Newsletter - January 2024
Welcome to 2024! I'm reorienting the newsletter around my favorite stories of the past month, instead of purely "web tech" focused. Enjoy!
For the first newsletter of 2024, I'm dropping the "Web Tech" from the title, and making this newsletter focused purely on whatever stories have grabbed my attention during the past month. There will still be a heavy focus on software development in general, but the links won't be as narrowly focused on web standards and frameworks anymore.
Everything Package Causes Chaos
What happens when you upload a joke package that depends on every other package in the NPM registry? Two things mostly: 1. it will exhaust system resources of anyone who tries to download it, and 2. it removes the ability for package authors to remove their packages since NPM doesn't allow packages with dependencies to be removed.
What PWA Can Do Today
As someone with a large amount of interest in PWAs, this is something I've wanted to exist for a long time now. One website that can showcase every capability of modern PWAs! Take out your phone, add this site to your homescreen, and play around. I guarantee you'll find some feature you had no idea the was possible on the web!
Vanna: Chat with your SQL Database
Here's a cool project that allows you to interact with your database through AI Chat. This could be useful as a quick way to expose data to non technical users, or even just a quicker way for technical people to interact with their data.
vanna-aiBun Shell
In the past, I've used zx as a way to quickly write shell scripts using JavaScript. This new feature from Bun is a similar idea that allows you to use your JavaScript knowledge to easily write cross-platform scripts. I will definitely keep this in mind for the next time I need a complex bash script. Even with AI tools, it's so much nicer to be able to use a language I'm familiar with instead of fumbling around with Bash.
Zed Editor Now Open Source
If you haven't heard about the Zed editor yet, let me introduce you. It's from some of the same people that brought you Atom, but with new tricks like Rust over Electron, and real-time team collaboration. It even has a vim mode already! I think Zed is definitely worth a look, especially if you're struggling with performance of VS Code. For me, however, I'm far too deep in my tmux+nvim workflow to use Zed everyday.
Nathan Sobo