Web in September 2021

October is here 🎃

This means Hacktoberfest is here too. Registration is now open for Hacktoberfest.

https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/

Hacktoberfest is a month long celebration of open source where participants are rewarded for making a contribution to open source. Even if you are not interested in the swags, Hacktoberfest is a time when lots of libraries starts marking their issues as new-contributors or first-timers or help-wanted. So if you haven't dwelled into open source and want to try, now would be the time.

Releases

• Postgres 14 - The new release of world's most advanced open source database comes with new JSON retrieval syntax, performance improvements and security enhancements.

• Bracket Pair Colorization - This has been an extension for very long, but plagued by performance issues (on very large files albeit). The feature is now build into VSCode and you can enable it with "editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled": true

• Cloudflare R2 - It's CloudFlare's birthday month (Happy Birthday Cloudflare 🥳) and they have come out with a storage service named R2, S3 but without the exorbitant egress bandwidth fees.

• MUI 5 - MUI has moved from using JSS for the longest time to the popular CSS-in-JS option Emotion. It's also interesting that they provide a swappable wrapper for styled primitive with styled-components if you already happened to be using the library. You can also create custom wrapper for other similar libraries.

In the Spotlight 🔦

https://twitter.com/argyleink/status/1438493119457103875

Tutorials

• Decision Making at Netflix - Netflix writes on their A/B testing architecture in this series.

• Focus Interactions - Hakim El Hattab makes the best animation UX interactions in the industry. His new codepen with focus interactions is just perfection.

• Designing Beautiful Shadows - It's Josh and he does as mentioned in the title.

• Web Components are easier than you think - This CSS Tricks series teaches you to use web components without any framework wrappers around it. Puts you in the slot.

• Interactive Learning Tools For Front-End Developers - Game your way to web development.

In Other News

• Netflix acquires Night School Studio - Netflix has made it clear that they will be moving to the games arena and their have made their first acquisition. Since this studio is famous for their game Oxenfree, I wonder if it's a game Bandersnatch in making.

• How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum - If Scrum is so successful, why don't we hear the Big Tech companies speak of it more often? The Pragmatic Engineer has an answer.

• Why Silicon Valley's Optimization Mindset Sets Us Up for Failure - What happens when you optimise your life for absolute productivity? Are you even supposed to?

• Facebook and Ray-Ban’s first pair of smart glasses - Facebook build stories on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp (copied from Snapchat, but hey! who is counting) and they are now literally putting them right on your face.

Looking Ahead

• JAMStack Conf is on October 6-7