What I'm Reading - February 2024
Do Anything, Side Projects, JavaScript Bloat, Enshittification, and CLI tools
I feel like I didn't get as much reading done in February but I am back with another list of interesting articles I read throughout the month.
Starting off, here's something I read at the end of the month from Aaron Francis: Do literally anything - Aaron Francis. This one resonates with me. I am always thinking of new projects I want to work on and hobbies I want to start. I've been thinking about getting into woodworking, I've been thinking about landscape improvements, and this is on top of my job, my side work, and my family. What ends up happening is I overwhelm myself and then sit in frustration thinking I can't get anything done. Instead, if I just do something, even if it isn't a lot, it is still a step in the right direction and builds momentum to keep doing more. So this will be something I keep in the back of my mind when I get overwhelmed.
Here's an article by Rob Owen: It's OK to abandon your side-project - Robb Owen. In the article, Rob describes working on a project and once he had it launched, he abandoned it. He was building an application to help him practice with a foreign language and by doing all the work to build the application, he ended up learning what he was hoping to use the application to teach. So it was more about the experience of building the application itself versus having a completed application.
On to a different topic, here's one by Nikita Prokopov: JavaScript Bloat in 2024 @ tonsky.me. It's shocking to see how much JavaScript is being loaded on different sites. What is Slack doing downloading 55 MB worth of JavaScript?! It seems like over the last few years, we are starting to see a shift in frontend development with tools like Laravel Livewire and React server components, we are starting to move back to servers doing more of the work versus the client. I spend more time working on backend code, so this is exciting for me. Hopefully, we'll start to see this JavaScript bloat start to go down. However, I'd be more excited for just the complexity of the front end to go down. Over the last year and a half, I've been primarily doing backend work and I feel like I am so behind on the latest frontend tools, but when I start to look into it, I just think, why has this become so difficult and I have years of experience in Vue, React, Angular, jQuery, etc. Is it time to get back on jQuery now that 4.0 is coming: jQuery 4.0.0 BETA! | Official jQuery Blog 😂?
This article from Cory Doctorow: ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything is a bit of a depressing read. It discusses how platforms, that start great and provide a lot of value to their users, start to degrade. It does end on a positive by discussing the "anti-enshittification" movement.
The last article I have for this month is from Paul Redmond at Laravel News: Five Tools That Will Make You More Productive on the Command Line - Laravel News. I learned about some new CLI tools I haven't used before. Zoxide has been an amazing find to make moving around paths more efficient. Also, Paul mentions fzf-tab. I have been using fzf for a long time with Vim/Neovim, but fzf-tab is great for completing items in the CLI.
Article List
Here's a quick list of the articles I described above:
RSS Feeds
If you found any of the above articles interesting, here's a list of RSS feeds to subscribe to:
Other Articles
Here are some other interesting articles I read over February.
How I take notes: Structure with Now Next Notes | Sebastian De Deyne
Watch out for this when testing Artisan commands | Mastering Laravel
Thanks for reading!