Monthly Digest – June 2019

Hello everybody... 👋

I'm two days late and missed my target of sending out this digest on the fifth of the month. But here we are – have fun!

This article written by Ibrahim Diallo is funny but also scary. The title "I charged $18,000 for a Static HTML Page" says it all – how can this be possible? Have a read and maybe find yourself in this story.

When I opened this article written by Julio Biason, I discovered that it is very long. I wasn't sure if I should spend so much time on a single composed piece. I'm glad I did because this article is interesting in two ways:

It includes a lot of opinions, and while I don't agree with everything in there, it led me to rethink my own experiences and thoughts.

Additionally, what I found exciting about this article is the format. It is clearly not written on a single day and is instead an ongoing collection of thoughts.

That's a great format to keep your thoughts together, and I think I'll start doing something similar soon.

After doing public speaking for almost three years now, I slowly started to add live-coding elements to my presentations.

It still freaks me out entirely, but there is one thing I learned – live-coding is a matter of practice. You know you're ready to live-code when you can have a conversation with someone else while coding.

Last month three of my live-coding attempts went online:

• "I didn't know that" – a lightning talk sharing things I learned about JavaScript given without any slides
• "React in a worker, worker, worker..." – my attempt to create a JavaScript bundle that runs in the browser, a service worker and a Cloudflare worker on stage
• "Just write a function" – a beginner talk explaining why serverless functions open a lot of doors for Frontend engineers

VSCode is my editor of choice, but I thought that it may be a good idea to look behind the horizon. My friend Mudit and I jumped on a call, and I learned first things about emacs. If you want to get a basic intro to it, you can have a look at the recording.

Error catch-bindings are finally optional

If you're writing JavaScript, you may have noticed that it is not possible to omit the error parameter in try/catch statements. This is now possible with optional catch bindings which are supported cross-browser today. (If you have to support older browsers babel is your friend.)

Node.js has a built-in debug log method

When writing complex Node.js applications, you may have used the debug npm module. It allows you to get a hold on log messages and only log certain areas of your application. I learned that Node.js has this functionality built-in (more or less).

I attended NDC Oslo and listened to the talk "Shaving my head made me a better programmer" (the linked recording is from another conference) given by Alex Qin. This very powerful talk brings up the many problems we have in the tech industry. Highly recommended!

A crisp and short quote on the journey to be a good person by Steph Smith.

Great is just good, but repeatable.

Summer arrived in Berlin (it's gone again though), and with it, more smooth and melodic electronic tracks enter my playlists. Kev Sheridan's track "Alone in Berlin" is an epic track with beautiful piano tunes.

And that's it friends! Have a great July! 👋