#8 Idalia goes back to school

8/31/2023

Hello 👋🏼 frontendies! Welcome to the eighth issue of our newsletter!

Let's begin by warmly welcoming our new frontendies fellows - we have doubled in size in the last month! To be exact, we've grown by 115% 🚀 I appreciate your support and could not be more thrilled to have you on board!

In other news, I am excited to announce that I have added an RSS feed. Feel free to subscribe if that's the way you like to read your favorite frontend newsletter!

Now that the back-to-school craze has quieted down and we've warmly welcomed hurricane Idalia to Mickey Mouse's land, I've got a chance to select several articles, tool updates and some minor platform changes from last month. I hope you find every bit of it enjoyable - happy reading!

Platform

Nodejs with native .env files support

Node.js is preparing to release v20.6.0, and it's got some cool features you might want to check out. The big news? Node.js now supports files for configuring environment variables - in other words, native .env files support. We can say bye-bye to dotenv packages! ✌🏻

HTTP status code: 103

Safari and Firefox are now receiving the 103 HTTP status code, which is a great enhancement for those who value performance and seek ways to preload resources more efficiently. With the 103 response, your server can supply the browser with a resource list that can be retrieved prior to loading your document, allowing for some performance boost.

Emoji in my VSCode

Have you heard of the Emoji File Icons VSCode extension? Scott from Syntax.fm has a short clip about it, and it's pretty cool. Instead of using custom icons for different file types, you can use system emojis. I have to admit I like this extension more than I thought I would. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Astro 3.0

The new major version of Astro is out - the first web framework to support the View Transitions API! On top of that, we're getting new image optimization (I'm very excited about this one), faster rendering performance, serverless enhancements, and optimized build output!

CSS Selectors: A Visual Guide & Reference

A great visual guide to CSS selectors, from simple ones like element and class to the ones that I'm still tripping on to this day like :nth-last-of-type. I also recommend checking out other mini tools on that website!

Tailwind CSS Color Generator

A useful tiny tool that will help you create a complete color swatch based on a given HEX or HSL value. Once you have your color scale, test it with some sample components, export it to your preferred format (including tailwind config), or check the contrast grid to ensure accessibility!

Storybook Visual Tests addon

Storybook is giving us a sneak peek at their new Visual Tests add-on, powered by Chromatic. This nifty tool will allow you to run chromatic tests from your local environment, so you should get much faster feedback and fix all bugs 🐛 during development without pushing your code and waiting ages for your CI!

Why we'll stay remote

It's hard to believe that working from home was initially considered a temporary solution. Well, Supabase is here to provide insights into why they are choosing to continue with remote work. Great read, especially when some companies attempt to force their employees to return to the old ways.

Why Tailwind CSS Won

Whether you like it or not, Tailwind CSS is taking over the CSS framework landscape, leaving its competitors in the dust. Why? Well, Matt Rickard has some hypotheses and thoughts about it.

#8 Idalia goes back to school