Good Reads: April 18, 2020

  • PublishedApril 18, 2020
  • Length2 Minutes
  • CategoryRoundups

A collection of my favorite articles, videos, and other resources from the past week.

Photo by Irina Iriser on Unsplash

About the Author

Dan is a front end engineer working on design systems. Previous roles include: Huge, Cvent, Gifn, and PRPL. For more information, see here.

Table of Contents

Questions & Comments

If you have feedback, view this post on GitHub and create an issue or open a pull request with edits. Thanks for reading!

Since my last update, the brief glimpse of sunshine we were enjoying in the capital has quickly passed and cold rainy weather has returned to the DMV. With most people stuck indoors for a couple of months now, there is a ton of great content being produced and more time than usual to consume it. That said, this one is a bumper edition—Best to make a pot of coffee ☕️

Top Highlight

Josh Comeau's article, A Static Future, does a great job explaining the power of modern static site generators and clarifies some of the strengths and weaknesses of popular libraries like Gatsby and Next.js. It makes for a great introduction if you're new to the topic

A static future

Design Systems

  • “What Has Changed and Where’s it Going?” by Dave Rupert—An Event Apart video: A close runner up for my favorite piece of content this week, Dave's a great speaker and his presentation at An Event Apart here in DC is no exception. He discusses how advancements in browser support have made redundant some previously popular polyfills and support libraries in an effort to slim down page weights whose growth outpaces data limits and connection speeds.
  • Layout-isolated Components: Facebook's former 'flexbox guy', Emil Sjölander, argues against the use of several properties whose effects extend outside the bounds of a reusable component resulting in unpredictable and inconsistent behavior in different situations.

CSS

JavaScript

  • Introduction to Next.js 9: This Egghead course was a great way to jump back in after using Gatsby on a handful of recent projects. Recently updated to empower SSG workflows, my favorite part about Next has always been the way the maintainers put careful consideration into API design to simplify complex functionality into easy-to-use solutions like filename-based dynamic routes 🤯 (Egghead subscription required)
  • Learn ES Modules in Node with Myles Borins: Insightful walkthrough of Node's recently added ES Module support including self-referential imports and export maps.

Speaking of Gatsby: This site is one of those I recently built with Gatsby, it uses a custom theme (gatsby-theme-xdmorgan) to aggregate and configure popular Gatsby plugins (like a toolkit dependency). This isolates dependency management, allows drop-in reuse on side-projects, and provides quickstart support for TypeScript, Sass, MDX, and other opinionated nice-to-haves. Check it out on npm and GitHub.

Tools

Framer Web beta

This week an invite for the Framer Web beta arrived in my inbox 📬 Being real-time and web-based, it will draw obvious comparisons with Figma. As a code-backed prototyping tool, I'm interested to see how it can be integrated into a design systems component library workflow, more on that soon!

Architecture

  • Architecture Spotlight: Event Sourcing: Simple explanation of the event sourcing pattern and how the storage of mutation events (instead of their outcomes) can result in an easily audited historical timeline of changes to saved data.

Performance

Conferences

Jamstack virtual

Sources

Allan Saint-Maximin

Thanks for reading! Hopefully the next time I write one of these it will be #cans on tyneside. 🤞