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The Web Weekly newsletter keeps you up to date, teaches you web development tricks and covers all things working in tech.

Happy Monday, party people!

Gmail decided to throw Web Weekly right into the spam folder last week. ๐Ÿ˜ข If you didn't receive last week's Weekly, read it online.

I changed things, and the email sender is now stefan@webweekly.email. Let's hope this fixes things. If you didn't receive last week's email and find it in your spam, it'd be fantastic if you could hit the "no spam" button. Thank you!

But on the bright side โ€“ I have news! I started a new job yesterday. ๐Ÿฅ๐Ÿฅ๐Ÿฅ

Stefan wearing a checkly shirt.

I joined a Berlin-based startup called Checkly. Checkly's a service to check your APIs, write end-to-end browser tests and monitor your site's performance.

And I'll be helping developers to build great stuff and make sure it stays great!

I'm super excited about this (and not only because the logo is so cute)!

And with this, today you'll learn about:

  • the evolution of Frontend frameworks
  • that there won't be new Emoji flags
  • job interviews without a written coding exercise

... and, as always, GitHub repositories, a new Tiny Helper and some music.

Lastly, welcome to the 38 new subscribers! I'm super excited to have you around! ๐Ÿ‘‹

Something that made me smile this week

CSS Pro Tip  Tired of your ugly site? Try this simple trick! "* { display: none }"

This CSS joke is so simple, yet I had to laugh about it.

The evolution of Frontend development

I have, in the past 9 months of working with SvelteKit, sat back more times than I can count and said to myself โ€œthis is the way we should have always done it.โ€

Frontend's constantly changing, and I really like Chris' take on the topic. He categorizes all the new JavaScript inventions into four eras:

  • The Before Times
  • The First Frameworks
  • Component-Centric View Layers
  • Full-stack Frameworks

It's a valid take, and his future prediction is also worth reading.

Think about Frontend

Did we(b development) lose the right direction?

Stefan on stage

It's the same topic but less analysis and more rant: I gave precisely one talk at an in-person conference in 2021, and I enjoyed every second! The recording is now available on YouTube.

Listen to my rant about tech

Is your data telling the truth?

The data tells me I get somewhere between 12k and 26k visitors to my site who open anywhere between 18k and 333k pages. If I stare at the larger numbers, that is impressive but not actionable. Comparing 2019 to 2022, Netlify is showing a 25% drop in pageviews and a 41% drop in uniques, while Fathom is showing almost the inverse.

Dave had a look at his site's analytics and compared the numbers of Fathom (client-side) and Netlify (server-side), and unsurprisingly, they're very different.

It's a good reminder to focus on more than just metrics. ๐Ÿ‘

How much do you trust your data?

A different take on coding interviews

A Better Way โ€“ So instead of writing code, consider instead having the candidate read existing code and talk about what it does and how it works.

I don't know who's behind the freakingrectangle.com blog, but I enjoyed their article "How to Freaking Find Great Developers By Having Them Read Code".

Let's face it; nobody wants to solve useless algorithm questions in front of someone who knows the answer. And you especially don't want to do this in a high-pressure interview scenario.

Job interviews should be smooth and maybe even fun! The article gives ideas on interviews that focus on reading instead of writing code. And I quite like this idea!

Stop writing, start reading!

The Clipboard JS API and different mime types

Screen showing six ascii art playing cards tasking you to click and automatically copy one.

I discovered a "web development magic trick" and learned a lot about the JavaScript Clipboard API while figuring out how it works.

It's all about magic

The new and shiny

New to the web platform in April โ€“ Discover some of the interesting features that landed in stable and beta web browsers during April 2022.

I love Rachel's new and monthly browser release summaries. Learn all about the April browser releases. ๐Ÿ’ฏ

Find out what's new

How are you today?

A profile page showing a picture of Felix with a subline that he's in Vienna right now.

If you'd ask me this question today, I'd say "so so". But If you'd ask Felix, he'd send you a link to his page howisfelix.today. For three years, he collects over 100 different data points about his life. These include sleep, food, workouts, his inbox, air quality, travels, etc.

I'm fascinated and scared but also a bit jealous about this project.

Should you track more?

There won't be any new Emoji flags

There is one particular type of emoji for which the Unicode Consortium will no longer accept proposals. Flag emoji of any category.

You may know that I'm fascinated by Emojis. This week, I realized that country flags don't work on Windows. Windows shows the flag's internal characters (called regional indicator symbol) instead of rendering a flag.

The German flag is shown as ๐Ÿ‡ฉโ€‹๐Ÿ‡ช, South Africa is a ๐Ÿ‡ฟโ€‹๐Ÿ‡ฆ, and so on. This two-character combination makes up a flag if the operating system supports it and Windows just doesn't.

And speaking of flags: the Unicode committee decided that Emoji flags were a bad idea in the first place. You can't delete Unicode characters, but there won't be new flag additions from now on.

Apparently, it's too hard to determine what flags should be included and which ones should be left out. And knowing that flags are the largest emoji category while being used the least doesn't help.

But to give folks more ways to express themselves, we'll get more colorful hearts. โค๏ธ๐Ÿงก๐Ÿ’›๐Ÿ’š๐Ÿ’™๐Ÿ’œ๐ŸคŽ๐Ÿ–ค๐Ÿค

Either way, Unicode and Emojis are so fascinating.

Learn more about Emoji flags

Reader shout out ๐Ÿ’™

My Favorite Newsletters, 2022 Edition.

My friend Eva described how she deals with newsletters. I should make her my role model and also start unsubscribing ruthlessly.

She also shares her favorite newsletters covering everything internet, programming and culture topics. It's a great list and Web Weekly is on it, too. Thank you, Eva! ๐Ÿ’™

Discover new newsletters

Random MDN โ€“ The URL API

// https://some.site/?id=123 const parsedUrl = new URL(window.location.href); console.log(parsedUrl.searchParams.get("id")); // "123"

From the unlimited knowledge archive called MDN.

Do you parse or manipulate URL strings manually? Hold on; there's the URL browser API for that!

Parse URLs with style

TIL recap โ€“ Commands in the Node.js REPL

Node.js REPL session with a multiline command.

Did you know that special commands such as .editor, .load and .save are available in the Node.js REPL? Now you do. ๐Ÿ˜‰

REPL it!

If you learned something new, whether small or big, old or new, documented or not, I'd love to include more learnings in this newsletter. Send me an email, and I'm happy to share your discovery!

Three valuable projects to have a look at

A new Tiny Helper

A visually explained regular expression

I enjoy writing new regular expressions but inspecting existing ones can be quite a challenge. Regex-Vis visualizes regular expressions to shed some light.

Inspect your regular expressions

Find more single-purpose online tools on tiny-helpers.dev.

Thought of the week

There are no more words needed about Kapehe's thought of the week. ๐Ÿ˜‰

When in doubt, be kind. you never know what someone might be going through.

A song that makes you stop coding

Lycoriscoris - Blue (Grandbrothers Remix)

This week's song is a smooth electro track from Lycoriscoris. "Blue" is a melodic piano track that makes me dream of good summer times.

Listen to "Blue"

Thank you for reading!

And that's a wrap for the sixty-fifth Web Weekly! If you enjoy this newsletter, I'd love you to tell others about it. โ™ฅ๏ธ

If you're not a subscriber, you can change that! ๐Ÿ˜‰

And with that, take care of yourselves, friends - mentally, physically, and emotionally. I'll see you next week! ๐Ÿ‘‹

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Stefan standing in the park in front of a green background

About Stefan Judis

Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.

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