Rodney Lab Newsletter — October 2023Rodney Lab Newsletter — October 2023
🍋 Deno Fresh 1.5 #
Deno released Fresh 1.5 this month, and it’s exciting to see the project continue to evolve at such a rapid pace. This latest release brought Developer Experience (DX) enhancements, including:
- Active link styling to simplify scoping CSS for links to the current page in a navigation menu, for example.
- Content Security Policy (CSP) enhancements; building on existing Fresh CSP to add nonces to script tags automatically.
- New in-browser error overlay catches up the Fresh experience with Astro DX, helping you debug errors quicker during development.
See the Deno blog for full details on these improvements, as well as other new features. If you are new to Deno Fresh, try spinning up a new Fresh project to see what the fuss is about!
🧑🏽💻 Follower Feedback — Image Tooling #
Web image tooling has moved up a level this year. You will have seen Lighthouse
recommendations to serve images in the modern formats and at the right
size for the device. Manually adding markup with HTML <picture> elements can
be a pain, and it is fantastic to see tooling step-up to help you here.
- Astro Picture component — this new Astro built-in component is feature-filled. It is impressive as an independent component, though the seamless Content Collection integrations are where it really exceeds expectations.
- unpic — this project from Netlify’s Matt Kane has plugins for Astro, React, Svelte and in-fact every other major framework. It is designed with image hosting services in mind, though you can set up your own image API for any projects that have a tight budget.
- sharp — the gold standard for JavaScript image tooling. Written in C, the project previously only supported Node environments. Not any more! Maintainer Lovell is updating sharp’s package installation, and sharp now supports Bun and Deno, with WASM plans also in the pipeline. Lovell is actively seeking feedback on the recent alpha releases.
📢 Fun Finds #
- a11y Resources Accessibility Study Guide — see this accessibility and inclusivity guide from Nielsen Norman Group to bring yourself up to speed on the latest best practices. The guide has a mix of articles and videos you can work through at your own pace.
- Tooling — Rust Telemetry Workshop: Luca Palmieri is a Rust educator and author of the book Zero to Production in Rust, which we looked at in an earlier issue. His recent EuroRust workshop on Rust telemetry is now open-sourced, and you clone the repo and run the exercises locally.
- Side Project Inspiration Embedded Rust Introduction on BBC micro:bit — Embedded Rust is a super idea for a new side-project. As you might expect for a Rust specialization, there are free books for complete beginners and those with some working knowledge of Rust or embedded development in other languages. Get a micro:bit for around $20 and try this book if you are new both to Rust and coding for system-on-chip microcontrollers.
👋🏽 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: