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    A bunch of cool things and neat little tips

    You know how some mornings you wake up, jump out of bed, and you're full of piss and vinegar and ready to take on the world?

    And other days you wake up and it's like you got hit by a cement truck rolling down the hill with no brakes?

    That.

    I was going to write today about either Constate and how much I love it for state management, especially with hooks, or about building webapps with Gatsby.

    But writing feels a lot like dragging barbed wire through my brain right now, so here's a 2-hour livecoding session instead. We worked on building a webapp with Gatsby and using Constate for state management.

    We continue tonight, and on Wednesday, you get an article about it. Deal?

    Tips & tricks I learned this week

    Let's try a new section for these wonderful Monday emails. Every day, I try to write 200 words about something new I learned. The cute little posts go on to live or die on Twitter and Facebook.

    But you're my favorite, so I should share them here as well.

    1. An important lesson about JavaScript testing. You really really have to make sure tests don't run in PhantomJS by accident.
    2. Getting help on Twitter can be absolutely fantastic
    3. Out-of-box Rails caching isn't actually that useful
    4. Novelty makes teaching and sharing easy. Preserving that enthusiasm as a grizzled veteran ain't easy
    5. README.md is great basic documentation, but you need more

    A few cool things

    Here's a bunch of cool things I discovered this week.

    • BestOfJS released their 2018 findings of most popular repositories. Interestingly Vue is the most popular frontend framework, but the most popular full-stack frameworks and site builders are all based on React. 🤔
    • react-simple-img is like a better version of my react-lazyload-fadein component.
    • The Towards Data Science blog published a really cool study of SF Bay Area commuter regions. I need to find time to do more machine learning, it's amazing for things like this.
    • This Pew Research are you middle class calculator is a beautiful example of how even very simple data visuals can greatly enhance a story.
    • And here's one I've been meaning to share for a while 👉 The Pudding is an amazing independent blog that publishes data-based stories with beautiful visualizations. Great for inspiration.
    Published on January 14th, 2019 in Personal

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    Senior Mindset Book

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    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

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