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[BAWD #94] Rethinking Discipline and The State of Frontend

Nov 7, 2022

Hello, dear friend 👋🏾,

I trust you had a blissful week. I’ve missed you. I’ve been away for a while and will probably be away for a few more weeks due to my busy schedule. So I thought to send a letter today and let you know that I would be back to the usual schedule very, very soon. Thanks for reading my letters! Btw, here’s a friendly reminder that meeting someone by 12:00 doesn’t mean you should leave your house by 12:00 🫠.

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Featured Technical Articles ✍🏾👩🏽‍💻

Software Engineering - The Soft Parts by Addy Osmani.
Why designers should move from px to rem by Christine Vallaure.
Building an interactive WebGL experience in Next.js by Paul Henschel and Anthony Shew.
How to Send Templated Emails with Commerce Layer and SendGrid by Bolaji Ayodeji.
Fully Typed Web Apps by Kent C. Dodds.
How composable commerce lets retailers innovate by Barbara Rybka.
Clouddley - Cloud Platforms Reimagined by Obinna Odirionye.
Full Stack Components by Kent C. Dodds.
Building High Impact Developer Communities by Nader Dabit.
How to Connect Google Colab to a Local Runtime by Bolaji Ayodeji.
Simplifying Developer Testing Through SLATE by Uber Eng.

Featured Productivity Articles ✍🏾🦅

The Staircase of the Self by Lawrence Yeo.
What I Do When I Feel Like Giving Up by James Clear.
Five Mindsets that Create Success by Mike Manson.
Rethinking Discipline by Scott H. Young.

Product of the Week ✨

Astria is a tailor-made AI image generation tool that allows you to start creating unique images.

Good Tidings 🔊

Is frontend tired of new trends and looking for stability? You can find answers in the State of Frontend report for 2022, which covers frameworks, libraries, typescript, SSGs, hosting, micro-frontends, browser technologies, testing, and more.
Nextjs—the React framework announced the 13th version of the project some weeks ago in an “Apple event style.” Some of the new changes include the new app directory for faster client JS, layouts, react server components, Turbopack, the new next/image with native browser lazy loading, the new next/font, improved next/link, and more. There have been several outlash on Vercel’s marketing of metrics numbers and also great threads on how to use these new features (see this, this, this, and this).
Google Firebase also released new long-awaited features like native support for web frameworks (Angular, Lit, Next.js, React, Preact, Svelte, and Vite) in Firebase Hosting, the new count() function in Firestore for getting the count of matching documents when you run a query or read from a collection, without loading the actual documents, and extensions marketplace. You can find all the new features in this announcement post.
Sarah’s book, Engineering Management for the Rest of Us is now available for purchase! So you should go get a copy now :winks:.
Commerce Layer recently released the public beta of their brand-new Metrics API. This endpoint provides powerful reporting by making all possible customer transaction data accessible and enabling ecommerce brands to calculate and process that data directly from the API as part of a query.
You should check out Interview Warmup, a platform where you can prepare for interviews by practicing key questions, getting insights about your answers, and much more.
You should check out this course to discover and rebuild your JavaScript mental models. Just JavaScript is not a course for complete beginners (you should already know how some parts work), and now you’d learn how to think about those parts.
Here’s a Notion page with compiled resources and steps a Nigerian student took to apply to schools in the United States. You might find this helpful if you’re considering the same.
Here’s a curated list of project-based programming tutorials you can use to learn how to build applications from scratch.
Need support for your learning? Every month, you can get funding for your learning needs (internet subscription, computer device, or courses) from anonymous people who care.
If you’re a student (at any level), you can apply to get the GitHub Student Developer Pack and access the best developer tools and courses for FREE.
Here's a recommendation of the top five websites to find remote jobs for different fields in tech.
Joe's Jobs curates the best web, product, engineering, design, DevRel, and open-source startup roles.

Dev Term of the Week 💾

Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a company that provides services for accessing and using the internet (e.g., AT&T, MTN, Verizon, etc.). Learn more here (text) or here (video).

Book Recommendations 📚

Knowing God by J. I. Packer.
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner.
The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin.
Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI by Abdulazeez Adeshina.

Featured Tweets and Videos 😍

Here are some tweets I think are cool and some of my favorite videos from YouTube this week.

John Collison @collision

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

nader (🧱, 🚀) | nader.lens @dabit3

Life is filled with ups and downs, fortunate and unfortunate situations, successes and mistakes. No matter how good or bad things seem right now, if you keep going everything balances out in the end and even gets better over time. Don’t give up.

James Clear @JamesClear

On the ground, a rock is just a rock. But when moving at high speed through the atmosphere, a rock becomes a meteor—alive with fire and burning bright. People are not so different. Without activity, we are lifeless and dull. When moving fast and taking action, we come alive.

⬇️: How to make your JavaScript Bundle Smaller

⬇️: Build an expense tracker web app with Firebase and React

⬇️: How Xata Radically Simplifies the Way Developers Work with Data

⬇️: Looking unto Jesus - Charles Spurgeon Sermon

Quote of the Week 💙

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.” –Jim Carrey

Shout out to my amazing Patrons: Maya Shavin, Angie Jones, Sarah Drasner, Samson Goddy, and Obinna Odirionye.

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That's all for this letter. See you next time, and stay safe!

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