Another weekend and another set of links for yall to enjoy. Yesterday my wife and I drove our eldest to NOLA and the airport there as he begins a ten-month excursion teaching in Germany. I'm so incredibly excited for him and I know he is going to do incredible. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the 90+ temperature days to come to an end. At this point, I don't expect that before October at the earliest.

As a reminder, I am still open to folks sponsoring these blog posts (or the blog in general). If you, your company, or your service, is looking to help support this site, just reach out!

A Practical Guide to Service Workers

Back a few years ago, I began digging deep into PWAs and with that, service workers. I don't really research them much anymore as it's more of a known quantity, but it does occur to me that there are probably still a lot of folks who need to learn how they work and how they operate. This guide by Kelvin Okuroemi does a really good job of introducing the concept and I really like the fact that he shows devtools usage as well. When working with service workers, knowing how devtools assist you is really important. Your browser devtools are always important, but even more so with service workers.

I will quickly get on my soapbox and remind people that you do not need to be building an "app" to take advantage of PWA technologies like service workers. They can help any kind of website.

Better Sorting via Intl

I love the Intl feature of the web platform. In fact, I used it a few days ago in my blog post on integrating it with Alpine's Mask plugin. Recently the Bytes newsletter featured an interesting article on it. Bytes is a free weekly JavaScript-focused email newsletter that I definitely recommend my readers sign up for. Each issue typically features a "Spot the Bug" article where readers are asked to look at a bit of code and, well, find the bug.

In issue 214, there was a particularly interesting bug shared. Unfortunatey I can't link directly to that part of the newsletter, but go ahead and read the entire thing to see both the issue discussed as well as the solution. (I suppose I've already spoiled it a bit by talking about Intl, but it's still absolutely worth your time!)

Let's Talk about React

Lastly, here is a really deep thought piece concerning React, "Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React". As you can imagine, this is a long look at what folks may be missing if their entire conception of the web is colored by the dependency on React. This can be best summed up by a quote from the epilogue:

I’ve come to believe React's popularity is, in no small part, because folks don’t look beyond it.

To be clear, this isn't a hit piece on React, but more a "wake up" call for developers who have possibly focused so much on React that they haven't gotten an appreciation for the alternatives or for the idea that what React does may not actually be what they need.

As I said, this is a pretty deep post, but I definitely recommend checking it out. Personally, I never really got into React. Adobe is a pretty big user of it, but I've never needed to use it myself in my own job. React has always felt like a "good framework that's not for me" and honestly, if I ever need to pick up, I'm not too concerned about being able to do so quickly.

One Last Thing...

When I started this series of posts, my idea was to share three links each time. Occasionally I'd share a fourth one that wasn't tech or industry-related in any way and I'm going to try to make that a consistent feature here, mainly as I love music and love sharing music with others.

My wife and I recently rediscovered Tetris Effects and I had forgotten how incredible both the visuals and soundtrack were. While this video doesn't show in gameplay, the track is one of my favorites from the game.