Reading List #9

Hi 👋

This week, we finally got our new MacBook Pros that we ordered at the end of the year. This meant I was spending way too much time going down all kinds of rabbit holes from “how best to setup my local dev workflow” to “which window manager is the absolute best” or just plain “does this run on Apples’ Silicon M1 chip?”. It was a lot of fun though, I learned a lot and found plenty of things to optimize.

Here’s a few things I’ve read, that were not Installation Guides or Github Readmes:

Frontend Development

🕵️‍♀️ :where()

Manuel Matuzović wrote about all the things he didn’t know about the new :where() pseudo-class. I was struggling to understand it as well, until I read the post he linked in his article. Also, he adds some examples to illustrate the purpose of using :where over other techniques.

Here’s what I didn’t know about :where()

 Apple and the funding of :focus-visible

This week, it was announced that Webkit shipped a feature and the announcement sounded like “Apple crowdfunded this work” which pissed off a few people who thought the richest company in the world should have money to spare for such things. I also had mixed feelings when I read about it, to be honest. But then Eric Meyer jumped in and explained why this was not the case after all, and what really happened there. In reality, it’s all much more boring and sounds like a pretty normal process.

Eric Meyer – No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund :focus-visible in Safari

✍️ Coding Fonts

As I was setting up my MacBook this week, I came across this beautiful little collection of curated coding fonts by CSS-Tricks. I think I will go with Fira Code for now, but there’s lots of beautiful options in there.

CSS-Tricks – Coding Fonts

⚡️ A tiny browser for your menu bar

MenuBarX adds your favorite websites as tiny browsers to your menu bar. Personally don’t I have a need for it, but it’s a good reminder, that “small browser window” doesn’t necessarily mean someone’s on a mobile phone.

MenuBarX

WordPress

🍾 WordPress 5.9 “Josephine” is out!

Version 5.9 got shipped this week, including the long awaited full site editing features. I still have it on my list to play around with it more.

WordPress 5.9 announcement

👍 Full Site Editing

I’m pretty sure I linked to this one before, but it deserves every attention it gets. If you want to get up to speed with all the new full site editing features, Carolina Nymark got you covered and collected nearly everything you need to know.

WordPress – Full Site Editing

👩‍💻 Valet for local development

While I was looking for the best tool for my local development workflow, I read a lot of good things about Laravel Valet. Don’t let yourself be fooled by its name, while it was developed by and for Laravel, it has plenty of features which make it a perfect companion for WordPress as well. I went ahead used Valet+, which is a fork of it that adds even more features to it, like XDebug or easily switching between PHP versions. There were a few quirks to get it working on the M1 chip, but I got it working and so far I haven’t had to install and go back to MAMP Pro. Will test this thing further over the next few weeks and keep you posted.

Laravel Valet

Github – weprovide/laravel-plus


Other / Random

🤔 Abundance vs scarcity

I like this quote and how he frames the difference between your mind on scarcity or abundance. It’s a good way to think about things this way, I guess.

Dustin Curtis – Contribution and abundance

🪐 Powers of Ten

This is such a great visualization of just how unbelievably, insanely huge our known universe is. The original was created by Charles and Ray Eames in the seventies, and now BBC did a remake, narrated by Brian Cox.

Powers of ten


🙌 Happy Weekend, everyone!

Made with ❤️ in Switzerland