Newsletter #6: Failing expectations, thoroughly tested

Welcome to another edition of the fettblog.eu newsletter. Moving to buttondown.email brought me exactly what I was aiming for: Less tracking, and reaching more inboxes. Yes, I’m totally invisible how many people opened the mail. But I got significantly more feedback than ever before!

This motivates me. That’s why I can increase the delivery schedule, and provide you with more value, on time!

Hope you enjoy this edition!

New articles #

I didn’t blog as much as I wanted to in the last couple of weeks, some drafts lying around in Git branches that I hope to get out there soon.

Thankfully, some interesting TypeScript challenges appeared in my day-to-day work. New material for articles!

TypeScript + React: Generic forwardRefs – In the component library we’re developing we use forwardRef a lot to give developers a way to work with DOM nodes if they need to. If you have a generic component, typing a forwardRef can be a little tricky.

Cinema #

The fettblog.eu cinema. Techflix and conference talks that I found helpful and interesting!

Matteo Collina - Can we double HTTP client throughput - I just saw a variant of this talk at CityJS the other day, and I loved it. Matteo tells us about the importance of HTTP in Microservices and Serverless, and how his library Undici is fixing all the troubles you get when doing regular HTTP calls.

Angular 2.0 introduction at ng-europe 2014 - Another entry in my History.JS playlist. This is the infamous introduction of Angular 2.0 about 7 years ago. Exactly, the one with all the tombstones, where Tobias Bosch and Igor Minar announced that everything you learned for Angular 1.x won’t be relevant in the future and there will be no migration step at all. I vividly remember watching this talk in a live stream back then, and the outrage in the industry it caused. Some friends of mine who run an Angular consulting job in Germany got enraged calls by their clients, fearing that they bet on the wrong horse for their 5-year project. In hindsight, the talk is pretty cringy, silly at its best. What’s interesting is how much the framework has evolved since this announcement. The fallout, however, the fallout was real.

Links #

Jotai - Jotai means State in Japanese, and is a very interesting, React Suspense powered state management library. The examples on Github showcase the concept pretty well. I’m eager to try it out and see how it works in a real-world app. Oh, and it’s TypeScript first! Always a plus!

The shocking immaturity of JavaScript - Jared White, a Rubyist, is shocked by how immature the JavaScript ecosystem is as a whole. How fragile, and how glued together everything seems. This hits a nerve with me. I don’t see it as dire as Jared, but he has a point! Every time I get a security issue notification from GitHub because a sub-dependency of a sub-dependency of a sub-dependency of a dependency has done something shady in their 0.0.2 release I start frowning! What do you think about the current state of the ecosystem? Where does JavaScript shine? Where does JavaScript fail?

Typesafe dates - Calculating leap years is one of the first programming exercises I know of. This TypeScript playground uses string literal types to take this one step further: Valid date strings! Found at Moshe Kolodny’s Twitter.

My current HTML boilerplate - Manuel Matuzovic shares a very well-defined boilerplate for his websites, and elaborates on the content.

Four words to avoid in TypeScript writing - Names are important as they give you a common sense of what’s going on. In TypeScript, we often use the wrong words for certain aspects. False friends from other programming languages. Dan informs us what we actually should use. And I’m definitely guilty of at least 3 of them.

Upcoming appearances #

Global Azure Bootcamp - On Friday I’m going to speak at Global Azure Bootcamp along with plenty of other speakers. I’m going to talk about Serverless Rendering and all the pendulum swings recently. What you’re going to see is how you can use JSX, TypeScript, Azure Functions to get some nice HTML rendering without too much client-side work

React Wednesdays - Next Wednesday, I’m joining TJ van Toll on his React Wednesdays web show. Talking about TypeScript, dynamic static typing, low maintenance types, and more!

That’s it for today! #

I hope this edition of the fettblog Newsletter was useful to you! I definitely had fun writing and curating it! If you have anything that you think would be perfect for this little piece, let me know!

Cheers!

– Stefan