🧑🏽‍🍳 Pick of the Month — vanilla-extract #

If you have followed me for a while, you will know I am a huge vanilla-extract fan. It has a lot of the features of Tailwind and in fact many of the benefits of CSS in JS frameworks. However, in my opinion, two factors make it worth considering vanilla-extract as an alternative: TypeScript and zero-runtime overhead. You write your styles in TypeScript, so get the in-editor DXDeveloper Experience benefits of Intellisense, checking and completion. The bonus is that the tooling (works with Vite, ESBuild and WebPack) transpiles the styles and you only ship CSS to the browser — no UXUser Experience performance hit.

🚀 Follower Feedback #

I really can’t believe how much interest in Astro is has picked up recently. Especially as the market for site generators is so crowded at the moment. My guess is that it is Astro’s ease of use that is driving its adoption; Astro is not fussy about about how you do things and on top, it is fast at building your fast site! Keen to hear your take though. Anecdotally, Astro seems to be the go-to generator for knocking up a quick demo. Do you think it is flexibility diving the adoption? You can use plain old HTML, React, Svelte, Vue and more) and on top create static or SSRServer-Side Rendered content sites. Or do you think something else is behind it? Either way thanks for the nice feedback comments on the Astro blog posts.

📢 Fun Finds #

• Productivity — Neovim Guide & Neovide: after running into performance issues on a project in VSCode/VSCodium I wanted to try editing the code in Vim from the console. A lot of Vim material assumes you know the basics (and more aside) of Vim and Neovim config already. I stumbled across an excellent blog post on setting up Neovim from step one. It is comprehensive and assumes no prior vim knowledge. Doing a little each morning over a week, I was so happy with the results, I didn’t even wait to finish to thank Jake for creating the post. I am using Neovide — a lightweight GUI for Neovim, built in Rust and available in Homebrew. 100.00% solved the issues with the project and I couldn’t be happier!
• Hosting — Deno Deploy, Rust & WASM: I had another issue, on a Rust Cloudflare Worker side project. Unfortunately Cloudflare WASMWebAssembly code has to be 1 MB or smaller. Despite trying a few optimisations I couldn’t even get close. Reaching out the the Deno team, Luca Casonato delivered fantastic news — they have a giant 20 MB limit 😁. I rewrote the Cloudflare Worker as a Deno project at the end of a Friday afternoon! A Deno/TypeScript part provided the server, listening for incoming requests. I refactored the existing Rust code and compiled it to WASM with wasm-pack. This worked a treat: deploy process is seamless and I cannot fault Deno on anything.
• Resources — Writing Performant CSS: excellent, detailed article on running vanilla-extract in Vite from LekoArts.

👋🏽 Until next time! #

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

• Astro Server-Side Rendering: Edge Search Site,
• Astro vanilla-extract Styling: CSS in TypeScript,
• Astro Sitemaps: Add Post and Page XML Sitemaps.