Monthly digest – July 2019

Hello everybody! 👋

I hope you all had a good July and enjoyed some vacation with your loved ones. Here's my favorite content in July. Enjoy!

Written communication is hard. Especially people that don't have English as their first language (like myself) struggle with writing "good" emails every day. Sometimes I rewrite an email several times for it to be concise and actionable but also well received.

That's not enough, though; I also tend to be over-careful and over-friendly, which often weakens the points I want to convey. I found Dani Dovonan's printable guide "Email like a boss" very helpful when dealing with emails.

Writing CSS is hard. One of the typical surprises in CSS wonderland is "margin collapsing". Luckily, Rachel Andrew wrote a masterpiece on that topic. "Everything you need to know about CSS margins" is the last article you need to read about this odd margin behavior – I promise.

Telling people about all the great things you did can make you uncomfortable easily. It is essential to have a clear picture of your achievements to show these to others (and maybe most importantly to yourself).

One way to tackle this problem is to write a work journal, which is what I do every day. But I'm also really digging the idea of having "a brag document" like Julia Evans. You might want to give it a try, too?

Emely Anhalt posted a quick twitter thread about how to be a good friend without asking "How can I help you?". I love the ideas in this thread!

Node.js has a built-in debug log method

The debug npm package has 43 million weekly downloads according to npm. It enables Node.js developers to control log messages depending on a DEBUG environment variable. Did you know that similar functionality is available in Node.js even without installing a dependency?

overflow-hidden hides only elements going over the padding-box

I was playing with CSS gradients and discovered a surprising thing about overflow: hidden. I learned that overflow: hidden doesn't hide everything outside of the border-box but rather the padding-box, which was not what I expected.

String.prototype.replace supports replacement patterns

String.prototype.replace is one of these functions that seem to be very straight forward. You define a string you want to replace and a string that should be the replacement, and you're good to go. It turns out there can very surprising side-effects if your replacer string contains sequences like $&.

React Hooks changed the way we write React components. If you wonder how they work on a conceptual level, Shawn Wang wrote a Hooks implementation for his custom React live on stage at JSConf.asia.

Shawn presented a top live-coding presentation in a charming and very professional way. Highly recommended if you want to understand React hooks.

To be on a cutting edge team is a privilege. It means having resources and money and a lack of accountability that most web developers simply don't have.

Charlie Owen discussed tech-fatigue and cutting edge development in her post "The real dark web". It made me think about my position and the privilege of playing with new technology every day.

The song of this month is a rather old song... I was listening to the radio, and Patrick Wolf's "Time of my life" made me stop doing everything else than listing. I had to get up and sing out loud (thinking about all the good memories I connect with this song).

And that's it friends! Have a great August. 👋