Hello, hello, hello! 👋

We're entering the holiday season. 🎄 And I think I've even seen a few snowflakes in Berlin today. We're almost through a wild 2020, and I hope you're all safe and sound to enjoy the holidays in the best way possible.

November has been very busy. Let's dive into my favorite content of the month!

Random MDN turned 2!

Two years ago, the Random MDN Twitter bot was born. It tweets random MDN pages a few times a day. If you want to have random web development facts in your Twitter timeline, you should check it out.

caniuse.com embeds as a service

How do you share browser support statistics in blog posts? I tend to take screenshots or link to caniuse.com. Both options are not great, but I found the solution to this problem!

Ire Aderinokun provides The CanIUse Embed. Implement a few lines of code in your site and embed always-up-to-date browser stats. Thank you, Ire!

Three excellent articles to read

• "Yes or No?" — One Checkbox vs Two Radio Buttons. by Sara Soueidan
• An updated daily front page of The New York Times as artwork on your wall by Alexander Klöpping
• An Engineering Team where Everyone is a Leader by Gergely Orosz

Three useful projects to have a look at

• edent / SuperTinyIcons – SVG icons of your favorite website and app logos in under 1KB
• dylanaraps / pure-sh-bible – A collection of pure POSIX sh alternatives to external processes
• microsoft / Web-Dev-For-Beginners – 24 Lessons, 12 Weeks, Get Started as a Web Developer

New posts on the blog

• 1025 shell command one-liners on one page (note)
• How to force yourself to leave the computer using the leave command (TIL post)
• A centered CSS navigation with fit-content (snippet)
• How to display Twitch emotes in tmi.js chat messages (blog post)
• How to run GitHub actions on particular commits (snippet)

Read more code snippets, notes, and TIL posts on the blog.

This month's DevSheets

• Compact output with git status
• min-content, max-content and fit-content in CSS
• How to center elements using CSS grid
• CSS filter functions

You can find more #devsheets on Twitter.

A talk to watch

The talk of this month is not a talk but a lecture. Larry McEnerney's "Writing Beyond the Academy" changed how I approach blogging. Larry explains that writing rules like "Avoid passive verbs." or "Use short sentences." are useless.

The essential questions in writing are: who will read it, what does the reader care about, and what value does your writing provide. 💯

A quote to think about

Joel Califa gave the excellent talk "Full Stack Anxiety". He describes the fact that there's not enough time to learn and follow every web development trend. If you want to succeed in your career, you have to prioritize.

In most cases, every choice to grow in one discipline is also a choice to not to grow in another.

A song that makes you stop coding

Richard Ashcroft's "Break the Night with Color" from 2006 came in the radio, and as a The Verve fan, it made my old Britpop heart jump!

That's a wrap for this month! 🎉

If you like, Tuesday's 8:30 pm CET I'm building today-i-learned.dev using Next.js and Firebase live on Twitch. I love it when people hang out with me! ♥️

And if you enjoy this newsletter, if you share it, that would mean the world to me. :)

Stay safe, happy holidays, and I'll talk to you in the new year! 🎉 👋

PS. I heard, the cool kids use RSS. You can find multiple feeds on my site.