Interesting Reads — volume #13
Woohoo, we’re already at lucky number 13! Did you know that number 13 is considered lucky to the Chinese?
Right, better get right into scrolling (and clicking hopefully)! Featuring @adamwathan, @marcelpociot, @calebporzio and many others.
Expose & Laravel Playground
Marcel Pociot was productive in the last couple of months and created Expose, free open-source tunneling service (ngrok alternative) written in pure PHP. It allows you to share your local websites with others via the internet.
He also created Laravel Playground — a free-to-use service that allows you to try out Laravel code (and all its features) directly in your browser.
I greatly admire people who can create and deliver products in such rapid succession. I’d be happy with myself if I was able to create and release one of my side projects. This is why this year I’m trying to work on smaller projects and tools and get my self in “release” state of mind.
Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business
Learn how Adam Wathan created Tailwind CSS and turned a helper library from his graveyard side projects into a multi-million dollar business. Succinct but inspiring as you never know where your possibility to make a “dent in the universe” lays :-)
And while we’re talking about Tailwind CSS — they recently released a plugin (called Tailwind Typography) that provides typographic styling for vanilla HTML you don’t control (like from a markdown or a CMS). A lot of users were complaining that Tailwind CSS was hard to use for CMS content (to me it was the only downside to it) and now they’ve addressed it, and they’ve fixed it pretty elegantly if I may say so.
11+ JavaScript Features You’ve Probably Never Used
Although I’m not a JavaScript developer, the title seems like a clickbait but my curiosity got better of me 🤨 There really are a few features that I’ve never heard or used before which seems useful and will definitely come in handy. Did you hear or used all of them?
Simple reusable React error boundary component
As the title says it is a simple React error boundary component that can be used to handle all errors thrown during React’s lifecycles. Plus it has a pretty nifty helper function for handling async errors. What are the error boundaries I hear you ask? Well, take a look at this Kent C. Dodds article for in detail explanation.
You’re already halfway through. Did you click on any of the links or are you just skimming through? :-) I’ll know if you did!
In the last two years, I read a library of copywriting and content marketing books. Here are my 15 takeaways to write better and faster.
Cool article with a lot of amazing tips for writing. I already included some of the tips in this volume. Can you guess which I’ve used? :-) Hemingway App (suggested here) is amazing as well — it calculates your text readability and suggests how to make it more so.
It even suggests replacing some more complicated words with their easier to understand replacements. This is strange because in my writing I wanted to expand my vocabulary and used a wider range of words to appear more knowledgeable — when in doing so I might have turned off some non-native speakers (one of the tips from the article ;-)).
Will Basecamp’s HEY Change Email Marketing Forever?
Overview of how email marketing might change due to Basecamp’s HEY email service provider and their screening and non-tracking features. This article provides advice and tips on how to approach these new trends and how to adjust your marketing emails.
I Just Hit $100k/yr On GitHub Sponsors! 🎉❤️ (How I Did It)
Story of how Caleb Porzio (whose products I’ve mentioned several times in the last few of the Interesting Reads volumes) got to over $100K on GitHub Sponsors. Besides navigating through the story of how that came to be, he also gives us “nuggets” he picked along the way and some of them might be helpful for just about anybody.
Caleb is extremely productive lately (Laravel Livewire, AlpineJs, and Sushi to name a few of my favorites) and his success story is an inspiration for how to be (financially) successful when creating open-source software without resorting to creating a SaaS product.
The Bullet Journal System
Excellent system for rapid logging that I’ve started using lately. It relies on just a few concepts but it is pretty powerful.
It uses bullets paired with different visual symbols (●, ○, and -) to categorize your data entries into tasks, events, or notes.
You’ve only added two lines — why did that take two days!
A list of great explanations why the number of lines of code does not tell anything about effort, value, or quality of work that was done. I’ve used almost all of the reasons listed here at one time in my career.
What kind of person (or a robot) are you to finish an article and not give an appreciation by clapping? What kind of message are you trying to send me? :-)
