Sept 2019 Recap

Hello mailing list friends!

September was the first month in a long time I didn’t do any talks (I was a guest on a couple of podcasts!). As you’ll see, I poured my energies into blogging, while at work my time was quite eaten up by a large video tutorial project that should be released soon.

Some highlights and commentary:

• Static Svelte: JavaScript Blogging with 93% less JavaScript - I rewrote my blog to Svelte/Sapper to feel out the developer experience. While Svelte delightfully fast and small and feature complete for this goal, I immediately missed the data pipelining experience from Gatsby. Static export is surprisingly not as simple as “just run SSR once for every route”. It is too easy to fetch data extremely inefficiently, and I ran head first into this. I wrote about this pain in Bad Ways to Get Data.
• Why I Won’t Choose To Be A Manager is a reflection on career paths prompted by a Charity Majors blogpost and weighing that against my own mixed feelings on the impact of management versus my flaws and preferences.
• After a lazy joke tweet about left-pad, I felt guilty about making fun of JS, so I wrote Why JavaScript Tooling Sucks for myself and other JS devs to think through why we’re in the mess we’re in. I think it is slowly getting better and the correct response to “JavaScript sucks lol” is not to give up.

I also wrote some things for work:

• Git-Centric Workflow
• Using Next.js as a Static Site Generator for Netlify
• JAMstack for Indie Hackers

Reader Question: Right now I’m posting this “work content”, where the reader profile is more beginner oriented, alongside “personal content”, where I expect everyone to be at least at my level or better, and understanding that I’m pushing myself and learning in public. Does this mix confuse or annoy you when you visit my site? What are good ways to handle this? I’m definitely keen on having my site be a central place to find all my work regardless of target audience, but I haven’t necessarily figured out the “Information Architecture™“.

October is a busy month. I’m hosting the first Svelte Society meetup today, and then speaking at/attending conferences in NY/NJ, Raleigh, San Francisco, and London. I don’t have an events page up yet but feel free to reply if you’d like to meet!

That’s it from me. All the best for your October and let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to write about!