaScript quickly.

Enough of the homogenous and soulless content all around the internet

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I think we have reached an interesting predicament in the world today.

More and more people have begun to write for the sake of business, opportunities, and fame. Blogs and content have largely become soulless and money-oriented machines.

It has reached a point where the world has become a giant group-think. Everywhere you go on Google, you see the same content, repeated across the top 10 or even the top 20 pages — everyone echoes off others, rarely contributing original thought into the ecosystem.

The easiest way to get and set CSS Variables in JavaScript

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CSS Variables have become super popular for many reasons. One of them these reasons is — you can now manipulate CSS easily with JavaScript.

In this article, we'll go through how to get and set CSS variables using the methods Vanilla JavaScript provides us with, then we'll go through how to make the process easier with simple helper functions.

December 2023

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2023 year was a horrible year for me.

The easiest way to get __dirname in Node with ES Modules

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Getting the directory name (or short for dirname) is extremely simple in Node prior to ES Modules (ESM).

All we had to do was use the __dirname global variable.

console.log(__dirname) // This will show the directory

Unfortunately, __dirname is not supported in ES Modules. So if we want __dirname, we need to use a rather round-about way to retrieve it.

The easiest way to use SVGs in an Astro or Svelte app

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SVG is one of the most important elements in a website or web application because it provides us with scalable graphics.

They are usually used for two things:

  1. Icons from icon sets
  2. Custom graphics

Today I'm going to show you how the SVG utility from Splendid UI works, and why it's the easiest way to use SVG to load both icons and custom graphics.

Iterating over objects in JavaScript

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Once in a while, you may need to loop over objects in JavaScript. Before ES6, the best way to do this is with the for...in loop.

Unfortunately, the for...in loop iterates over properties in the Prototype chain as well, so when you use this loop, you need to check if the property belongs to the object with hasOwnProperty.

Easy way to parse JSON with JavaScript

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When you use JSON.parse to parse JSON, you almost always need to make sure you pass in a JSON value, so you will end up having to use a try/catch block most of the time.