Idea Showcase

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

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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/).

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

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.

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

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.

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

A Brief Guide to Startup Fundraising Terminology for Beginners

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

Making the case for Mainstream EOL of IE 11.

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.

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

10 Principles I Learned

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

Musing about how Twitter can enhance your Internet reading experience

Why we should focus less on Implementation and more on Standardization

How to turn Ignorance into Power

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

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

The short version of Why Svelte

Linking to a blogpost I was too lazy to do

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

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.

Adding GitHub Actions and Updating Data Dependencies

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.

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

! 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)

## 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.

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

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

250 Podcasts I enjoy listening to

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.

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.

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.

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 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).

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:

*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.

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)*

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/)

> 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).

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

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.

> 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)

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

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

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

*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!

> 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/)*

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

> 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.