Rodney Lab Newsletter — May 2024Rodney Lab Newsletter — May 2024
❤️ Svelte 5 RC #
Svelte 5 is now at the Release Candidate stage, and the full release should be just around the corner. I have been using it with Astro as it was being developed, and am excited to see the final thing released. New features include:
- new Runes fine-grained reactivity system;
- more efficient
ifandeachblocks; and - Hot Module Reloading.
Keen to hear your thoughts on the new features!
🧑🏽💻 Follower Feedback — Centring Text with Capsize CSS #
Saw this nice post on centring text in CSS by Niki. It’s not your typical skit on centring content within a div; instead, it looks at centring text on a line, how the default spacing above and below a font can seem arbitrary and how some apps like Figma solve the problem.
Capsize CSS is a fantastic typography tooling especially for this issue, giving you precise control on text layout. Capsize font metrics have data for Google fonts, and are also utilized in Fontaine to reduce layout shift.
In case you missed these, here is some content I have put together on using Capsize directly and in other packages:
- Svelte Capsize Styling: Typography Tooling;
- Astro Font Fallbacks with Capsize: reduce CLS; and
- SvelteKit Fontaine: Reduce Custom Font CLS.
Hope you find these useful!
📢 Fun Finds #
- Design Article — Generate Colour Palettes for Design Systems: Good read in which Matt Ström-Awm talks about how the Stripe team rebuilt their colour palettes using a systematic approach.
- Learning — 100-exercises-to-learn-rust: More free Rust training from Luca Palmieri and the Mainmatter team. Another bite-sized options (previously linked), for starting Rust is the rustlings project.
- Tools — ATAC — Postman functionality from the Terminal: following the recent trend of Text-based User Interface (TUI) apps, inspired by Charm (Go-based) and Ratatui (Rust-based) tooling, ATAC lets you test you REST based API right from the Terminal, a little more convenient than curl and this tools offers a lightweight alternative to Postman.
👋🏽 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: