Developers are notorious for being lazy. So much of our work involves developing efficiencies...ways of doing things faster with less work. I'm obsessed with streamlining processes, it's one of those things that brings joy to my heart. Unfortunately, you have to do a lot of work to save a lot of work. Most people get stuck on getting started with their time saving project.

That reminds me of this funny meme, which I totally live by. I used to go to the gym at a previous job and on the way back, my brain ALWAYS wanted to take the escalator instead of the stairs. I had to force myself to do the right thing...every time.

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Speaking of getting faster, I made a special video this week on the different tools I use to get started faster when creating web projects.

Here are some of the tools I talk about in the video.

Emmet is a toolkit for coding faster through quick shortcuts and is well worth your limited time. If you want some more flexibility try HTML Boilerplates. It gives you the structure for different elements for a basic page. You can start a new project is based on an old project by switching a repo to a template, or use Degit to you create a project based on a repo branch or subfolder without any history. Create App lets you choose libraries like React, Svelte or JavaScript and download a zip file or terminal commands.

My Favorite

Now, if I had to begin a project today, I've been keeping an eye on tools like Rollup, ESBuild and Snowpack. I've tried them all (so you don't have to), and I'm really enjoying Vite from Evan You. The maker of Vue.js.

It's greatest feature...it's highly opinionated, which just saves me a ton of time I don't have to spend setting up and tweaking. Or wrapping my brain as to what the heck I'm doing when using WebPack. Don't get me started on that.

Found on my Posts

As you probably know, I post about twice a weekday (leave my weekends for the fam). Here's a couple of interesting finds.

This Code Works, is sort of like a Pinterest of code. You can store your own snippets for when you need them later or browse through community generated code.

Also, check out this site that helps you quickly build an animated gif from an existing Tik Tok or YouTube video. it's a fun way to create a meme from existing content.

You can get to all my posts by following my page on LinkedIn. I'm trying to figure out a process for including these in my blog, but for the time being this seems to be the most efficient way.

Comin Soon

To celebrate the release of my course Building a GraphQL Project with React.js, I'm hosting a launch party where I'll be talking about why React works so well with GraphQL and how developing with React Hooks felt closer to working with regular JavaScript. We'll explore some of the more complex hooks like useState and useCallback and how to use Github as a platform for trying out GraphQL.

Half an hour of Demo and half an hour of Q&A. If you've been thinking about using GraphQL with React and have a Github Account join me and learn why you should take just a few hours to build something practical like this to help you quickly gain skills with all of these technologies super important.

Setting up pagination from Building a GraphQL Project with React.js by Ray Villalobos

If you follow me on LinkedIn, I'll make the course free for you to take for 24 hours, so don't miss it! Since this newsletter is going out more than a week before the event, I can't give you details now so stay tuned for more info.

Final Thoughts

I'm going to try to move the next edition a bit earlier, so you might get the next newsletter a bit faster, probably closer to the weekend.