Exciting Lessons For 1st Week Of 2021 - I Suck At Design, TailwindCSS plugins, Privacy-first Analytics, and more
Hey friend, I hope you had an amazing first week of 2021. Either ways, it will get better for sure 💪🏻! I personally had a great (and busy) first week building tons of new interesting webdev stuff and I hope it will motivate you, too 🔥
In a nutshell, the following are 3 primary things I built and 3 advices I thought can be helpful for you.
3 things I built
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Finally finished redesiging my website after ~2 weeks. Learned a great deal about designing that I think a lot of developers can relate to.
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Wrote my first TailwindCSS plugin. Writing TailwindCSS plugin is pretty fun, and when you know it you can pretty much escape CSS forever 🤯! I open-sourced 3 plugins so far, it may be inspiring to see how simple they are: tailwindcss-autofill, tailwindcss-text-fill, and tailwindcss-shadow-fill.
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Enabled privacy-first analytics in my website using Plausible! (300 views a day and the fact that I've just started it 2 weeks ago is pretty good 😜)
3 advices for you (hopefully)
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It is easy to see something beautiful in our imagination, because we ignore the details and want to believe that we can make things beautiful. But when we actually sit down and do the work, we face the details that we'd never thought of, things get really hard and we will feel like we suck. The fact is everyone, even professional designers, start at this same situation and most quit. The key point is to accept that we aren't good now, see it as a learning process, be patient to do this boring difficult task, and we'll get better. Consider that most people don't get this.
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TaiwindCSS plugins are pretty easy and reusable compared separate CSS files. Intellisense features on VS Code also get automatically integrated. Try to write one to replace your separate CSS files, you'll feel less headache maintaining CSS while having an open-source NPM packages for other and future uses.
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There're plenty of website analytics tools. Google/Firebase Analytics are most famous and free, but it uses your users' data, and you're required to have a cookie banner and privacy policy. I hate it, it creates untrust feeling to the site. So use privacy-focused analytics tool instead, you don't have to deal with any legal aspect at all 👌🏻! Fathom is the most popular, however it is a little pricey for beginners. Plausible is amazing, it is open-sourced, 30 days trial, and 6$/month for starting bloggers.
Alright, that is it. I hope you learn something from it!
Next up
💼 New job, first day: Next Monday is my first day at my new remote senior software engineer position, so I'm excited and it's gonna be busy. There are gonna be lessons I can learn and share. Let me know if you want to learn anything specific about this experience!
🤖 Automating content distribution: On the side-project side, I'll focus on automating distributions of my content. The goal is to automatically convert my content into formats that are tailored for distributions to major platforms: DEV.to, Medium, Hashnode, and Twitter. I believe this idea will benefit a lot of other developers, too. So I have some ideas to scale it further. But first, let's see how it works for myself first!