Rodney Lab Newsletter — April 2023Rodney Lab Newsletter — April 2023
🦀 Pick of the Month — CLI Tools as a Gateway to Rust #
Ask a rustacean how to learn Rust, and they will probably tell you to follow “The Book”. You will also get told to try building a CLI application. And with good reason. The tooling is fantastic, and you will find some accessible crates (Rust packages) like clap for parsing CLI options and indicatif for progress bars.
You might not know, though, there is a handful of other, more specialized,
official books like The Embedded Rust Book. The series includes
Command Line Applications in Rust,
which is a lighter alternative to the main book, which takes you through
building a grep replacement. You can start with zero Rust knowledge and just
dip into “The Book” when you need more background.
I followed the CLI book to build out a little tool for writing content. Something more lightweight than Astro or Deno Fresh, Markwrite parses Markdown files into HTML and has a little LanguageTool (see Fun Finds, below) integration too. I’m loving building it and trying out Rust crates. Here are some I am using:
- askama: Jinja-like templating but fully typed
- axum: web server with WebSocket support
- notify: watches files for changes
- pulldown-cmark: Markdown parsing
🧑🏽💻 Follower Feedback — Markdown Blogging #
I’ve had a few questions, from followers, about creating Markdown blogs with SvelteKit. Joy of Code have just dropped a quite complete post on creating a Markdown blog in SvelteKit from scratch, with page transitions, Open Props and more. This is a quality resource on the topic.
You can still come with your questions, though! I love Astro’s new Content Collections, which let you add schema (and bring type safety) to your Markdown front matter; I want to put something together on adding similar features in SvelteKit, working in some of your requests!
📢 Fun Finds #
- Tooling — ThumbHash from Evan Wallace (creator of ESBuild and Figma cofounder) is an alternative to the BlurHash algorithm. Like BlurHash, ThumbHash creates a compact representation of an image, useful for low-quality placeholders. ThumbHash is able to encode more image detail in the same space and additionally includes aspect ratio data. Evan created JavaScript, Rust and Swift implementations, and there are also community contributions supporting other languages.
- Services — LanguageTool: proofreading API with a free tier. Submit your text of up to 65,000 characters to the API as a REST request, and get spelling, punctuation and grammar suggestions back. On the free tier, the character limit is 1,500 and you cannot create a custom dictionary. There is an IP rate limit, but the cap is high enough for quite reasonable use. Look out for a blog post on using LanguageTool with SvelteKit Forms!
- Resources — Google Fonts Typography Guide: a complete reference guide to typesetting from Google. With dozens of articles, organized around topics such as Essentials and Choosing type, this is a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to learn more about typography.
👋🏽 Until next time! #
Hope there was something valuable in here for you. As always, reach out with feedback. Here are some links to recent content, which I hope you will find useful: