September 2023: Advice for Building Reusable Component Libraries and Designing Complex UIs
Plus cool new features of Astro 3.0. Learnings from a lot of smart, talented folks this month.
Hi all,
This past week the weather’s been beautiful in my part of the US: cooler in the mornings, but still warming up throughout the day to be balmy by lunch time. It’s a nice change from the oppressive heat and humidity of summertime in Atlanta.
This past month I’ve been leaning into some new (non-tech) hobbies I’d like to get better at: calligraphy (and the slanted, flowing Copperplate script, in particular), and learning Spanish. And for the past year I’ve been learning hand balancing and working towards a solid, two-arm freestanding handstand.
I don’t speak much about what I’m doing outside of tech, but I really enjoy hearing about people’s interests and hobbies so I thought I’d share a little bit more about what’s caught my attention lately. Let me know if you enjoy it.
Now let’s get to the web development stuff.
The Front-end Fire podcast welcomed our first guest, Fred K. Schott to talk about the release of Astro 3.0.
In last month’s newsletter I announced that I and two of my web dev friends, TJ VanToll and Jack Herrington, started the Front-end Fire podcast, a weekly podcast about the latest and greatest news and happenings in the front-end world.
Astro 3.0 released right at the beginning of September and we were lucky enough to have Astro’s co-creator Fred Schott join us on the show to give his takes on the news and share some of the cool new features Astro 3.0 boasts.
I also had the pleasure of interviewing React-expert Cory House, and Founder and Editor-in-chief of SmashingMag Vitaly Friedman for the LogRocket podcast PodRocket.
Two folks who’ve been helping advance web development knowledge and skills for years through courses and workshops, conference talks, and articles, it was so cool to sit down with Cory and Vitaly and talk one-on-one.
I’ve taken Cory’s excellent online courses in the past, so exploring how he approaches building reusable component libraries today, was a total blast. He gives very sensible advice based off of years of experience building these sorts of systems for all different kinds of clients, and has a lot of actionable insights you can take away if your company is trying to do something similar.
SmashingMag is a resource I’ve turned to many times over the course of my web dev career, and talking to its Founder Vitaly Friedman was a great experience. Vitaly simplified how to design for complex UIs in our interview with lots of great takeaways for many complex things designers and developers deal with daily: nested menus, multi-level breadcrumbs, and carousel displays, to name just a few.
Last but not least, I wrote a blog about how to run multiple npm commands simultaneously.
With the advances in frontend web frameworks lately (Next.js, SvelteKit, Remix, etc.), a backend server isn’t quite as required for a JavaScript project as it used to be but I know many slightly older projects that still need both, and, interestingly enough, there’s not an immediately obvious way to start the client and server projects up at the same time with one npm start script.
In this article, I explored four different ways to start multiple servers using straight bash shell scripting, a couple of different npm packages, and even Docker, depending on your preferences.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s edition of “Paige Codes.” Please share with your friends if you did.
See you again at the end of October,
- Paige
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