Summary

I don't have anything new or original for comment on 2020, so I won't. However I'm sharing some of my favourite reads from last year and a few details on my new blog and its design.

Favourite reads from 2020

I spent much more time in Spring reading because gestures broadly I had a lot more free time. For me this tended to be books in Spring but over the rest of the year I found myself reading more technology and software articles with the help of Pocket. Here's a quick list of what I've enjoyed:

Disrupted by Dan Lyons

Dan had worked as a writer at Newsweek until he was made redundant. After reporting on tech and startups, he then found work at Hubspot as a marketing fellow and is horrified by the startup's cult-like culture.

I'm not much of an intense reader, and often struggle to find the focus to concentrate on a book, but I finished this one over a weekend. The stories were unbelievable and the inside of a hyper growth startup with the culture described in this book sounds horrendous.

How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You

I found this article is a helpful guide for indication on how to make code reviewing easier for your colleagues. I remember feeling like an idiot when I first began to write software professionally by the number of problems that'd be highlighted in my pull requests.

Deno 1.0

I think Deno is a really interesting project. It is a new JavaScript & TypeScript runtime from the creator of NodeJS, Ryan Dahl, who first showed off the project in his JSConf EU talk. There's a lot to find interesting about Deno both under the hood and in developer experience. There's further reading here in a Deno Handbook.

Understanding (all) JavaScript module formats

I spent a good chunk of 2020 working with JavaScript (Angular, really) but I kept noticing that there was different ways to include files and modules. I had a fuzzy notion of there being different types of JavaScript modules and built systems and such. It wasn't until I got a warning about a CommonJS dependency that I decided to dig into it and landed on this article.

A new design! 🥳

I had been wanting to change up my blog a little for some time now, for no other reason than simply wanting to. I was previously running on Jekyll to create my blog since it's really easy to setup on GitHub pages, and I just chucked in the Texture theme I had found online.

I liked Jekyll because it is a static site generator meaning that it takes my markdown files, marries them to some template files and spits out regular HMTL. The advantage here is that I don't need to run/pay for severs to keep a silly wee blog online and can deploy to services like Azure Static Web Apps or Amazon S3, but I personally use Netlify.

This new blog uses Eleventy, a static site generator built with JavaScript and the theme was made by me with the help of the Tailwind CSS framework. I've used Tailwind on a number of projects recently, including LitPaths and I'm a huge fan of the utility-first approach to CSS - but I have yet to see how that scales with multiple people & teams in a larger system.

I've kept the design largely the same with the tall purple header on the homepage but I've changed the background from a texture to map contours. This is done with an SVG background, and will fall back to just purple when SVG backgrounds are not supported. As an aside, I didn't find the CSS generated on the website like the best solution because it really floats the size of the file which is to be download by the browser. I instead downloaded the SVG, cut it in half (since I do not need to cover a large area) and ran it through SVGOMG which reduced its size by half.

I've also removed the summary & header images for each post from the homepage and turned it into a list of headlines & published date. My analytics indicate that most people appear on this blog directly from either my LinkedIn or Twitter, so I don't want to waste unnecessary bytes on something that doesn't add a lot of value.