Top picks — 2024 December
This is the last post of 2024. It was a really good year overall, but to keep an annual tradition I published “A look back at 2024” where I revealed more. It was also an interesting month. You would expect December to be a quiet month, but it was full of interesting releases, and a bunch of great resources came out. Other than that, I also have some great music recommendations for you folks.
Before you jump into top picks and music recommendations, I would like to wholeheartedly wish you a happy and healthy 2025.
Album of the month
Sometimes spontaneous click-around on Bandcamp can lead to a good exploration. That was the case with my favourite album of December, Damu The Fudgemunk – Peace of Action. Mainly a jazz record, but heavily inspired by the hip hop nuggets here and there. You can tell that it was produced by a hip hop beats producer! Sourced from KPM (and associated music libraries), the selection makes it a truly unique compilation that just makes you want to listen from start to finish the whole day. Love it!
Top picks
Make creative borders with background-clip border-area
A great post about a totally unsupported feature at the moment of writing this post. It opens up so many great possibilities, especially for fancy-looking buttons that clearly were a trend in recent years. This one can save a lot of hassle with creating additional elements just for masking reasons.
React v19
This is the long-anticipated release of the new version of React, which comes with a bunch of incredible new features: support for actions, server components, simplified reference passing, better hydration warning messages, support for document metadata, stylesheets and scripts. There is also support for web components. This is a juicy release!
Storing times for human events
A great article by Somin Willison about the best format for storing the date and time of real-life events. As an organiser of the NN1 Dev Club meetup, this subject is close to my heart, and I spent not a trivial amount of time thinking about this problem. Storing the date and time is only the first part of the puzzle, but the consumers of this value are what bring the complexity. I cannot tell you how much I dislike everything about calendar invites compatible with multiple popular providers. I spent too much time on this one!
CSSWG Minutes Telecon (2024-12-04): Just Use Grid vs. Display: Masonry
There are two competing specifications to add native CSS masonry layout: one coming from Apple and another from Google developers. This post is a nice summary of recent CSSWG meetings about it and the consensus that comes out of them (or rather the lack of it).
State of JavaScript 2024
It is always interesting to browse the results of the annual JS survey. In my eyes, the JavaScript ecosystem has slowed down recently, and this is a very good thing. Of course, the ecosystem still argues about the best patterns to write code, but the set of tools at this point looks very much stable and standardised. No surprise here that Vite and Vitest adoption exploded and a bunch of new tools and meta frameworks built on top of their primitives. Overall, an interesting read.
Easing Wizard
Super well-designed CSS easing wizard. It comes with predefined cubic Bézier and linear functions, ready for copy and paste. Also, the preview of multiple animatable CSS properties is a super nice touch.
Ghostty 1.0
Ghostty is the new terminal emulator built by Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Vagrant, Terraform and co-founder of HashiCorp. He spent two years building it with Zig and a bunch of native technologies with the goal of creating the best terminal available. It took me a moment to transition my Alacritty configuration to Ghostty, and now I use it as my daily driver. It has everything I would expect from a terminal client built in, comes with tons of options and themes, and feels a lot snappier than any other client I used before. In “Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0”, the author elaborates further on the creation process.
Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus
The Fish shell team shares a bunch of interesting insights from the famous rewrite from C/C++ to Rust. The motivation and process, good, bad, and regrests. A very interesting read.