Rodney Lab Newsletter — August 2023Rodney Lab Newsletter — August 2023
🍋 Deno Fresh 1.4 #
Deno Fresh is getting quicker updates now with Marvin Hagemeister working on the partial-hydration site generator full-time. Version 1.4 dropped this month, laden with enhancements including:
- a new, more direct approach for editing the document
htmlandheadelements; - optional pre-compilation, allowing faster production response times; and
- improved developer experience for layouts, making adding multiple, nested layouts shared across routes easier.
See Marvin’s Fresh 1.4 post for full details on these and the other new features. There was a joke about a fresh lettuce outlasting a previous British Prime Minister. With Marvin Hagemeister on the team Deno team now, this can be updated to lemons outliving new Deno Fresh versions 😅.
🧑🏽💻 Follower Feedback — SvelteKit Forms #
SvelteKit, another option for generating SSR sites in Svelte, gets high praise. Debugging forms on SvelteKit, though, is probably the area I get asked for most help on. To get you unstuck quicker, I put together a list of 10 SvelteKit Form Mistakes to Avoid.
This starts with a minimal example, then adds user experience and accessibility enhancements, pointing out the pitfalls along the way. It ends with an example of using zod, for form server-side validation. Have a look, and let me know if there is some issue you faced, but I forgot to add!
📢 Fun Finds #
- Productivity — lazygit: I love this lightweight git tooling from Jesse Duffield. It is an efficient alternative, both to GUIs and regular git commands, using a Terminal User Interface, with packages for major operating systems. Jesse recorded a short video to get you going and there are other videos with more advanced tips, on the project GitHub page.
- Package — starry-night Choosing a code highlight theme, which is accessible, and has dark and light modes, can be tricky. Save yourself some time and go with starry-night, based on GitHub’s code highlighting themes. It supports 580 grammars, and you can add it to your project as an NPM package.
- Stack — Leptos: Rust-based SSR and CSR site generator, which has a React-in-Rust feel, though it has no virtual DOM. Leptos is a fine-grained reactive framework; to keep the DOM up-to-date, it efficiently invokes functions, which you define, only when needed. If you have never used Rust before, I would recommend starting with something else, but there is a Leptos book suitable for Rustaceans who want to give it a go.
👋🏽 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: