Rodney Lab Newsletter — October 2022Rodney Lab Newsletter — October 2022

💾 Pick of the month — Directus #

Have you tried Directus yet? It’s a content management system backed by an SQL database with some great developer and user experience features. For example, you can upload data to the DBDatabase as JSON files. Another feature I liked was the image APIApplication Programming Interface. Once you upload your full-res JPEG images, their API makes any sharp plugin transformation available. As well as generate smaller WebP images, you can resize for responsive image sets or thumbnails, or even apply sharp image transforms.

We used Directus in the latest Plus tutorial to store product data and images for a SvelteKit eCommerce site using Snipcart. Nice linking Directus right through from JSON inputs to the site and onto eCommerce structured SEOSearch Engine Optimization data loved by Google.

🖥️ Follower Feedback #

Thanks for all your feedback and post ideas. My favourite recently was to write a blog post on deploying a SvelteKit node app. With services like Cloudflare, Netlify and Render offering free or affordable hosting, and let’s not forget convenience, it’s been a while since I spun up a self-managed Linux server. Doing so does bring a lot of advantages. For example, we were able to run node on the server and use the sharp image plugin. There is also much scope for optimization with nginx caching, plus Redis caching at no extra cost. It’s not ideal for every project, though, I still recommend trying it out on a hobby project — not just for the enjoyment but also to keep skills current.

Was fun using this app as an excuse to try out some future CSS using :has in hover images and springy overscroll. The two part post, was split into building the site locally and deploying to Linode. You can jump straight in to the second one if you’re not as excited by the CSS as I am!

📢 Fun Finds #

• Git Repo — Whisper Speech-to-Text: already amazed at how awesome Google and Descript transcription are, I was mind-blown to try out Whisper. On a GPUGraphics Processing Unit: computing chip originally designed for graphics but frequently used for machine learning tasks., it took about four minutes to transcribe a minute of audio (was about an hour per minute on my local machine 😅). The accuracy was impeccable, it seemed to pick up the context too; correctly capitalizing technical terms.
• Tooling — vite-node - if you have projects where you need to run node scripts, before or after your build, it can be annoying to make import aliases ($lib in SvelteKit or ~components in Astro) work when your script needs to reference them. vite-node takes care of this for you and supports TypeScript too. Config is fairly straightforward.
• Resources — web.dev patterns: check out this site. There’s example code for just about any Web API you can imagine.

👋🏽 Until next time! #

Hope there was something valuable in here for you. As always, reach out with feedback and until next time, here are a few highlight posts/tutorials:

• Get started with SvelteKit Headless WordPress
• Fastify GraphQL API Stack
• Trying out Deno Fresh