Rodney Lab Newsletter — February 2023Rodney Lab Newsletter — February 2023
🚀 Pick of the Month — Astro 2.0 Hybrid Rendering #
Astro 2.0 finally dropped last month. My verdict: I like it! The two main new features are Collections and Hybrid Rendering. I was most excited about Hybrid Rendering. Static sites are faster, more secure and better suited to content resources (blogs, documentation and so on). And it is in building content sites that Astro shines. That said, even content-rich sites often need some server interactivity. This was possible in Astro 1.0 but only by switching from static generation to server rendering.
Hybrid Rendering lets you ride two horses at once! Let’s say you want to add a
comment form to your content site. With Astro 2.0 and Hybrid Rendering, you can
configure Astro to create an SSR app, but then add a prerender directive to
all your pages. This tells Astro to generate pages statically. Finally, you
create a server API route to listen for comment form submissions. That’s it
— a static site with server interactivity. The full
code for this example, using browser APIs and with added Cloudflare Turnstile bot detection, is on GitHub.
🧑🏽💻 Follower Feedback — GraphQL is still going Strong #
I have put together quite a few GraphQL tutorials and demos over the last couple of years. I’m surprised, even with the rise of tRPC that I still get feedback from developers using these resources. Diving deeper, research seems to point to GraphQL being chosen for more complex uses. Federation (unifying diverse GraphQL sources into a single API access point) is such an example. Another is apps with backends created outside the JavaScript ecosystem (headless WordPress is a great example here).
tRPC does have great ergonomics and helps you get started quicker when your app doesn’t need those bells and whistles. A lot of engineers swear by it!
If you want to show GraphQL a little love, here’s some tooling with recent updates and a quick tutorial:
- GraphQL Code Generator: generates TypeScript types from a schema. Recently got persisted operations support.
- Houdini: SvelteKit GraphQL client which just got bumped to version 1.0.
- Deno GraphQL Server: tutorial from Deno on building your own GraphQL server.
📢 Fun Finds #
- Productivity — Glow CLI Markdown previews: This is a fantastic little tool for previewing Markdown files in the Terminal. As a bonus, it also has a Vim plugin. I have tested it in Neovide and it should work in other Vim GUIs.
- Services — Tinybird serverless Clickhouse: with Google retiring Universal Analytics (UA), you might be looking at alternatives. Analysing site traffic in a privacy respecting way helps you deliver what your audience is looking for. I have heard good things about UA alternatives like Fathom, Matomo, Pirsch & Plausible. These all offer a hosted service, and you can self-host some of them. Tinybird is a little different here as it is serverless and they just handle the data. You are free to create your own cookie and decide what data to collect and push to Tinybird. On the serverless platform, you can create data processing pipes and even serve the outputs from REST endpoints. I love the customization potential here. However, if time is a constraint, try their web analytics starter.
- Resources — Comprehensive Rust free Google Course: A great Rust learning resource. It was originally created for Google Android engineers, but is now open sourced and available to anyone. The course is in mdBook format. You compile it locally and can then run interactive exercises in the browser. You will appreciate this course more if you already use the C++ language, as there are frequent references to C++. This saves re-explaining concepts you are already familiar with. You might still prefer The Book if your previous experience is in other languages.
👋🏽 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: