Top picks — 2023 November
Own Your Web
This newsletter by Matthias Ott is one of my favourite ones, even though it’s super new. The vibe, its focus, and shared resources speak to my interests. It’s all about the Indie Web and the core building blocks of a Web platform. Nice one, Matthias!
The poster’s guide to the internet of the future
The Verge team did a great job explaining the issues with the current state of social media platforms and why the good old POSSE principle is finally gaining adoption. After Elon’s Twitter acquisition, Mastodon and other ActivityPub-fueled platforms finally got well-deserved traction. Also, WordPress.com’s protocol adoption is a massive hit for this incredible technology. There’s no better time than now to take ownership of your content.
Monaspace - An innovative superfamily of fonts for code
A new, beautiful coding font from the GitHub team landed. You can get it as a regular OpenType font for desktop software, a variable font with multiple configurable axes, and a web font. It is a bundle of numerous fonts (Neon, Argon, Xenon, Radon and Krypton), but they all have their distinctive look. “Texture healing” is one of the features of this font family, and I am not sure if this is the terminology used in typography or some marketing term coined by the GitHub designers, but this is very cool. A presentation website for this font family looks sweet! I will try it as my new iTerm and Visual Studio Code coding font.
Lost in Translation: Tips for Multilingual Web Accessibility
Accessibility, by itself, is a subject that is hard not to screw up, even on a simple website, without a great understanding of HTML semantics and essential accessibility best practices. Now, add multiple languages into the mix, and the complexity grows by an order of magnitude. Ben Myers, one of my favourite writers about accessibility, published this handy guide about multilingual support.
Geist Font
Is it some font month or anything like that? Vercel also announced a new font. At first, they intended to make one for coding environments, but next to the mono version, they also released a sans-serif one. It is an elegant using font. I am becoming a fan of font websites - they are all so beautiful.
Commit Mono
Do you need another fresh font? Here you are!
things that aren’t doing the thing
This post is golden! My new favourite resource to read when I end up in the procrastination loop.
HTML web components
People talk about Web Components quite a lot. They are having their moment now, and the cool thing is that this momentum will never stop. It won’t because it is no new fancy framework. Web Components is a part of the standard and will outlive any JS framework, no matter how impactful it is nowadays. However, adopting Web Components requires a mental shift for people from JS frameworks. Jeremy Keith writes about it and beautifully summarises the current transition in web trends.
NodeConf EU 2023
Recordings from one of the most reputable JavaScript-related conferences are live. There are plenty of good talks to choose from.
EuroRust 2023
Having recently been more involved in the Rust ecosystem, I cannot skip this recommendation. All recordings from EuroRust 2023 are live. From what I have watched, Ashley Williams’s talk titled “It’s all in the delivery” is so good.
An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid
Josh published another very interactive guide. It covers the basics of CSS Grid without going too deep into more advanced concepts, but it is the best guide to start using it that I have seen so far. It must have taken ages to prepare such beautiful and interactive demos.
Node.js 20.x runtime now available in AWS Lambda
Node.js 20 is now an officially supported runtime on AWS Lambda. I have plenty of serverless functions with a single dependency of node-fetch, which I can safely remove now as fetch is currently in the global scope. It also comes with other improvements to the performance of URL parsing, crypto modules, and others.
The Inter typeface family
One of my favourite font families (I use it on this website) got a significant update to version 4.0. I am not a typography expert, so I will not pretend to understand these changes. I still can’t believe that an independent designer made this font family and that it is free. Also, have a look at the new website. It truly is stunning!
Biome formatter wins the Prettier challenge
Biome, the fork of Rome created and abandoned by Facebook, made a pretty exciting thing! A prettier bounty of $20k for a Rust-based formatter that satisfies 95% of the tests goes to the Biome team. The Prettier team confirmed a winner for the challenge in a "$20k Bounty was Claimed!" It took only two weeks from the first info about the bounty until the release of Biome 1.4. This version of Biome also comes with great stuff and a fantastic approach to handling binaries via the VSCode extension.