Breakpoint #14
Hey folks,
Last weekend was the first time I tried Escape Room with friends and it was really fun. Never had the opportunity to get “stuck” in a room and tried to solve puzzles so we could get out in real life.
On another note, Thread seems to have lost some people which was completely expected for any new products. It’s up to Meta how they want to play the game so they can keep the core users that are still using it now.
🖥️ Frontend Shares
Prefer Deliberate Practice Over Tutorials
There are many tutorials online, and many of them are also teaching similar things, that we can learn certain tech from. However, I don’t think we can truly learn until we actually use and apply what we saw in the tutorials in real-life projects. Everybody has different situations and tech stack so once we apply what we learn we will start thinking whether this is a good idea or if this is the tech for us. We can keep reading a bunch of tutorials without applying. The next time you see a similar tutorial, pretty sure you will read it again and on and on.
Malte Ubl - Principles for Scaling Frontend Application Development, React Summit 2023
In this video, Malte Ubl the CTO at Vercel walks through some principles we should follow in order to scale frontend applications as it grows. There are six principles that we discussed in the video but the main takeaway for me is to ensure the codes are easy to update. Yes, the codes were written by us engineers but how can we remove ourselves from the process so when new people join the project they can start contributing quickly or know who to ask for better contexts. We should have a system that works without human dependency.
- Use ScrollTimeline and ViewTimeline to create scroll-driven animations that enhance user experience.
- Fenced frames work along other Privacy Sandbox APIs to embed relevant content while preventing unnecessary context sharing.
- With the Topics API the browser can share information with third parties about a user's interests while preserving privacy.
We used to rely on intersection observers to apply code on certain content when that piece of content is in the view. We can do the same but with the scrollbar’s position and the new API allows you to easily achieve that.
CSS Findings From The Threads App
This post is pretty fun to read. It’s like doing a CSS code review on production. From here we can learn a few things about why certain design was implemented and most importantly what CSS rules were used to make that happen. Give it a read if you like to play with CSS.
Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible
Technology moves really fast and we have a tendency to treat the latest and greatest as this shiny treasure we have to get our hands on. As engineers, we are here to deliver values and products for our customers. Most people won't really appreciate if we use certain old or new tech. We should be asking the questions like whether this new tech actually solves a problem. Besides the so-called old tech is battle-tested and many people have contributed to it a lot to cover a lot of different scenarios. So consider choosing the stable boring tech but innovate using the new tech incrementally.