What a busy month! Crazy at work, but also a lot of prep went into the last NN1 Dev Club meetup of the year. I’m very proud of how this little meetup idea grew to become a solid community of software engineers from the Northamptonshire area. Luckily, at the beginning of December, we are travelling to Sri Lanka and we are staying there until the end of the year. I’m very much looking forward to it.
Content Preview
What a busy month! Crazy at work, but also a lot of prep went into the last
NN1 Dev Club meetup of the year
. I’m very proud of how this little meetup idea grew to become a solid community of software engineers from the Northamptonshire area. Luckily, at the beginning of December, we are travelling to Sri Lanka and we are staying there until the end of the year. I’m very much looking forward to it.
The World Wide Web kept on sending interesting articles my way, so like I do every month, I wanted to share with you my favourite bits. Hopefully, you will like this month’s selection. Music recommendation from my collection is also here!
Album of the month
If I had to tell you about a single song that I listened to in the last month the most, no doubt it would be “Lucky Star” by Madonna. My daughter is just obsessed with this tune at the moment and we listen to it dozens of times a day. But in the meantime, we have had some really enjoyable dancing sessions with the
selection made by Fania Records
. This album is full of bangers, like “Dakar, Punto Final” by Johnny Pacheco or “Sonido Bestial” by Richie Ray & Bobby Cruz. Top Latin vibes!
Often times we don’t need complicated storage mechanisms, state management libraries, or even a database. Good, old URL is a beautiful way of passing state around and reliably works on the web since 1991. I’m sure you have heard that before, but please use the platform devs.
It is no secret that
I’m a huge fan of lazygit
, and naturally I like to see more like-minded geeks embracing this powerful TUI. Bartek’s article highlights all the good reasons why you should try it, if you’re still pursuing the masochistic practice of using the git CLI. A little side note, that you should probably try Jujutsu, but this is a story for another day.
I have seen a lot of color palette generators in the past, but this one is my new winner. So useful and the design of this tool is just insanely cool. Bunch of little super tasteful animations, the gradients game here is absolutely top tier. For me, this tool is an instant bookmark!
The specification of HTTP is evolving and it is a good time to learn about the new
QUERY
method. It is a combination of
GET
and
POST
that takes the best traits of both. Like
GET
, it has a body and is idempotent.
As with POST, the input to the query operation is passed as the content of the request rather than as part of the request URI. Unlike POST, however, the method is explicitly safe and idempotent, allowing functions like caching and automatic retries to operate.
A good write-up about the Frdiverse and its value from prolific contributor to the open web, Tim Bray. I cannot agree more with Tim’s opinion, and for this number of reasons, I treat Mastodon as my only serious social media presence. Of course, this very page is my home on the web. Some may be asking what my take on Bluesky is, which I use almost as much as I do Mastodon, but Tim also wrote
“Why Not Bluesky”
about it, so I don’t need to. Great articles!
As of now, three dominant server-side JavaScript runtimes (Node.js, Deno, and Bun) can natively run TypeScript code. This is incredibly useful, and it is a huge convenience not to worry about the transpilation process. Deno and Bun supported this from the beginning, but Node.js has just unfledged this feature. Happy days!
This is a super cool little snippet that may save you from
npm i some-chunky-otp-lib
. Nothing beats the simplicity of HTML elements when all you need is an HTML element, not a bunch of
div
s and inaccessible nonsense masks.
Josh Comeau is the master of the interactive CSS explainers. This post about the CSS subgrids is not different and I learnt a ton from it. I found the gotcha section the most interesting, especially the one about indexing the grid lines inside the nested subgrid.
Since the explosion of AI tools, I keep on hearing about the increased productivity and the ability to build software at a speed never imagined before. But from time to time I hear the other part of this story, which resonates with me a lot more, which talks about the quality degradation of software overall. GitHub is a perfect example of something that was insanely good and stable, and in recent years has become so problematic to use. The Zig team, sharing the same frustrations, decided to make a big move and move entirely to Codeberg. This platform is fantastic, built with performance in mind and focused on developers trying to build software without any annoying nonsense. I really hope others will follow and Codeberg helps us stop relying on Microsoft.
Howdy y’all, I hope your October was not as hectic as mine. Mine was ridiculous! It’s been a super hardworking year overall, and I’m looking forward to a trip with my family at the end of the year. We are going to spend December in Sri Lanka, so if you have any tips and recommendations, ping me on Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn or in the comments section below.
Content Preview
Howdy y’all, I hope your October was not as hectic as mine. Mine was ridiculous! It’s been a super hardworking year overall, and I’m looking forward to a trip with my family at the end of the year. We are going to spend December in Sri Lanka, so if you have any tips and recommendations, ping me on
Mastodon
,
Bluesky
,
LinkedIn
or in the comments section below.
I found some time not to neglect my monthly routine, and I prepared for you a few links that I really liked in the past month. As always, a music recommendation is waiting for you below, although I would love to have a different trigger to talk about today’s artist. Enjoy the read.
Album of the month
This month is different and not about a single album, but more about the artist. A little bit of a tribute to D’Angelo, who lost a battle with pancreatic cancer and passed away on the 14th of October. He was only 51 years old. He was the pioneer of the neo-soul movement, owner of an incredible voice, talented songwriter and producer. All his releases are great, but “Voodoo” from 2000 is the hottest soul album ever recorded. Huge loss!
This is a great and not too technical explainer of the ATProto and how it enables an open social. Dan is really great at explaining complex subjects using simple analogies, and this one is no different. I would love to read a post like this one about the Fediverse, which I use a lot more than anything related to ATProto (pretty much Bluesky only). A few days later, Dan also posted
“Where It’s at://”
which is a lot more technica deep dive into the output JSON resolutions from the
at://
links.
Kilian, the creator of Polypane, recreated one of the debugging tools from his browser using pure CSS. Pretty nice way of removing a ton of expensive calculations from the main thread. Another good example that shows that CSS anchor positioning is not for tooltips only.
My least favourite part of writing React components is soon going to be a thing of the past. The final release of React stable means that we no longer need to care about memoisation of static values and functions. This is what the compiler is going to do for us. This is going to significantly simplify the way we write React components.
Modern JavaScript runtimes are packed with features that in the past required some external packages. Here is a good list of built-in commands like that. I published articles about some of them in the past, but I also learned a ton from this article. Great summary.
This is a pretty niche one, for Neovim fans only. Evgeni Chasnovski, the creator of the mini.nvim family, released a great resource to help you out with your Neovim configuration. It is not another opinionated distribution, but more like a starting point to build upon. The closest thing I would compare it to is
kickstart.nvim
, which I like a ton, and this was my starting point for my configuration. Evgeni put tons of love into it, and the comments on the Lua files are insanely helpful. I’m a huge fan of his contributions to the Neovim ecosystem.
This title doesn’t lie, this guide is very pragmatic. Potentially you know about many of these new colour features, but I’m sure you will learn an extra thing or two. I totally missed the fact that so many colour formats do not require commas and units anymore. This is a little thing, but when typed hundreds of times, it is also a time saver. Kevin is on fire with his content creation game!
Nikita Prokopov is a great blogger and here is another rant post that perfectly describes the current state of code editor themes. For some reason, there is a trend to use flashy, vivid and super colourful themes, but when you look at it from the usability point of view, most of them do not work. Nikita explains why and shares some good recommendations to fix it. I use a close to default Neovim theme, with a bunch of colours toned down, and I cannot be happier. Not the prettiest but very usable.
As always, the production by the CultRepo is epic. I was a little doubtful how the documentary about the modules bundler can be any interesting, and I was really surprised. From the initial idea, through the race with other competitors up to the huge success and domination in the market. Really interesting documentary.
Ken Thompson is one of the most influential programmers in the history of computing. He created B programming language that massively inspired creation of C, developed UTF-8 encoding, co-created UNIX and Go programming language. He is an absolutaly leged and without him, our job would look very differen to what it is now. This is a very detailed interview with Ken. Not short, but I enjoyed listening every single minute of the chat with this smart fella.
Short, great comparison of importing JSON and fetching it by Jake Archibald. So good to see one of my favourite web folks blogging more recently, and I’m also glad that he moved back to work on the browser engine. Great addition to the Firefox team!
Holly molly, September was hectic, mostly good and definitely memorable. Family came over for a visit from Poland, we got married, we travelled to northern Italy, and the most recent meetup I organised was a huge success. It was intense and I’m ready for a chill and quiet October. On the web sphere, September was also pretty productive and a lot of good resources popped up. Here, like on every last day of each month, I have prepared for you a list of the ones I found interesting. I hope you will enjoy them! Also, the music recommendatoin is here as well!
Content Preview
Holly molly, September was hectic, mostly good and definitely memorable. Family came over for a visit from Poland, we got married, we travelled to northern Italy, and
the most recent meetup I organised
was a huge success. It was intense and I’m ready for a chill and quiet October. On the web sphere, September was also pretty productive and a lot of good resources popped up. Here, like on every last day of each month, I have prepared for you a list of the ones I found interesting. I hope you will enjoy them! Also, the music recommendatoin is here as well!
Album of the month
We didn’t listen to a lot of music this past month, but the bits we played were all around the Afro-funk vibe. We got our daughter a djembe drum, and this is a good one to play along with. Here is a pretty rare
“Drum Fever” album from 1973 by Candido
with an outstanding tune
“Soulwanco”
.
Very good read about the database indexes, how they work and what kind of data structure makes them so efficient. This post uses Postgres as an example, but the knowledge here is equally applicable for MySQL users and probably other relational databases.
Documentaries by Cult.Repo (formerly Honeypot) are the best, and I have recommended many of them before. This one is a lot longer than their usual stories, but it is incredible to learn about Python as a language, its story, origin, strength of its community, hot dramas about it, and the major language transitions. “Meeting” the language creators and the faces behind the most important parts of the ecosystem gives a good vibe of the language and the culture of the tech. I know nothing about Python, and I’m unable to write a single line of valid Python code, but this was still very well worth watching.
There is a lot going on in the browsers space.
Atlassian bought The Browser Company
,
Perplexity released Comet
, and not a day goes by without coming across some rumours about OpenAI potentially working on one. There is a lot of AI noise around all these, but there is also Helium. Privacy-oriented, Chromium-based, fast, free and open source. Not something I am switching to, but I like the direction!
What an experiment! Some complain about the lack of resources of incredibly powerful boxes that need to handle the load of modern JS-heavy applications. Some put a website on the disposable vape and still have some RAM to play with. I love everything about it!
Looks like Chris Coyier picked up a new tradition to list the most important CSS features and listing them in a one aggregated blog post. Here is the one from 2025, and there is a bunch of incredible stuff here worth knowing about. We have been waiting for animating to the
auto
value forever, and it has finally landed, CSS
@function
s and
@if
statements are here, the
linear()
easing functions and heaps of other goodies. Check it out.
Sara is one of my favourite people on the internet. I have followed her for the last decade or so, and no matter if she is into SVG, CSS or accessibility, the content she creates is second to none. In this interview with Kevin Powell, she shares a ton of insights related to accessibility, the most common issues people make, some insights on the recently added elements to the CSS specification, and of course, some cooking tips.
The new macOS Tahoe is a little disaster and by far the least polished release in Apple’s history. This is a subject for a dedicated article though. The very good thing about it is the arrival of Safari 26. It comes packed with new features which makes me super happy because Safari is my daily driver. CSS anchor positioning, scroll-driven animations,
colour-contrast
and
progress
functions, SVG icons (finally), and tons of other features and bug fixes.
Speaking off the latest macOS release. This one is the most accurate review of the current state of the macOS. I love every single line of this article!
This is a good refresher on the lesser-known media query descriptors. I must admit that some of them are incredibly useful and I have never heard of them before. Good reference.
