Idea Showcase

slug: supapechakucha

I used to use yt5s all the time to rip and remix videos:

I just got a Home Assistant Voice (https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/) recently. I was so excited to try it out as a programmable Alexa.

I recently kicked off a 99designs contest for a new logo: https://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-brand-ai-engineering-podcast-help-define-industry-1307842/

I was very excited when I saw Cal Newport's episode on Structured Journaling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptcgqoMQ33A) come up, but I was disappointed by the recommendations:

I've been interested in being more intentional with my work, time and life recently. Here is **my working definition of how to be more intentional**.

if you like me\*, and you're interested but never thought to ask, just ask!

i was involved in 3 end of year-ish recaps today:

this is the tracking doc for my talk on "Engineering AI Agents" for OpenAI DevDay Singapore. I'll add photos and notes and stuff when i'm done. note that the full slides contain a lot more info that i had to cut out of the ~~10~~ 9 minute talk.

I set up a new Mac for work today. Here's everything I use on a Mac for fullstack web development.

i recently had to move (from smolhaus 1.5 to a temporary place) and so had to evaluate some choices in moving options. TLDR: **I made a huge mistake not choosing Clutter**.

> this post was mostly dictated off the top of my head with Wispr AI

4.5 years after my initial podcast inventory (https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts), with COVID and a career change under my belt, with my OPML file growing from 566 rss feeds in 2022 to 771\* in 2024 (https://github.com/swyxio/2024podcastreset) (with quite a few of my fave NPR podcasts dying), and my backlog mounting to 43GB (according to this script (https://yaleman.org/post/2020/2020-02-03-simple-overcast-stats/), my outstanding episodes: 11915 (played: 22451)), I am now needing to declare podcast bankruptcy.

We have just come off a very intense production period of the first AI Engineer World's Fair (https://x.com/aiDotEngineer/status/1791506805065216017), the large, multi-track format of the AI Engineer series of conferences that my biz partner Ben and I are building. I am historically bad at writing down lessons and thoughts, so I am sitting down at my laptop on a friday evening at a McDonald's with my m2 macbook air on 16% battery and writing and writing until my battery runs out of juice (or I do).

> My first attempt at bringing back the short story (https://www.swyx.io/short-stories) in ~30 years.

I manifested (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1548867050684272642) a "State of Diffusion++" meetup yesterday that I felt was a success. 200 people signed up! Here are some photos!

A collection of public thoughts that could be blogposts but i dont have time, so here, have the short form. I may upgrade these to full posts in future.

A collection of public thoughts that could be blogposts but i dont have time, so here, have the short form. I may upgrade these to full posts in future.

There was a time, before the screens took over, when people read these things called "books". Remarkably efficient things. Always-on display. Could survive dropping from a great height. Somewhat fragile but who cares when you could mass produce thousands of the things for hundreds of dollars.

The new iPhones ditched the physical mute button with a software enabled action button, that allows some customization. the highest degree of customization is Shortcuts. Apple's default transcription is terrible. I got a new iPhone recently and so this is my chance.

If you fit one of these criteria:

As someone who does a lot of my learning via podcasts, I've been putting up picks lists for 4 years straight (see main 2019 list (https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts), then my 2020 (https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts-2020) and 2021 (https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts-2021) and 2022 (https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts-2022) diffs), so it's time to do year 5(!)

I worked on a little hackathon project at AGI House with Sasha. We won!

My first introduction to bouldering was in 2017, in DUMBO Boulders in Brooklyn Bridge Park ( now closed (https://www.brooklynbridgepark.org/about/press-releases/bbp-selects-dumbo-boulders-to-operate-bouldering-wall-at-main-street/)):

I was recently involved in moderating a chat with Kanjun Qiu of Imbue at the MIT AI conf: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNJ9i78ICeg2YuemyAXmtStKvqr9l0Tao3xQWxmeAVjBALHn\_NnFvPXFlNSkdMfqA?pli=1\&key=dTFRRHBTLVRZTEVCem0zal8tNVkxblh0V3k4VXhR

## 2024 update

A personal guide to Singapore for foreign friends visiting.

Sarah (https://twitter.com/saranormous/status/1696740417671442796) asks a provoking question that has been on my mind a lot as I transition from part time creator (https://www.swyx.io/part-time-creator-manifesto) to founder:

I last talked about my Latent Space adventures in April (https://www.swyx.io/ranking-1-on-hn-in-mid-april) and last December (https://www.swyx.io/lspace-2022). Even as a well regarded developer- part-time-creator (https://www.swyx.io/part-time-creator-manifesto), the Latent Space Newsletter + Pod has done much better than I usually do. Here are the stats as of today:

My smol menubar (https://github.com/smol-ai/menubar) project utilizes Electron's special webview tag (https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/webview-tag) to dynamically generate a list of sub browser windows for chat. For the last couple months I've had an issue with the SSO popups in this, namely that they just don't work at all, presumably because Electron blocks popups for you by default.

> note - this is a hasty written braindump of feelings as emotions as I don't have the time to polish this essay up to my usual standards, but still wanted to capture this important moment and end in my life. pardon any poorly phrased and organized thoughts. The JSJam guys did a roundup of reactions here (https://www.javascriptjam.com/august-1-2023/) and Ricmac did one on The New Stack (https://thenewstack.io/is-jamstack-toast-some-developers-say-yes-netlify-says-no/).

as a cheapo who uses Apple iCloud (the world's worst (https://www.swyx.io/what-to-do-when-icloud-is-stuck-on-uploading-items) sync service) as a sync service for my Obsidian Second Brain (https://www.swyx.io/obsidian-brain), I have recently run into this issue a lot:

I'm pretty new to the pypi packaging ecosystem so recently ran into some trouble pushing a python package:

## Prerequisites

One of the most common problems in the beginning stage of a founder journey is establishing the cofounder group. I thought I would jot down some notes from my own experience + that of friends in similar situations.

I've been quite inspired by David Sacks' The Cadence (https://medium.com/craft-ventures/the-cadence-how-to-operate-a-saas-startup-436aa8099e8) ever since I read it. It prescribes an operational process and ideal team structure for a 50-500 person startup - running sales, finance, product, and marketing in sync in quarterly cycles with effective communication between functions.

I set up a new Mac for work today. Here's everything I use on a Mac for fullstack web development.

I have just received my O1A Visa and like for the H1B1 (https://www.swyx.io/h1b1), I figured I should write down my experience, thoughts, and tips for those who may wish to make the same journey. Note that I am not a professional at this, I'm just a guy who recently went through it so dont rely on me for precise facts, mostly a fellow traveler a little ahead of you.

some of you may know I've recently started a new company. I'm not ready to talk about -that- yet, but I did want to capture some notes on logistical stuff I have had to ramp up on as a first time founder. hopefully this helps somebody out there.

I last wrote about Ranking #1 on HN in December (https://www.swyx.io/lspace-2022), and wanted to offer an update from my mild hit today. I am now taking Latent Space (https://latent.space/) (the new name enabled by the previous owner of that domain selling it to me in my first P2P domain purchase (https://www.swyx.io/substack-change-domain)) a lot more seriously with the support of my partner and friend Alessio.

Since September, I've been running my AI newsletter on https://lspace.swyx.io

> Note: sometimes WhisperX is WAAYYYY too slow so I often end up using https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp which somehow runs much faster.

TLDR, https://megaphone.spotify.com/ rehosts all mp3s

I honestly never expected this to be a topic that was common enough to write up, however, it suddenly hit me today that it is the *ultra niche topics* that deserve writing up since it is the stuff that is outside the usual SERP riffraff.

Discussing the 2023 migration of swyx.io to the SvelteKit 1.0 and the swyxkit template

All rocketship startups are alike, but every fading startup is fading in its own way.

One of my biggest and scariest projects of 2022 was co-organizing the first-ever **DEV | WRITERS | RETREAT** in Miami!

As someone who does a lot of my learning via podcasts, I've been putting up picks lists for 3 years straight (see main 2019 list (https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts), then my 2020 (https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts-2020) and 2021 (https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts-2021) diffs), so it's time to do year 4 (!)

For those who weren't aware (you would be if you were subscribed (https://lspace.swyx.io/subscribe?simple=true\&next=https://lspace.swyx.io/) on email!), I started a separate AI blog, L-space Diaries (https://lspace.swyx.io/), this year to 1) try out Substack in anger and 2) create a focused feed on a topic rather than a person (I also started DX Tips (https://dx.tips/) for devtools/devrel writing, but have been accordingly distracted).

This post was written as a reflection at the first Dev Writers Retreat. It's been really weird doing this in the PermaParty city while the world seemingly falls apart outside. Here's my attempt to make sense of it.

We use Docusaurus at work, and while it shipped v2 this year it still has ( as of v2.3 (https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/issues/2961)) not shipped with any Tailwind support at all. Googled and found this post (https://dev.to/sajclarke_62/using-tailwindcss-v3-in-docusaurus-in-5-steps-5c26) which was almost everything I needed, but required some stuff in the comments for it to work.

Just a quick tutorial and explanation of how best to set up concurrently with named and colored log output since I had to look it up today.

I returned to Zadar!

How to break the cold start problem in content creation as a new entrant to any field, and getting the leaders of that field to at least read your writing and know your name.

I was interviewed for Livecycle's DevX interview series here (https://livecycle.io/blogs/devx-project-swyx/). Reproducing for posterity.

Some show notes for my Svelte Summit talk for those who are looking for all the references and cut content.

a brief meditation on why we keep trying to build God Endpoints and why we will fail until we figure out interfaces.

Some show notes for my CascadiaJS talk for those who are looking for all the references and cut content.

Let's rethink the humble Index Page from first principles.

Bottom Line Up Front: You are probably underestimating how much goes into blogging technology these days.

The Twitter API has changed (from v1 to v2), and Python has gone from 2 to 3, and Google is still serving up loads of outdated results.

Today's fun emergency at work was a first - writing a security postmortem for a breach of an *open source user* (aka not a breach of us, which seems the norm).

This week in a Svelte Radio recording (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1555596996744028160), @rich-harris commented that something I said was "uniquely swyx": an offhand observation that "we are all professional streamers now" \ ^1 . I responded that I've been calling this behavior "barbarianism" - you can listen to the full explanation when the episode drops in future (https://www.svelteradio.com/).

Society is splintering in an unacceptable way and I have a metaphor for it.

I use iCloud as my syncing engine for my Obsidian Second Brain (https://www.swyx.io/obsidian-brain), and twice now I've seen iCloud get corrupted into a really bad state. I also back up everything to github (https://github.com/sw-yx/brain), so I dont really experience much data loss, but it is annoying to see iCloud be so unreliable at even the simple task of syncing mostly text files.

> 2024 update: for those who work in devrel/organize less-social-more-technical meetups, I have now written How to Organize Meetups Good on Dx.tips (https://dx.tips/meetups-guide)

An advanced tip for high-volume writers.

We had a delightful discussion on the importance of writing weekly updates in this week's Coding Career Community meetup (https://learninpublic.org/#community). I rarely get so excited about an idea I immediately know I need to start doing it, so I'm choosing to write it up to commit to it, and to share it with you.

My recent End of Localhost (https://dx.tips/the-end-of-localhost) piece on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31669762) came with the usual dash of HN criticism devolving into blaming beginners for not knowing the same parts of the stack that they consider mandatory (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31669762#31671401):

Recently, John Cutler tweeted (https://twitter.com/johncutlefish/status/1533661807029563392?s=21\&t=WJORvdw2EyoLB1ChjQ8NpA) a chart on the view of management:

I've been unhappy with my tweet rendering strategy (https://github.com/sw-yx/swyxkit/issues/61) for a while - Twitter encourages you to use their heavy JS script to render tweets, which undoubtedly heaps all sorts of tracking on the reader, docks your lighthouse performance score by ~17 points, adds ~4 seconds to Time to Interactive, occasionally gets adblocked (so *nothing* renders!)

> This post was originally published on my new dedicated DX site: https://dx.tips/the-end-of-localhost

2 years ago I moved all my blogging to Dev.to (https://www.swyx.io/devto-cms). Today my main blog is on Github Issues (https://www.swyx.io/github-cms) and I've just launched DXTips on Hashnode (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1531330889535602688).

> This post was originally published on my new dedicated DX site: https://dx.tips/circles

Now that the dust has settled on the Plaid-Stripe thing it's time to recap lessons learned.

Docker is great. Docker Desktop sucks. Here's my fix.

I set up a new Mac for work today. Here's everything I use on a Mac for fullstack web development.

Risk cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be redistributed

Slides and show notes for my updated Talk at Reactathon

a reprint of my interview on Will Larson's InfraEng project.

These are the raw notes of my talk prep for my React Miami 2022 talk - Temporal - React for the Backend. Includes links and initial draft at the bottom.

Why Temporal is worth >$1b now, why it will be worth >$10b, and how it *could* be worth $100b

Grabbing the audio

the full text of my State of JS writeup!

An insightful discussion on how to trade off aiming for viral or permanent posts.

Discussing the 2022 migration of swyx.io to SvelteKit and GitHub Issues

The case for having a -Public- Second Brain, and why I picked Obsidian.

As I build out swyxkit, I am finding that I am no longer prototyping and that I need to be able to refactor with confidence.

Discussing the 2022 migration of swyx.io to SvelteKit and GitHub Issues

TurboRepo is a big deal for the JS community because it addresses the monorepo problem head on, bringing 85% faster build speeds and great architecture/docs/marketing.

EDA tools like Datasette dramatically lower the cost of data analysis, with a surprisingly simple ELT contract - You handle the Extract phase, it handles the Load, and exposes a standard UI for you to do dynamic Transforms.

The default Transistor.fm website is kinda ugly. Here's how to customize your Transistor.fm website if you use Transistor. But also it's a simple guide to do clientside customizations of almost any website whose code you don't control.

My picks of best podcasts I found in 2021, across tech, business, and creator categories. I also pick up on best of the best from 2020.

A piece of advice I heard about marketing and community that I've repeated to founders ever since - Get Good at Events.

Simple grab and go upgrade to the base user agent stylesheet to make for readable sites

AWS is playing Chess. Cloudflare is playing Go.

How I broke out of the tiresome REST vs GraphQL debate - by realizing that the real battle is between Smart Clients and Smart Servers!

just some memories 20 years after 9/11.

Swipe Files are underrated, passively compounding sources of personal leverage for your creator journey.

Relatively new Git features that actually have me excited

Improvements in DX in both programming languages and cloud infrastructure will eventually converge in a single paradigm, where you truly "just write business logic" and the platform mostly figures out the rest.

Usage billing is the new hotness for SaaS, and I have personally seen the pain it caused, but I was ultimately scared off from investing in it.

DevRel is hot but nobody knows how to measure it. That's because we don't agree on what effective DevRel *is*, and we don't agree on the tradeoffs of lagging vs leading metrics for a creative, unattributable, intimately human endeavor.

There is too much money chasing too few operators.

An excerpt from Becoming Steve Jobs that made me stop in my tracks.

Temporal ties Orchestration, Event Sourcing, and Workflows-as-Code in one distributed system and it is eating the world.

I set up a new Mac for work today. Here's everything I use on a Mac for fullstack web development.

Learning is *BOTH* a discrete and a continuous process. If the tools we use don't respect this duality, information is lost — either writing involves too much effort, or reading requires too much context.

This post (together with the embedded talk) aims to give you a solid mental model on what each Activity timeout in Temporal does and when to use it.

Remember what life can do.

The conclusions are far more nuanced when you ask the people involved at the time.

My own content creation philosophy, explored through my own personal story with React

Celebrating following 100 episodes of my mixtape, and reflecting on why this works

Stripe has entered the No Code market in a big way! I take a crack at explaining what it's doing and why.

Automated code quality with GitHub Actions, Husky, Lint-staged, Prettier, and ESLint

*This post originated as an AMA on IndieHackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/made-121-326-since-launching-my-book-last-july-63-of-it-after-launch-month-ama-about-long-tail-infoproducts-41b55f5670)*

Lessons from React, GraphQL, and Rich Hickey on how to design software that doesn't implode the first time requirements change.

The Innovator's Dilemma according to MKBHD, applied to YouTube's attempt to clone TikTok

A case study I published for my work at Temporal

Expertise in a subject often goes in a bell curve of simple → complex → simple. Can we skip the complexity?

Working out a thought exercise by Paul Graham.

Don't spend your life spraying 20% effort all over the place, hoping for 80% results, only to look back and wonder why you never hit 100% on anything.

a simple tutorial

I turn 35 today. Here are 35 principles I have accumulated and try to live by.

First we shape X, then X shapes us.

A simple way to normalize asking for help.

Letting my writing improve under the heat of feedback

Comparing the two popular custom dynamic content solutions!

Why we need more people creating Part Time and how you can do it too.

What if we just assumed we might have two of everything?

A recap of my first ever conference talk

What if the real product was the friends we made along the way?

Produce Consistency, Publish Quality by buffering.

The most underrated part of Singapore that foreigners don't appreciate

My first time being a technical reviewer for a published book!

You can enhance the web by making wrappers around it.

Two ways to approach responsibility in a company.

Understanding new social media is a *sociological* exercise, not a logical one.

Many language ecosystems use try/catch paradigms to represent both errors and exceptions. This is wrong.

Every creator wrestles with the tradeoff between quality and consistency. The answer - Default to consistency, and cut scope.

Don't play games you don't want to win.

A simple way to decide when and what to write.

What got you here won't get you there.

A tutorial on data scraping with AWS Amplify

The biggest unanswered question in the study of systems.

A review and reflection of Morgan Housel's bestselling collection of essays on personal/behavioral finance

A system for goalsetting.

Alex Lakatos interviewed me for the Devrel Advent calendar he put together

I was interviewed by Pete from No CS Degree on my journey, here are some extracts!

I was interviewed by Chris Bongers on Daily Dev Tips, here are some extracts.

Making personal side projects for fun and profit.

React Server Components are a nuanced, sweeping addition to React's existing capabilities. This is my guide.

With the Amplify Sandbox, it is really easy to model and think through any app backend scenario

My thoughts on preselling, from having done it successfully exactly one time.

Two opposing forces that describe how perception and reality do battle.

AWS just added the easiest way to deploy long running serverful code alongside a serverless architecture.

Why are so many CS pioneers from Denmark?

Developer Experience is shifting left, all the way to onKeyUp.

What happens when we can't convince machines that we are human?

An update to my favorite podcasts list with the ones I have found this year

How we plan to fail with Thoughtful Error Message Design at Temporal.

Five themes I am optimistic about for the next decade - and more open questions I have no idea about.

The 'API Economy' is a popular term for VC's and tech media, however Developers seem ironically out of the loop despite their central importance to the whole story. Here's my explanation, together with a dash of economics and social implications.

Our 9th transparency update describing how we are shipping the upcoming Authentication feature

Some things we often repeat as truth just aren't. We should call bullshit more often.

My Notes on Slobodan Stojanovic's Serverless GraphQL with AppSync talk

'I will find free money for you' is one of my favorite business models. Here's a quick definition of Found-Money Startups and a short list I've been keeping.

Reflections from two-and-a bit years helping to run /r/Reactjs

Why we should stop trying to use the same tool for different jobs.

A demo using AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) using Amplify Storage, Svelte, and Tailwind CSS

Notes on Randy Pausch's lecture on Time Management

Reflection on how both gyms and startups do choice architecture and how we can be more conscious of this

Before you start offering Software as a Service, perhaps just offer a Service.

Following up and following through is a well known formula for success. Yet people don't do it. Why?

Why I changed my mind on Tailwind CSS, and why I now consider it the Goldilocks Styling Solution

Many things that make sense individually don't make sense as a group.

5 Things I Learned about Node.js Fundamentals from the Node.js Design Patterns Book

A lightning fast overview of everything you need to know to set up a REST endpoint with full CRUD capability with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB and AWS Amplify in 2 minutes.

Notes from an a16z podcast about developer relations that I thought was valuable

This is the blog version of a talk I am giving at React Summit 2020

One of the greatest autobiographies by a business icon and great writer

Summarizing thoughts from Seth Godin and Cory Doctorow on Interoperability

I care a lot about creating Cool URIs so I have been paralyzed more than I should be about what I'm calling "URL Architecture". In true fashion, I'm blogging about it.

A quick 3 step guide for myself on how to set up Svelte with Tailwind CSS

My glowing review of Rob Hope's Landing Page Hot Tips Book

Your entire worldview changes when you realize you can *create luck*.

I did a livestream with John Lindquist from Egghead.io today, and he blew my mind on how much mileage you can get out of your keyboard!

AWS Amplify launched a Flutter Integration, so I thought I would record a quick video and blogpost

Notes I have collected on how to renaming the Git default/primary branch

Tips for Speakers Prerecording Talks for Online Conferences

It's time we look beyond the easy questions in developer experience, and start addressing the uncomfortable ones.

A quick demo of how easy it is to add realtime, offline persistence to an app with Amplify DataStore

A Brief Guide to Startup Fundraising Terminology for Beginners

I answered some questions from someone planning to write their first book

Revisiting one of my favorite talks ever, on designing programming languages for user extensibility and collaboration

A quick book review of the new Mongoose.js book from Val Karpov

I submitted my book's landing page for Rob Hope's review and he obliged! Brutal feedback incoming.

I did a Q\&A for Fullstack Academy Bootcamp Prep students - copying out my answers here!

making my own vs code snippets helpers for working with AWS Amplify

A snippet I use all the time

Reflections on the Coding Career book launch

I'm launching my career advice book today!

Amplify Console just got the ability to create a custom subdomain for every new branch. This makes creating versioned docs a cinch!

I'm starting to feel some RSI in my left hand. It's a matter of time. I decided to collect some information about it to make improvements now rather than later.

Recounting my process of how I started with 2 HEY email invites and ended up raising $2575 in Donations to Support Diversity in Tech!

Confidence is a dual edged sword. I trafficked in confidence when I was in finance, and now I see it everywhere I look.

Answering Q\&A's

AWS Amplify assumes CommonJS, which Rollup is allergic to. I recently discovered that you can make it work with Rollup with a few tweaks.

Where Amplify fits in AWS' trajectory, and why I am joining

A bunch of things are moving in JavaScript - it is quite feasible that the JS of 10 years from now will look totally unrecognizable

Having weird sleeping hours is working out... very well for me.

Reflecting on the sudden switch away from Slack for Developer communities

Making the case for Mainstream EOL of IE 11.

A single mindset shift that changed my entire attitude to software.

This is a *very* high level overview of tech strategy; that is, the *business of software* rather than the art and science of creating software itself.

The next step in the evolution of the Cloud is specialized distros.

Let's think about the value chain of humans that code and how we interact.

Assemble your Personal Brand, your Domain, and your Coding Skills/Business Value, then Market Yourself in Public + at Work.

I'm writing a Dev Career Advice book... and I'm scared shitless!

Reviewing Alex DeBrie's new the DynamoDB Book

## Bottom Line Up Front

A quick exercise to improve your attention to detail when implementing/designing with CSS.

> 2021 edit: note that tailwind typography now comes with a `not-prose` class (https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwindcss-typography-v0-5#undo-prose-styles) that unsets typography styles

Here's a recorded screenshare chat I had with Sean Grove (https://twitter.com/sgrove), Cofounder of OneGraph! We swapped out the Next.js API Routes that I manually set up in my livestreaming, to the premade GraphQL integration that OneGraph has with Dev.to. As a bonus, this takes care of user authentication so it doesn't rely on getting Dev.to API keys!

In my livestream today (https://dev.to/swyx/make-your-own-dev-to-cms-livestream-part-4-6em) I had the need to bring in a spinner component to show work in progress in my app. However found that existing React spinners were too heavy. That's when I had the idea to use web components in my Next.js (React/Preact) app for the first time ever!

This is day 4 of my livecode Dev.to CMS.

What happens if we did away with plugins altogether? The case for Imperative Recipes

10 Principles I Learned

This is day 3 of my livecode Dev.to CMS.

## Bottom Line Up Front

This is day 2 of my livecode Dev.to CMS. See Day 1 here (https://dev.to/swyx/make-your-own-dev-to-cms-livestream-part-1-2ad1)

Livecoding my own Dev.to CMS with Next.js + Preact + TypeScript + Tailwind UI

I have been enjoying the CHM's YouTube Channel.

A list of the public engineering career ladders I've found

How to write more, faster, and better by decoupling writing from pre-writing

John Gruber's Markdown is almost a perfect content authoring format. Here are 6 things it got wrong.

On leaving Netlify

Netlify Build Plugins are here! Here's a smattering of thoughts on what you can do with them.

Musing about how Twitter can enhance your Internet reading experience

Some thoughts on how frontend developers can also embrace instrumenting their apps for observability

Check your site's speed quickly with a battery of tests

Gatsby-Remark is one of those fun plugins that have their own plugins - but there are a lot of them. Here's a list I wrote down a few months ago of plugins I think everyone should use.

Why we should focus less on Implementation and more on Standardization

A link to the 190 page history of JS by its original creator and the editor of ES6.

How to turn Ignorance into Power

Some thoughts on how to set up testing with plugins

React has long eschewed convention in favor of the extreme flexibility of JS. It is time for the next level in React authorship formats.

A common design pattern for forms in React is using Controlled Components - but involves a lot of boilerplate code. Here's another way.

The US is probably going into recession - here's why I'm talking about it now, what it could look like, what Devs can do to prepare, and why it's not the End of the World.

One of the most powerful forms of persuasion is the argument from crossover people

A post for the Netlify blog on how we did Code Reviews during my recent product rotation.

Some careful thoughts from joining a startup from Series B to C.

The short version of Why Svelte

Linking to a blogpost I was too lazy to do

A great nugget I learned from watching Brian Holt's Intro to Containers workshop

Thoughts on how I am doing with 4 months of Svelte Society in the bag.

I have used iPhone/iOS for the longest time. Last month I switched to OnePlus 6T/Android. Here are my impressions.

This is how to pair two newcomers on the React scene for mocking and using CRUD APIs, for a great developer experience.

An explanation of First Principles via comparing Inductive vs Deductive Reasoning, and thoughts on Applications

This is my attempt to explicitly define a not-legally-binding "terms of service" for people who peruse Digital Gardens, and the people who Learn in Public with them.

The DX of JavaScript Developer Tools could be better if we added Metrics, Logs, and Traces

Adding GitHub Actions and Updating Data Dependencies

Blog on DEV.to, publish on your own domain, using the DEV.to API!

A reminder that serverless functions actually have a lot of state, and how the "function" analogy breaks down when you look through the abstraction

In general, you move faster and feel a lot less stress once you realize - You don't need "the best", you just need "good enough".

Why we no longer have frontend framework wars, and musing on the state of React metaframeworks today and tomorrow

You've heard of the Golden Rule? "Treat others as you want to be treated." Introducing the Platinum and Silver Rules.

If your site has a dark mode or custom theme, you might have a flash of the default theme before JavaScript loads. Here is the solution.

The best way to communicate a group of benefits is to slap a label on it.

One of the best ways to level up in programming is to contribute to a high quality open source project, especially a framework.

wiring up Google Sheets via a Netlify Function

! https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQrqygkW4AIxT0c?format=jpg\&name=large (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQrqygkW4AIxT0c?format=jpg\&name=large) (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M-JUtp9I5_gSk8OpV9Adk9sYzhoU-VNcwz9RUJ1-8Sw/edit?usp=sharing)

How you can enhance your blog with webmentions without adding heavy build times.

## Table of Contents

In this post I sketch out `Big L` notation, which plots your learning as a function of `N` years of experience, with `P` peers.

RPA seems to be NoCode Enterprise Edition™ and the pricing disparity is wild. But there are real differences and I am trying to note them down here.

I dipped into my automation repo (https://github.com/sw-yx/automation/blob/master/README.md) today and explored Huginn. It didn't really appeal so I looked for alternatives and found Node-RED (https://nodered.org/). It uses a much more familiar toolchain (JS) and is draggy-droppy which I likey!

Messing around learning Django and deploying

Styling scrollbars for my space on the Internet

a belated recap, highlighting my best writing over the past couple months

People who can scale coding communities are 🔥 🔥 🔥

Patrick McKenzie's simple concept for making friends on the Internet.

250 Podcasts I enjoy listening to

Svelte is a really nice authoring format for HTML components. I wanted to explore if I could extend Eleventy to use it.

Svelte is often thought of as a compiler. But really it is a compiler within a bundler.

Reflecting on what I have learned about CSS Units and Line Lengths

People can't use your code without docs. People might get overwhelmed with too many docs. How can we match the maturity of docs to the maturity of the project?

Learning from Slack and Refactoring UI to create color palettes, then using HSL colors to do customizable theming with CSS variables

Interesting Two Word ideas with names of people on them

Reasons I enjoy Svelte, despite not using it for work.

The best way to sell to, brand, persuade, or inspire people is to condense your idea down to Two Words.

reigniting the Zen Garden era with modern technology

This is my attempt adapting an Amplify DataStore tutorial to Svelte

This is my attempt today wrapping an Authentication workflow into a Svelte Store

A neat trick I discovered from Mikeal Rogers

As Moore's Law ends, devices multiply, and software becomes critical to life, we must take another look at our full stack for continued gains in efficiency, reliability and security.

Quick and simple ways to set up Open Source Repos with Best Practices

Some thoughts on writing your first few writings

Some thoughts on writing your first few CFPs

Of course I don't think that everything should be public. I don't even think everyone should Learn In Public. The majority of the time you are still learning in private. Here are some thoughts on how to do it well.

A discussion of why JS developers use build tools like Webpack and what we do with them, for new JS developers.

> Translations welcome! ( Português (https://meleu.github.io/artigos-traduzidos/aprenda-em-publico-hack.html))

Let's say you needed a multipurpose tool. Which of these would you pick?

Recently, I asked tweeple (https://mobile.twitter.com/swyx/status/1158902677289472001):

Hello mailing list friends!

> "How to become a 10x engineer: listen to @software\_daily everyday." - Amjad Masad (https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/956603016513167360)

When talking about "Narrow Waists" I should clarify that I'm only referring to the term from the somewhat obscure "Internet Architecture" model of the different technology layers ( my notes here (https://dev.to/swyx/networking-essentials-architecture-and-principles-2g5e)):

This is a *rant* of uninformed thoughts and theories about running a restaurant.

Hello mailing list friends!

I recently made a mistake. I make many, but this involved someone important to me and to people I know, so it stands out among the general cacophony of my many other failures. I wanted to own up to what I did, explain how I handled it, and in general take ownership of the problem.

A useful dichotomy for team dynamics.

I benefited from FreeCodeCamp and would like to give back

*Originally published on the Webflow blog (https://webflow.com/blog/no-code-is-a-lie).*

> This is a quick note on a API Design. I hope to make this an ongoing series.

Borrowing heavily from Gatsby Themes to improve the Sapper developer experience, and a discussion of how Ejectable Defaults fits with the Zero Config movement

Hello mailing list friends!

*Published on the Netlify Blog (https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/09/26/git-centric-workflow-the-one-api-to-rule-them-all/)*

I recently decided that I will not *choose* to be a manager. This is how I arrived at that conclusion.

*Note: this was published as the Complete Intro to Netlify on the Netlify Blog (https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/10/07/complete-intro-to-netlify-in-3.5-hours/) and the FreeCodeCamp Channel (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-build-and-deploy-websites-using-netlify-a-comprehensive-tutorial/)*

I noticed an asymmetry between adverse status updates and trust that I figured it would be worth a quick comment on.

The worlds of software, business, and music use the word "Waterfall" incredibly differently and they are completely ignorant of each other. I figured I would make a quick note to compare and contrast them!

> Note: this tutorial is now out of date - I don't pre-generate og:image cards anymore as it added too much time to my builds

> Note: this was an unfinished draft, i published it anyway but it is incomplete

JavaScript Tooling is just too hard to use, and it's not your fault.

In working on my Sapper export library (https://www.npmjs.com/package/ssg), I ran into a very peculiar problem: my pages were being generated a lot more slowly than expected:

This blog now uses Svelte & Sapper (https://sapper.svelte.dev/) as a static site generator, where it previously used React & Gatsby (https://5d7699e172ae430007210374--scout-videos-51664.netlify.com/writing/moving-to-novela). This is achieved through Sapper's `sapper export` feature (https://sapper.svelte.dev/docs#sapper_export).

How to deploy a Static Next.js Site to Netlify, and then upgrade it to use Dynamic Route Segments to become a full fledged Static Site Generator!

Gatsby is more than a simple static site generator. It uses JavaScript to rehydrate Markup into a fully dynamic React app - which means you can use APIs to do all sorts of dynamic functionality!

My mistakes and insights on GraphQL Variables and Persisted Queries.

I enjoyed listening to Des and Paul's discussion of keyboard-first apps on their podcast today (https://art19.com/shows/intercom-on-product/episodes/10ee6fbe-13ef-48c6-af5e-3477bdbe87e3). They discussed the rise of the `cmd+K` UI paradigm in apps like:

Today I dropped out of the Compilers course I accidentally registered myself for. I'm not proud of it but there's too much I want to do and I know I'm just going to do a shit job at everything by spreading my self thin and also putting an intense gun to my head.

*This article was published on Indie Hackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/article/jamstack-for-indie-hackers-b07f7a943d)!*

I've been feeling like I've skewed too much on empty calories recently. So I ran this poll (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1168182079613485056):

I thought I would write a quick coda to my Netlify Year One (https://www.swyx.io/writing/netlify-year-one) Recap. That post was entirely me looking back at myself. It's helpful to see what others said about me at my review.

> Note: this is an unfinished draft

There is a possible "React Native Web Singularity", when it starts being a better standalone choice for developing for the mobile web than `react-dom`. If this speculation comes true, this would be gamechanging.

* Published on Freecodecamp (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/you-already-use-types/)*

* Slides here (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_aeM_UkwS9qaSzHDz87zC9bmtvbuLbPof7RnN96SJKE/edit?usp=sharing)*

How to deploy Python projects to Netlify

*Originally published on Scotch.io (https://scotch.io/@sw-yx/jamstack-or-pilha-de-atolamento-let-your-user-decide-i18n-in-gatsby-netlify)*

The other thing about Netlify Year One (https://www.swyx.io/writing/netlify-year-one) that people are generally interested in is my experience of remote work. As I put it recently (https://mobile.twitter.com/swyx/status/1154916667606130689):

I broke past 10,000 Twitter followers on Saturday. Obviously this is a completely arbitrary milestone and pretty minor in the hierarchy of needs. I'm not celebrating.

> Published on FreeCodeCamp's Developer News (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/naked-promises-are-not-safe-for-work/). A followup for this was published in Errors are not Exceptions (https://www.swyx.io/errors-not-exceptions/)

We usually use Environment Variables as (global) variables, but did you know they can literally configure your environments as well?

> Update: I have since left Netlify (https://dev.to/swyx/farewell-netlify-1alo). Alex has published his own writeup on The Mo (https://twitter.com/goodalexander/status/1701446671555579958).

With the growing community interest in Gatsby, we hope to create more resources that make it easier for anyone to grasp the power of this incredible tool.

Why you need redirects on clientside and serverside and how to set that up with Gatsby and Netlify

*Published on CSS Tricks as Types or Tests: Why Not Both? (https://css-tricks.com/types-or-tests-why-not-both/)*

Tutorial on Deploying a Create-React-App Website to Netlify with HTTPS

I'm writing to you from a cheap hostel in downtown Toronto ( Hostelling International (https://reservations.hostellingtoronto.com/iqreservations/asp/IQHome.asp), highly recommend for solo travel, I have stayed in SF, LA, NY, PHL, TO, NZ and more I probably forget) where a cute anecdote just happened that illustrates an important principle.

*Published on Alligator.io (https://alligator.io/nodejs/solve-cors-once-and-for-all-netlify-dev/)*

Adding authentication is a pain point for many React beginners. We’ve made it ridiculously easy to add Netlify Identity onto any React app, including create-react-app, Gatsby, Next.js, or any other setup you may have, by wrapping it all into one simple React Hook! However, this article is more about effective design patterns for introducing authentication into React apps, and any reader should be able to write similar wrappers for their preferred provider.

> There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. - Leon Bambrick (https://twitter.com/secretgeek/status/7269997868?lang=en)

RL with multiple actors

> Translations welcome! ( Português (https://meleu.github.io/artigos-traduzidos/marchas-de-aprendizagem.html))

Presenting the same information a different way... helps! Plus, one algorithm that does better than Principal Components Analysis!

Breaking the Curse of Dimensionality!!

Single Linkage, K-Means, Soft Clustering, and Kleinberg Impossibility

*My thoughts to self while weighing adding `netlify functions:create` to Netlify Dev. Originally a gist (https://gist.github.com/sw-yx/6f97b9d7f3efbfad4c8e5b8a14b5bd27)*

Learn React Hooks by building a clone of React - in 30 minutes!

A small detour to catch up on the basics of Information Theory we'll need

Hill Climbing, Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms, oh my!

Hill Climbing, Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms, oh my!

Or, the unreasonable effectiveness of dumb rules

What are all the things you can do to improve as a developer after graduating from college or bootcamp?

Lets update our priors! Oh wait we have none.

It's not venture capital, that's for sure

What's the big O of machine learning? Lets put some formal theory around HOW we learn!

Transforming dimensions, nearest neighbors, and boosting, all in service of "drawing the best line".

Better together - how bootstrapping samples of data can work better than the entire dataset, and how to boost it even further, and faster

Regression isn't the only way. What if we were far, far... lazier about it?

That one time we tried to emulate our brains with computer chips

Drawing lines among dots and more!

The simplest form of Classification algorithm

The three major branches of ML

*Published on CSS Tricks as STAR Apps: A New Generation of Front-End Tooling for Development Workflows (https://css-tricks.com/star-apps-a-new-generation-of-front-end-tooling-for-development-workflows/)*

This was just a short rant I prepared for Netlify's Allhands where we were asked to give a short lightning talk on any topic we wished. I picked cuttles. I actually saw one in real life diving in Fiji once!

Gatsby is great for not only static sites but also traditional web applications. You can add authentication and serverless functionality and get up and running incredibly quickly with Netlify - here's how.

What is Traffic Engineering?

What is Traffic Engineering?

Why Software Defined Networking is taking the networking world by storm

quick checklist for setting up a new macbook

How CDNs, BitTorrent and Distributed Hash tables work

How Computer Networks shape, police, measure, and limit the traffic that flow across them.

advice for beginners from a podcast

Bottlenecks inevitably arise in networks. How do we deal with them in TCP? How about in practical streaming applications like Youtube and Skype?

Domain names, you buy them, you sell them, but how do they work?

A small detour into Router Hardware!

How IP Addressing evolved over time, how it works today, and how we can transition to IPv6 in future

How the Internet cobbles together thousands of Autonomous Systems with the Border Gateway Protocol

> 2018: *Published on the Netlify Blog as The Rise of Immer in React (https://www.netlify.com/blog/2018/09/12/the-rise-of-immer-in-react/)*

Discussing why we need Switches in a network and how they work

Discussing the architecture of the Internet and its the principles that guided its original design.

## much of the original piece below is outdated. this is my remaining 2023 updates for fellow singaporeans.

a survey of new documentation/static site generators

> Author's note: This is part 4 of a series of essays I originally drafted about Opinions for your Tech Career (https://gist.github.com/sw-yx/9720bd4a30606ca3ffb8d407113c0fe5). Part 1 is Learn in Public (https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/).

> Author's note: This is part 3 of a series of essays I originally drafted about Opinions for your Tech Career (https://gist.github.com/sw-yx/9720bd4a30606ca3ffb8d407113c0fe5). Part 1 is Learn in Public (https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/).

> Author's note: This is part 2 of a series of essays I originally drafted about Opinions for your Tech Career (https://gist.github.com/sw-yx/9720bd4a30606ca3ffb8d407113c0fe5). Part 1 is Learn in Public (https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/).

The fastest way to build your expertise, network, and second brain.

a no-bs guide to set up your new React and Typescript Design System powered by Storybook!

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Compiled Insights for Infinite Learners

a friendly cheat sheet for those wondering what React Suspense is and if they should care

a guided walk through Jane Street's OCaml workshop

an introduction to mobx 4 for people coming from react and redux

Annotated commentary on the code behind the Movie search demo featuring React Suspense

Using python and selenium to find better follows on Twitter

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You may have heard of Flutter (https://flutter.io), Google's answer to React Native. What should you know?

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