Rodney Lab Newsletter — January 2023Rodney Lab Newsletter — January 2023
🍋 Pick of the Month — Deno Fresh #
I quite like the Deno Fresh framework. It creates
SSR
Deno Fresh also gives you, the developer, more control over your sites. Although you get a lot of convenience from any modern framework, some have a trade-off of less control. In fact, I noticed Adam Argyle has moved his personal site to Deno Fresh and mentioned Fresh not making decisions, which he did not want to make as a reason for his choice.
Personally, I found implementing the tips which PageSpeed Insights offers much more straightforward with Fresh. As an example, because you add the link tags for CSS yourself, splitting off non-critical CSS is simple. You can have separate CSS files for desktop and mobile (using a media query in the link tag) or defer loading CSS which the browser needs, but not straight away.
🦀 Follower Feedback — Markdown WASM Module #
I created a Rust WASM module to help with Markdown processing for this newsletter. Admittedly, this was mostly to help in my quest to learn Rust. I was delighted to get positive feedback on the module and a request to add it to deno.land/x (a collection of third-party modules for Deno).
Naturally, I obliged and it is now on deno.land/x. The module is called
Parsedown. Parsedown parses Markdown to
HTML, adding anchor links for titles. It also performs some minor text
formatting (like replacing “'” with “’”). As well as that, it works out
reading time and has a separate function for generating Email HTML from
MJML. All of this makes it much easier to distribute the newsletter on the
site as HTML and also in emails as Email HTML and plaintext.
Give it a try if you are interested and drop some ideas for improvements.
📢 Fun Finds #
- Productivity — Graphite Stacked Git Commits: I’ve started trying this Git tooling out. It is designed to let you make changes to your code incrementally, adding them to its stack. This lets your peers review changes in smaller chunks, rather than having to block out a chunk of time for the process. Each branch you create is a new stack element. The stack model lets you push the reviewed changes to the trunk (or main) branch even while later ones are pending review. It works mostly from the CLI and integrates closely with git. There is an online dashboard, though, which shows you your pending reviews.
- Resources — Docker Curriculum: if you’re someone who puts off using Docker until they really have to, you might find Prakhar Srivastav tutorial useful. It is suitable for Docker novices and takes you right from setting up Docker on your device. To follow along, you will need AWS and Docker Hub accounts, but you can just read along or use other services you might prefer.
- Performance — jampack: this is a newly open sourced tool for optimizing your static sites. You run it post-build to compress images and bump up your Core Web Vitals scores. From what I have seen, it doesn’t optimize fonts, but you can use the subfont tool with static sites. Both are worth a try if you need to make your site a little faster, especially if you have not yet optimized your images.
👋🏽 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: