Scott Andrew

Posted November 4, 2024.

Pocket Lint: Is It Over Yet? November 2024 Edition

Welcome to the world of local-first web development. - I didn't know there was a community of devs focused on building web apps that run completely client-side. I'm also wondering why I was surprised by this.

PikaPods - Super-inexpensive ready-to-use hosted apps like RSS readers, blogging software (including Ghost and Wordpress), wikis, notebooks, link sharing and a ton of others. Via Joe Crawford.

PocketBase - an open source fully-contained backend for web apps. You get an SQLite database, authentication, and file storage, wrapped in a single binary with a REST API. Neat! One of the available apps on PikaPods.

Questions to ask a senior front-end developer - I like most of these. It's difficult to find front-end questions that aren't explicitly coding and don't feel like trivia.

Editing Plain Vanilla - a good overview of a VS Code profile for vanilla JS projects. The Plain Vanilla site has a lot of really good and sensible patterns for building sites and apps without frameworks or a huge toolchain, but it's such a bummer to see AI images to adorning their blog posts.

Animate.css - cool library of ready-to-use CSS animations along with best practices. Pull apart to code to see how the animations work.

Quantity Queries for CSS - from 2015! Clever ways to use *-child pseudo-class selectors to configure layouts based on the number of elements in a container. There's a nifty generator here. Via Eric Bailey at piccalil.li

...and a fun bit of web history: Nifty Corners Cube. A 2006 JavaScript library for creating rounded corners on HTML elements, from the time before border-radius existed. The demos still work! The source code is an interesting time capsule of techniques we needed to hack around poor/missing support of APIs like addEventListener and querySelector.