Crowdsourcing Best of the Web(dev)
March 7, 2022 1:26 PM Subscribe
Please share interesting / novel / surprising web tech, tools & sites, so that I can keep up with the bright young things I work with...
The small web development company I recently started work at runs sporadic, informal end of week discussion / workshop sessions, kicked off by a quick round table presentation of the sites, tools or tech that have recently grabbed each person's interest.
Great concept, fun to participate in, works well in the context of what's already a nicely positive, learning focused work environment.
The rub is that all my colleagues are 10+ years younger than me and child-free, and thus at stages of life where browse-random-stuff-on-the-web time is a much more abundant resource.
Luckily I'm a pretty compulsive bookmark (and MF favourite) hoarder with a pre-existing tech focused web habit, so have been able to pull my weight thus far. But I would really like to get some more spares in my bag of tricks as a backup...
Anything interesting, surprising or out of the ordinary, from an end use, conception or technical standpoint, that's web dev / website / web tech or adjacent would be really appreciated.
Please spare my team from being made to watch Homestar Runner clips via Ruffle.rs
The small web development company I recently started work at runs sporadic, informal end of week discussion / workshop sessions, kicked off by a quick round table presentation of the sites, tools or tech that have recently grabbed each person's interest.
Great concept, fun to participate in, works well in the context of what's already a nicely positive, learning focused work environment.
The rub is that all my colleagues are 10+ years younger than me and child-free, and thus at stages of life where browse-random-stuff-on-the-web time is a much more abundant resource.
Luckily I'm a pretty compulsive bookmark (and MF favourite) hoarder with a pre-existing tech focused web habit, so have been able to pull my weight thus far. But I would really like to get some more spares in my bag of tricks as a backup...
Anything interesting, surprising or out of the ordinary, from an end use, conception or technical standpoint, that's web dev / website / web tech or adjacent would be really appreciated.
Please spare my team from being made to watch Homestar Runner clips via Ruffle.rs
Best answer: More on-topic: I was quite surprised when I learned about Web MIDI.
posted by mpark at 3:39 PM on March 7, 2022
posted by mpark at 3:39 PM on March 7, 2022
I just heard about Svelte JS, which seems to be some kind of "compiled" JavaScript framework that makes pages lighter. I'm skeptical, but I'm always skeptical.
posted by amtho at 3:49 PM on March 7, 2022
posted by amtho at 3:49 PM on March 7, 2022
Best answer: I start every weekday by checking out product hunt. I almost always find something that interests me.
posted by missjenny at 5:34 PM on March 7, 2022
posted by missjenny at 5:34 PM on March 7, 2022
The rub is that all my colleagues are 10+ years younger than me and child-free, and thus at stages of life where browse-random-stuff-on-the-web time is a much more abundant resource.
My workplace has similar sporadic, informal discussions about new tech that people have heard about, and I'm also in your same boat of not having time outside of work hours to devote to random web browsing (or inclination, really, but that's less relevant). The point is that if this is something you're expected to do for your job, you should be doing it during your regular work time. I had a discussion with my supervisor about this to ask if these discussions were important enough that I should be using work time to research topics, and the answer was yes. So now I spend maybe an hour a week doing just that.
Anyway, that wasn't your question, so let me add one answer: Hotwire (stands for "HTML Over The Wire"), which is sort of a micro-Javascript-framework put together by the fascists over at Basecamp. It's focused on server-side rendering, against the current trend of heavy JS frameworks such as React that do almost everything on the client side. There are two parts to it currently, with a third (mobile-only) part supposedly being released this year. The two currently existing parts are:
posted by number9dream at 6:00 AM on March 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
My workplace has similar sporadic, informal discussions about new tech that people have heard about, and I'm also in your same boat of not having time outside of work hours to devote to random web browsing (or inclination, really, but that's less relevant). The point is that if this is something you're expected to do for your job, you should be doing it during your regular work time. I had a discussion with my supervisor about this to ask if these discussions were important enough that I should be using work time to research topics, and the answer was yes. So now I spend maybe an hour a week doing just that.
Anyway, that wasn't your question, so let me add one answer: Hotwire (stands for "HTML Over The Wire"), which is sort of a micro-Javascript-framework put together by the fascists over at Basecamp. It's focused on server-side rendering, against the current trend of heavy JS frameworks such as React that do almost everything on the client side. There are two parts to it currently, with a third (mobile-only) part supposedly being released this year. The two currently existing parts are:
- Stimulus, which is essentially a declarative syntax for binding event handlers. You bind event handlers using data attributes on HTML elements, so it's very easy to understand what's going on by looking at the HTML. It's nice because it's really easy to add to existing HTML. We're in the process of replacing all of our legacy jQuery stuff with Stimulus, and I couldn't be happier with it.
- Turbo, which uses caching cleverly to increase the perceived speed of page loads. When you visit a page, Turbo caches the content; when you come back to that page (either by clicking a link or navigating through the browser history), Turbo shows the cached content immediately and simultaneously re-fetches the page via an ajax request. If the page has changed, Turbo swaps in the new content without doing a full page reload. It's really smooth, and it gives you the responsiveness of an SPA.
posted by number9dream at 6:00 AM on March 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by mpark at 3:36 PM on March 7, 2022