Week 25 of 2022

Weeklies are my notes of things not big enough for a blog post but worthy of being mentioned and linked to. Find all of my Weeklies at /weeklies.

• The Demo → Demo Loop by Dave Rupert

  I'm a big fan of demo culture in tech teams. I was introduced to it first at Chartio and later at Smartly. I think it's a great way to keep your team up to speed on what's being built, enabling better discussion when there's already something going on and showcasing demos is just pure fun too. In his blog post, Dave explains how demo → demo loop can help your team maintain better momentum.

• Into the Personal-Website-Verse by Matthias Ott

  Another great addition to the list of "great blog posts about blogging you should read". Matthias talks at length about the benefits of running your own blog compared to leaving your material at the mercy of social media or blogging platforms. Algorithms now prioritize content from people with a huge following and everything that is loud and outrageous. It’s all about what the masses and the bots “want”, what they will like, share, and click. Above quote from the blog post puts into words well what I strongly dislike about social media. With our own blogs, we can go deeper into more meaningful stuff, write longer technical posts or explore the world in a way that can be read in years' time as well and not only for a few seconds or minutes in our timelines.

• “Don’t Mock What You Don’t Own” in 5 Minutes by Hynek Schlawack

  How should one test the parts of one's software that is not their own? Hynek shares his thoughts on the testing principle of "don't mock what you don't own".

• Writing one sentence per line by Derek Sivers

  Very interesting idea by Derek to improve one's writing. Writing one sentence per one line exposes you as the writer to your sentences' first words and the dance of varying sentence lengths. When using Markdown or HTML, those lines will still be rendered as regular paragraphs so the reader is not affected.

• Keep your experiments separate by Jessica Kerr

  You decided to learn something new: a tool, a technology or an approach and you start building it. Then you get excited about the next thing and start adding stuff and the scope creep starts to crawl in. At some point, adding those new things that you wanna learn becomes a bit harder because there's more and more added complexity. In this blog post, Jessica explores the idea of keeping those experiments separate. Don't stack multiple experiments into one project but start new projects so you can start from fresh and can focus on individual learnings.

• Why Web Developers Should Care More About Semantic HTML by Africa Kenyah

  Writing good, semantic HTML is the baseline for building accessible web. If you're not sure why, check out this post by Africa! (PS. My website is currently a mess with regards to semantic HTML, it's one of my main focuses on a website rewrite but finding time to do that has been tough.)

• Lazy load embedded YouTube videos by Chris Coyier

  We were having a discussion in Slack about how to speed up Youtube embeds on the website since the embed iframe loads quite a lot of stuff by default. I learned then that there's a srcdoc feature in iframe that allows one to write HTML & CSS that is shown until the iframe is clicked.