Rodney Lab Newsletter — July 2024Rodney Lab Newsletter — July 2024
🚀 Astro Server Islands #
Astro 4.12 is out with experimental Server Islands. I can’t wait to try this exciting addition. Much like the content islands that Astro has from day one, for adding interactive, hydrating regions to otherwise static pages, Server Islands let you mix server-rendered content with static content on a single page.
Staring at a page of placeholder animations while waiting for a server-rendered page to load can be quite frustrating. Loading static content faster should mean a much improved experience for users. Excited to explore this bold new frontier!
🧑🏽💻 Follower Feedback — egui Rust GUI #
An often-recommended approach for getting into Rust is creating a CLI app. There is a Rust CLI book and the Rust package ecosystem has crates like:
- Clap: for command line argument parsing;
- indicatif: for progress bars; and
- Ratatui: for taking your CLI app to the next level.
If you are feeling bold, or are want a new challenge after scratching the itch with your first text-based Rust app, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) might be what you are looking for.
egui lets you create GUIs in Rust and my posts on using it to create a Cistercian clock or for a game development back-end have earned some positive feedback. egui uses immediate mode rendering, which typically results in simpler code, when compared to retained mode libraries (like QT). That said it might take a little time to adjust to if you are used to creating pixel-perfect CSS sites with Web tooling.
The posts list some fantastic resources to help you find your feet:
- Trying egui: building a Cistercian Clock with Rust GUI;
- Macroquad egui DevTools: Rust Game Debugging UI; and
- Using egui for Bevy ECS Introspection with Macroquad Rendering.
📢 Fun Finds #
- DevOps Tooling — typos: Fast
tooling for finding typos in your code. It is tailored for code repos,
recognizing, for example composite camel-case identifiers (like
GetEnvironmentVariable). typos is written in Rust and lightning fast, so suitable for running locally on larger code bases, and also has a GitHub Action. - Learning —
Build React Hooks:
Epic React free tutorial from Kent C. Dodds to help nail using
useState,useEffecthooks like a pro. - Web Library — Shoelace Component Library: React & Vue component library with full set of building blocks you can style and drop into a project or use for creating a design system.
👋🏽 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: