Top picks — 2025 Novermber
What a busy month! Crazy at work, but also a lot of prep went into the last NN1 Dev Club meetup of the year. I’m very proud of how this little meetup idea grew to become a solid community of software engineers from the Northamptonshire area. Luckily, at the beginning of December, we are travelling to Sri Lanka and we are staying there until the end of the year. I’m very much looking forward to it.
The World Wide Web kept on sending interesting articles my way, so like I do every month, I wanted to share with you my favourite bits. Hopefully, you will like this month’s selection. Music recommendation from my collection is also here!
Album of the month
If I had to tell you about a single song that I listened to in the last month the most, no doubt it would be “Lucky Star” by Madonna. My daughter is just obsessed with this tune at the moment and we listen to it dozens of times a day. But in the meantime, we have had some really enjoyable dancing sessions with the selection made by Fania Records. This album is full of bangers, like “Dakar, Punto Final” by Johnny Pacheco or “Sonido Bestial” by Richie Ray & Bobby Cruz. Top Latin vibes!
Top picks
Your URL Is Your State
Often times we don’t need complicated storage mechanisms, state management libraries, or even a database. Good, old URL is a beautiful way of passing state around and reliably works on the web since 1991. I’m sure you have heard that before, but please use the platform devs.
The (lazy) Git UI You Didn’t Know You Need
It is no secret that I’m a huge fan of lazygit, and naturally I like to see more like-minded geeks embracing this powerful TUI. Bartek’s article highlights all the good reasons why you should try it, if you’re still pursuing the masochistic practice of using the git CLI. A little side note, that you should probably try Jujutsu, but this is a story for another day.
Color Palette Pro
I have seen a lot of color palette generators in the past, but this one is my new winner. So useful and the design of this tool is just insanely cool. Bunch of little super tasteful animations, the gradients game here is absolutely top tier. For me, this tool is an instant bookmark!
The HTTP QUERY Method
The specification of HTTP is evolving and it is a good time to learn about the new QUERY method. It is a combination of GET and POST that takes the best traits of both. Like GET, it has a body and is idempotent.
As with POST, the input to the query operation is passed as the content of the request rather than as part of the request URI. Unlike POST, however, the method is explicitly safe and idempotent, allowing functions like caching and automatic retries to operate.
“Time to Migrate” by Tim Bray
A good write-up about the Frdiverse and its value from prolific contributor to the open web, Tim Bray. I cannot agree more with Tim’s opinion, and for this number of reasons, I treat Mastodon as my only serious social media presence. Of course, this very page is my home on the web. Some may be asking what my take on Bluesky is, which I use almost as much as I do Mastodon, but Tim also wrote “Why Not Bluesky” about it, so I don’t need to. Great articles!
Running TypeScript Natively
As of now, three dominant server-side JavaScript runtimes (Node.js, Deno, and Bun) can natively run TypeScript code. This is incredibly useful, and it is a huge convenience not to worry about the transpilation process. Deno and Bun supported this from the beginning, but Node.js has just unfledged this feature. Happy days!
Simple One-Time Passcode Inputs
This is a super cool little snippet that may save you from npm i some-chunky-otp-lib. Nothing beats the simplicity of HTML elements when all you need is an HTML element, not a bunch of divs and inaccessible nonsense masks.
Brand New Layouts with CSS Subgrid
Josh Comeau is the master of the interactive CSS explainers. This post about the CSS subgrids is not different and I learnt a ton from it. I found the gotcha section the most interesting, especially the one about indexing the grid lines inside the nested subgrid.
Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg
Since the explosion of AI tools, I keep on hearing about the increased productivity and the ability to build software at a speed never imagined before. But from time to time I hear the other part of this story, which resonates with me a lot more, which talks about the quality degradation of software overall. GitHub is a perfect example of something that was insanely good and stable, and in recent years has become so problematic to use. The Zig team, sharing the same frustrations, decided to make a big move and move entirely to Codeberg. This platform is fantastic, built with performance in mind and focused on developers trying to build software without any annoying nonsense. I really hope others will follow and Codeberg helps us stop relying on Microsoft.