Top picks — 2025 October
Howdy y’all, I hope your October was not as hectic as mine. Mine was ridiculous! It’s been a super hardworking year overall, and I’m looking forward to a trip with my family at the end of the year. We are going to spend December in Sri Lanka, so if you have any tips and recommendations, ping me on Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn or in the comments section below.
I found some time not to neglect my monthly routine, and I prepared for you a few links that I really liked in the past month. As always, a music recommendation is waiting for you below, although I would love to have a different trigger to talk about today’s artist. Enjoy the read.
Album of the month
This month is different and not about a single album, but more about the artist. A little bit of a tribute to D’Angelo, who lost a battle with pancreatic cancer and passed away on the 14th of October. He was only 51 years old. He was the pioneer of the neo-soul movement, owner of an incredible voice, talented songwriter and producer. All his releases are great, but “Voodoo” from 2000 is the hottest soul album ever recorded. Huge loss!
Top picks
“Open Social” by Dan Abramov
This is a great and not too technical explainer of the ATProto and how it enables an open social. Dan is really great at explaining complex subjects using simple analogies, and this one is no different. I would love to read a post like this one about the Fediverse, which I use a lot more than anything related to ATProto (pretty much Bluesky only). A few days later, Dan also posted “Where It’s at://” which is a lot more technica deep dive into the output JSON resolutions from the at:// links.
CSS-only floating focus with anchor positioning
Kilian, the creator of Polypane, recreated one of the debugging tools from his browser using pure CSS. Pretty nice way of removing a ton of expensive calculations from the main thread. Another good example that shows that CSS anchor positioning is not for tooltips only.
React Compiler v1.0
My least favourite part of writing React components is soon going to be a thing of the past. The final release of React stable means that we no longer need to care about memoisation of static values and functions. This is what the compiler is going to do for us. This is going to significantly simplify the way we write React components.
15 Recent Node.js Features that Replace Popular npm Packages
Modern JavaScript runtimes are packed with features that in the past required some external packages. Here is a good list of built-in commands like that. I published articles about some of them in the past, but I also learned a ton from this article. Great summary.
MiniMax - Neovim with maximum MINI
This is a pretty niche one, for Neovim fans only. Evgeni Chasnovski, the creator of the mini.nvim family, released a great resource to help you out with your Neovim configuration. It is not another opinionated distribution, but more like a starting point to build upon. The closest thing I would compare it to is kickstart.nvim, which I like a ton, and this was my starting point for my configuration. Evgeni put tons of love into it, and the comments on the Lua files are insanely helpful. I’m a huge fan of his contributions to the Neovim ecosystem.
A pragmatic guide to modern CSS colours - part one
This title doesn’t lie, this guide is very pragmatic. Potentially you know about many of these new colour features, but I’m sure you will learn an extra thing or two. I totally missed the fact that so many colour formats do not require commas and units anymore. This is a little thing, but when typed hundreds of times, it is also a time saver. Kevin is on fire with his content creation game!
I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong
Nikita Prokopov is a great blogger and here is another rant post that perfectly describes the current state of code editor themes. For some reason, there is a trend to use flashy, vivid and super colourful themes, but when you look at it from the usability point of view, most of them do not work. Nikita explains why and shares some good recommendations to fix it. I use a close to default Neovim theme, with a bunch of colours toned down, and I cannot be happier. Not the prettiest but very usable.
Vite: The Documentary
As always, the production by the CultRepo is epic. I was a little doubtful how the documentary about the modules bundler can be any interesting, and I was really surprised. From the initial idea, through the race with other competitors up to the huge success and domination in the market. Really interesting documentary.
Oral History of Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson is one of the most influential programmers in the history of computing. He created B programming language that massively inspired creation of C, developed UTF-8 encoding, co-created UNIX and Go programming language. He is an absolutaly leged and without him, our job would look very differen to what it is now. This is a very detailed interview with Ken. Not short, but I enjoyed listening every single minute of the chat with this smart fella.
Importing vs fetching JSON
Short, great comparison of importing JSON and fetching it by Jake Archibald. So good to see one of my favourite web folks blogging more recently, and I’m also glad that he moved back to work on the browser engine. Great addition to the Firefox team!