The Web in January 2020

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I hope you are all having a great 2020. The year has just began and so many things are happening.

I started a new job at Big Binary and my first time working at a fully remote company. It's been a breeze so far, looking forward to rest of the year.

Releases

Browser Functions: A new serverless platform using Web Browser execution engines - IBM had a crazy idea that they could execute serverless functions in a browser instead of a container. And the best part is: It's faster.
Yarn 2 - just came out with PnP as the default and people are not very happy about it. It differs from npm so much that developers are worried they have two write two different Getting Started now.
Puppeteer 2 - The crowd favorite puppeteer is now v2 and supports firefox binaries. Might be a step in desperation as Microsoft's Playwright gains in popularity.
Styled Components v5 - CSS-in-JS is a hill I'm willing to die on and my favorite library for it is on v5 now slimmer, faster and no breaking changes.

My Content

JAMStack Reader app - Created a serverless reader app with React, Netlify Functions and wrote about it.
My Blog has RSS - You can subscribe to my blog from RSS now. Here is a blog post with procedure.
PiP Pomodoro Clock - A pomodoro clock website that does can do picture in picture, how about that!

Tutorials

Clean Code - JavaScript - After Dan Abramov's article on clean code took off, huge amount of twitter discussions have lead to the resurgence of this github repo and boy! it is a gem.
Simple state machine library in JavaScript - State Machines and associated libraries (in particular XStateJS) have been gathering a lot of hype on the frontend. Kent C Dodds wrote about creating one yourself in JavaScript. Worth a read for the concepts.
CSS Cascade - Amelia Wattenberger writes this beautiful blog explaining CSS cascade with illustrations.
An OS on React Native - Well, it's true. LightOS is being build on React Native. React Native is going places.
React Native as default at Shopify - With AirBnB bailing on React Native, there was a gap of large enterprise backers and with recent debugging improvements and others, they have managed to bring Shopify to the party.

What am I learning?

I have started to learn Rails this month (I'm not leaving JavaScript, don't worry). I have been taking notes, so feel free to follow along on this repository. Another of my picks to learn for next month is KeystoneJS, have already heard good things about it.

In Other News

Remote Work at FYI - Marie Prokopets breaks down the results from a survey of remote workers that she and her cofounder Hiten Shah had conducted. The results are sometimes astonishing with tips being just walk out of the room and walk back in to get the office feeling. Definitely can try that out.
Your New Year Resolution has already failed - CGP Grey on his youtube channel makes a hypothesis that themes and not resolutions are the way to better habits. On every juncture visualise your overarching theme for the year and act accordingly. Also, they have to be broad (which is interesting if you have read Atomic Habits)

What am I doing?

I watched His Dark Materials - A well animated show with creating a world of fantasy and a magical atmosphere that I hadn't realised I missed.

I read The Originals - Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant. Adam tries to break down what being an "Original" mean and how to develop these characteristics. Definitely an enjoyable read!

What are some interesting stuff you are reading/writing/watching/building? Let me know your suggestions/improvements by replying to this newsletter or find me on Twitter