💻 My favourite tech

18 October 2020 - Antigua, Guatemala

Thought I’d change it up this week and talk about tech. Specifically the tech I enjoy using most.

🔪 A killer frontend stack

JQuery is simple, well supported, and still uses by 80% of sites in 2020. I use v1.12 exclusively to maintain IE6 support.
Dreamweaver isn’t so popular these days but the cute product name keeps me hooked.
Ever heard of Wordpress? I agree, too mainstream. That’s why the classic Joomla is my CMS of choice.
How do my designs look so good? MS clipart is key in helping me maintain a consistent feel throughout my apps.

Ok I kid.

preact - It’s React but on a diet (3kB!). The syntax is identical and it even supports React libraries.
typescript - Not using TS? Are you living under a rock? Make JS fun again and actually usable in prod.
zustand - Forget redux, manage state easily via react hooks
react-spring - Powerful natural animations thanks to spring physics
axios - Easy API requests. I love the custom adapters to extend API calls across an entire app
parcel - By far the easiest to use bundler ever. Bundle every library above with ZERO config. It’s incredible.

Been eager to try out next.js too. The route pre-fetching looks sweet.

concurrently - Running multiple dev servers at once? Use this to spin them up with a single npm command.
husky - Writing git hooks can be tedious. Husky makes it easy as you run them from your package.json file.
patch-package - Have a broken npm module? Patch it yourself with a custom fix. Comes in very handy.

🌋 + ☕ = 👩‍💻

On another note how good is coffee right? Despite the situation I love that I can get mine from frickin volcanos.

Those who know me know that I’m a huge fan of Tailwind CSS. It’s honestly made me a better designer.
Setup is a little involved but their new play editor let’s you try it instantly
I could ramble for hours but here are my fav perks:
- 📱 Inline media queries makes you a responsive god
- 🔧 Never break styles on other screens again. Styles are bound to elements so it’s really hard to break stuff.
- 👀 Things just look nicer. It’s fully extensible but the default styles work so nicely together.
- 📛 I never have to come up with new class names. I love it.

I was sceptical at first too but you have to try it to see the benefits. It’s worth it, trust me.

Django - combines the beauty of Python with a simply fantastic web framework. Adding the frontend was tricky but overall it’s awesome.
Firebase - the best way to get AWS like powers with the ease of a JS library. You get auth, DBs, serverless functions plus much more. One downside is the library is HUGE (like 2MB).
Heroku - once you get config sorted it’s just nice to work with. I started using pipelines recently which has been great for testing.
Netlify - my go-to for static site hosting. It’s super quick to setup and I like their extra features like serverless form capture.

Last week I mentioned I’m running some experiments. They’re still in progress but check out the UI here.
I made my analytics privacy-friendly and built internal stats and analytics for the experiment tracking
The Firefox extension was approved! Making it public TOMORROW.

Want more tech summaries like this or a run down of how I built previous projects? Get in contact and let me know!