Sreetam Das' newsletter

Archive

🤝 Friendly forks, some Svelte and anti-crypto toxicity

Hello there!

I learnt a used a bit of Svelte for a personal minisite this week. It felt really neat and fast but I almost missed JSX! I realised that I’m not a huge fan of templating syntax, especially versus using JavaScript. 😄

Also, React India announced they’ve opened their CFPs, you can apply here!

Wanna share this with someone? You can send them here 😄

#57
May 8, 2022
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💫 The Return of the 90s Web, Docs for everyone and DALL-E 2

Hello there!

I attended Devs for Ukraine, it was such a great conference with a stellar lineup—you can catch the VOD! 😄

Onto this week 🚀

Wanna share this with someone? You can send them here 😄

#56
April 26, 2022
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🏎️ Fast, Rome Formatter and Code through drawing

Hello there!

I spoke on a Twitter space last weekend, on State management in React—it was my first time and I think did okay? I’ve had stage fright since…forever, so I was pretty nervous. 😅 (yes, even though it was just audio and virtual)

Wanna share this with someone? You can send them here 😄

If you’d been procrastinating on submitting your talk proposal for React Day Bangalore, they’ve extended their deadline!

#55
April 13, 2022
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🍅 Devs for Ukraine, An Anniversary and The Ketchup Conundrum

Hello there!

Today’s a special day: it’s been officially a year since I started this newsletter! (and published it regularly 😅) It’s had such a great positive feedback loop effect on me through the weeks, and hopefully you’ve liked it too! 😝

My colleagues just announced Devs for Ukraine! It’s a small online conference by Remote, with an amazing speaker line-up and completely free—you can donate, with all the money raised going to help Ukrainian people. 💙💛

Finally, Remote announced our Series C funding! 🚀🚀🚀

#54
April 5, 2022
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🐟 Being an Imposter, Knowing when to say "No" and React Day Bangalore

Hello there!

Hope you’re having good time wherever you are—it is officially need-to-take-multiple-showers-a-day weather here in Bhubaneswar. 😅 I had some fun solving the puzzles over at Break the Code 2 by .Tech and also talked to a couple of people over the weekend! This was the first time I’ve ever done this and I think it went well enough that I’d do it again—keep an eye on my Twitter or reply here if you wanna talk!

I also finally submitted my talk for React Day Bangalore! Going to keep my fingers crossed. 🤞 They’re looking for more proposals so please go ahead and submit your talk—feel free to reach out if I can help you review your proposal. 😄


#53
March 29, 2022
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⛽ Zustand, On being indispensable and the jerrycan design

Hello there!

This week I moved a buuunch of my React.useContext code over to Zustand! I was pretty impressed by Zustand last week and I especially loved that I could VERY easily configure it to persist the /foobar state—I even added a small helper to migrate the data (from localForage/IndexedDB to Zustand, in case you’re interested).

Wanna share this with someone? You can send them here 😄

Onto this week!

#52
March 22, 2022
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📬 Type syntax in JS, YAMO and a homecoming for this newsletter

Hello hello!

I’ve been busy this past week finishing something that I’ve wanted to do for quite a while—you can now view this newsletter’s archive right on my website! Like always, I got carried away and made more changes that I originally intended to. 😅 Check it out and let me know if I can make improvements!

I’ve already started on the next thing: I’m gonna replace my React Context spaghetti code with Zustand—I’ve only seen it briefly but it looks really solid and I’m pretty confident it’s gonna make my /foobar code sooo much better. 🧑‍🍳 Lemme know if you’ve worked with it before and liked it!

Also, I had my review at work last week and it went so well!

#51
March 17, 2022
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⌨️ New MDN, Browsers working together and a new keyboard! ...kind of

Hello there!

I moved yet again last weekend and now I’m in the outskirts of my hometown: Bhubaneswar. I finally got a chance to settle down and unpack the stuff that I’d got back from the US—and got to put on my new keycaps, and IT LOOKS SO GOOD! 🤩

Also, my partner presented her first-ever(!!) conference talk at the Investigative Reporters and Editors NICAR conf—you can check out the (timestamped) recording. 😄


#50
March 8, 2022
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🇺🇦 1x engineer, The 'high five' couple and Markdown

Hello there!

The world is a not-so-fun™ place right now and I hope you and your loved ones are doing okay. It’s unfathomable to me that any of this is possible in this day and age.

I’m back in my hometown of Bhubaneswar and having loads of home food, and I got back to work from what feels like an eternity. I’ve been working on adding a /books page on my website and didn’t feel the best about using Goodreads—you can read up more about what I’m doing [GitHub issue] and check out my work so far [Pull request]. 😄


#49
March 1, 2022
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✈️ State of JS '21, Next.js 12.1 and more!

Hello there!

I’m in the middle of travelling, so this is gonna be a short one—but boy there have been exciting things this past week! 😄


📚 To read

#48
February 19, 2022
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☕️ California, painting mugs and some more NYC

Hello hello!

I travelled to California and Los Angeles last week to visit some relatives here. (Hence the delayed newsletter issue 😅) If you’re interested, here’s my hot take: NYC > LA. I mean, LOOK at this view.

We went to a pottery class today and hand painted mugs for one another. We’ll get the baked-and-finished mugs later this week—can’t wait to share them!


#47
February 11, 2022
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🍎 A new MDX, Lego and iPhone

Hello there!

I witnessed a snow storm here in New York last week! (it’s so cold that the snow is still here after 4 days 🤯) I’ve always been a winter-loving kid but NYC really has me questioning if I love winters as much. 😅

I also got myself a couple of shiny toys! I bought my first Lego set and an iPhone — I’m lovin’ it. And Remote got a facelift!


#46
February 1, 2022
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🗽 New York is pretty cool, who knew?

Hello there!

It’s now been almost two weeks since I’ve been on my time-off, and I’ve seen so much of New York already! There’s so many things that have surprised me here: the vehicles are so big, you can simply drink the water from the tap directly(?!?!!), and there are like 1787812 varieties of cereal. 😮

If you’ve got recommendations for places I should definitely check out or restaurants to eat at—let me know!


#45
January 25, 2022
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🗽 Doing touristy things in New York

Hello there!

The secret’s out of the bag: After a bunch of luck with my US Visa, flights and US immigration, I’m in New York City visiting my girlfriend for a month!

So far I’ve already walked more than I probably did in all of 2021 and saw the New York Stock Exchange, Times Square, Tom’s Restaurant (which was featured a couple of times on Seinfeld!), and of course, Columbia University!


#44
January 18, 2022
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"Don't criticize unless you can do better" — Dan Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

Hello there!

Hope y’all had a great week. I flew into Delhi from Kolkata for the final part of my top-secret work™, and I’m hoping my luck continues on for a couple more days. 🤞

More details soon, I promise! 😇


#43
January 11, 2022
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🥳 New Year, new Me, new You too!

Hello there, Happy New Year!

I hope your return to work is going peachy. 🍑 I’m in Kolkata for some top-secret work and if everything goes well, I’ll have some exciting news to share sometime next week. 🤞

I bought a bunch of books last week—I’m hoping to read (and write!) a lot more this year! I was also thinking about how to keep a track of this on my website, so if you have any ideas I’d love to hear them. (Someone already pointed me in the direction of Maggie Appleton’s Library page!)


#42
January 4, 2022
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⏳ Time to update your footer's copyright year

Hello there!

Wow, we’re finally here. It’s the end of 2021.

And yet, it feels like we’re still stuck in 2020. 🙄 (Do you also wonder what day in March it is?) I spent the last couple of days reflecting on how (quickly!) this year went and I suggest you do too! No matter how it went, pat yourself on the back for making it till the end of 2021 and be proud of what you accomplished. 😄

2021 was an amazing year for me, and looking onwards to and everything in the works for 2022, I’ve got a feeling similar to what I felt when joining Remote: Hoo boi, I’m nervous but so, SO much more excited for everything to come. C’est la vie!

#41
December 28, 2021
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⏲️ It's almost the end of the year

Hello there!

It’s almost the end of the year—wow, that was quick. 😅 Everything is cold and slow, and I hope you get to have a festive end to the year as well!


📚 To read

#40
December 21, 2021
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React Conf, Tailwind and log4j — it's been quite a week!

Hello there!

Last week, we had React Conf 2021 with a plethora of great talks! My favourite talks were React Developer Tooling and React without memo, but there’s a buuunch of great ones in official playlist. I’m also impressed by how the team has gone about Suspense and Concurrent mode features. It’s an exciting time for React!

Also, an enormous part of the internet became vulnerable to an exploit in log4j. Cloudflare has a great write up if you’d like to read more—but here’s the summary: It’s bad. VERY bad. To make things worse, it is incredibly easy to use this exploit, it affects even Minecraft. 🥶


#38
December 14, 2021
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😇 Sandpack, finishing side projects for charity, and some news :)

Hello there!

I I got promoted; I’m now a Senior Frontend Engineer!!! 😄🥳🎉 This means a lot to me. I genuinely enjoy working with everyone here at Remote and it is amazing that Remote celebrates me as well!

Also, we’ve got React Conf this week—check out the different talks that they’ve got lined up! 😍


#37
December 7, 2021
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👶 Baby brother is all grown up!

Hello there!

I’m back in my hometown and dropped off my lil’ baby brother! He’s all grown up now, and I definitely hugged him extra tight today. 😢


📚 To read

#39
November 30, 2021
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🌄 I travelled though east Sikkim

Hello there!

I travelled through east Sikkim last weekend—It’s a truly serene landscape, and very, very cold. I shared some pictures too!

I also got a shoutout from Cassidy! It feels like I’ve come full circle since her newsletter has always been a huge inspiration—check it out if you haven’t already.

Lastly, Advent of Code 2021 is just around the corner; it’s an advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. If you’re interested, lemme know by replying to this email/contacting me on Twitter so I can add you to a private leaderboard. 👀

#36
November 23, 2021
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👋 Hello from React India 2021

Hello there!

React India finally happened last week—if we were on the same table in the lounge, hi again! Like any conference, the lounge/booth conversations were equally exciting as the actual talks themselves, especially when there were so many interesting people to interact with too! (Disclaimer: I may or may not start preparing for the React India 2022 conference CFP already 👀)

I also attended DX Club‘s AMA with Kabir Nazir — who has been living in the Himalayas for over 2 years now. 🤯 Lots of great advice and tips as always, love what they’ve been doing over the last couple of months.


#35
November 16, 2021
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📖 VSCode has (Jupyter) Notebooks now

Hello there!

It’s been an eventful week for me—I celebrated 3 years of dating my girlfriend! I (finally) became eligible for the Hacktoberfest rewards as well (you should be too! Go check your dashboard)

Apart from that, I was with watching the latest CS:GO Major—and ! I also finally watched the fifth season of Money Heist, so if you wanna tell me I’m too late in watching it now, reply to this email!

#34
November 9, 2021
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✨ New releases everywhere!

Hello there!

Doing my best impression of MKBHD So I’ve been living in the mountains for almost 10 days now, and I’m all settled in! With this move, I realized that apparently all I need in life is good internet (to video call my girlfriend, duh). I’m just trolling, but I really can’t find things to complain about — I mean look at the !

#33
November 2, 2021
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⛰ Life update: Hello from the Himalayan foothills!

Hello there!

Life update: I moved to the foothills of the Himalayas! I’ve been posting photos and am still in awe of where I am. Living in a place as remote as this is a whole another experience and I cannot wait to share more about it. 😍 I did want to add though that I moved here with my parents and younger brother since this is where my Dad is posted out currently. I’ll be writing more about the whole move on my blog, so stay tuned! You can even subscribe to . 😄

#32
October 26, 2021
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😌 Beautiful code blocks, at last

Hello there!

I got to visit my mother’s ancestral home in a little village today, had a ton of great food and met a bunch of relatives. I also made a ton of progress with adding shiki as my syntax highlighter — I’m actually almost done! You can check out a live preview of how it looks and for a comparison of how it compares to what I was using earlier (, incredibly popular and probably your choice of syntax highlighter as well!)

#31
October 19, 2021
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🎨 A new syntax highlighter for sreetamdas.com

Hello there!

I’m writing out today’s newsletter slightly late: I got to visit the Jagannath Temple in Puri. We hadn’t been able to go for a couple of years now (something related to a global pandemic maybe?) so it was a surreal experience! We had to leave super early in the morning (by 5AM) to reach in time, so I spent most of my afternoon catching up on sleep. 😅

I started trying out for syntax highlighting on — it’s a much more VSCode accurate syntax highlighter than the much-more-common-choice , so I’m very excited to see how it’s gonna turn out! You can track my progress in the . 😄

#30
October 12, 2021
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🚗 I'm moving to the Himalayan foothills!

Hello there!

I’m in the middle of moving, so long Vizag! 👋I’m at my ancestral home in Bhubaneswar at the moment and missing Bangalore weather ! Being home and having a change of scenery is sweet though. I’ll be moving again in a couple weeks to , and I’m sooo looking forward to that. 😄

#29
October 5, 2021
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🦸 Getting ready for Hacktoberfest, and I'd love your help!

Hello there!

I got mdx-bundler working, yay! It’s live now and you can take a look at the PR. I haven’t had much success in benchmarking the results after removing completely, but it definitely feels like the right decision. MDXJS seems to have come back to life with a v2 though — I’m gonna wait and see how that turns out. 👀

#28
September 28, 2021
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🦤 Using mdx-bundler for sreetamdas.com

Hello there!

I FINALLY HAD A BREAKTHROUGH THIS WEEK! 🎉 I’d been meaning to move away from the way that I was using my .mdx files for my website since it was .

#27
September 21, 2021
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😮 500 commits on my website repository

Hello there!

Hope you had an amazing week! I finally merged my PR adding a “view counter” to different pages with Supabase and crossed 500 commits (over ~500 days) on my website’s code repo.

#26
September 14, 2021
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💉 Fully vaccinated and working with Supabase

Hello there!

I got my second dose of the vaccine. 😄 With the number of cases in India showing a slow rise again, I’m glad I can sleep just a lil’ bit easier now.

I continued working with Supabase over the week; I’m amazed at how much control it provides over interacting with my data, as well as ! Hopefully, I deploy it this week — you can always . 😄

#25
September 7, 2021
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⌨️ Beats and Keebs

Hello there!

What a week it’s been — I’ve spent the last couple days listening to Donda! I also saw people I know posting their mechanical keyboards — Oh man, I couldn’t be happier seeing so many people getting into this not-so-niche-anymore lil’ hobby that I used to think I was alone in! 😄

#24
August 31, 2021
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💜 I'm back and well!

Hello there!

I’m back from my bout with Dengue fever! I spent a couple of days at the hospital under observation to make sure that I went into the recovery phase, and my blood platelet count is finally increasing again. 🙌

This whole episode made me realize just how grateful I am for so, so many things in my life — my mom who took take care of me and my brother throughout the week, my girlfriend who made sure I was taking care of myself, and Remote for being able to stay away from work without a worry. 😅


#23
August 24, 2021
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😅 Not the Best Weekend

Hello there!

I got dengue over the weekend, and all I can say is: F**k mosquitoes! My weekend was a cycle of medicines and bed rest.

I feel better now, but I took the week off from work to make sure I recovered fully (yay unlimited leaves!). 🤞


#22
August 17, 2021
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🌺 Checking out React query and Svelte

Hello there!

I spent the weekend learning about two new things! This recent tweet from The New York Times’ coverage about the Olympics pushed me to finally check out Svelte. has been on my radar for a while now. I love pretty much everything about it, and definitely want to use it in my next project 😄

#21
August 10, 2021
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👫🏻 Guess who's back?

Hello there!

I’m back from Bangalore after my PTO — it was surreal to be able to get out of the house, and I got to meet my girlfriend as well! I love her a lot, and she totally didn’t ask me to write this 😄

The StackOverflow Developer Survey results came out yesterday, and I’ve been going through them — so cool to see the most (I love TypeScript and have been a recent admirer of Elixir as well!) and 😂

#20
August 3, 2021
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🌴 Time off + some happy updates :)

Hello there!

I’ve been on leave for the past week and enjoying time away from, well, pretty much everything! And to top it off, I got a raise at work! 😄

It’s really refreshing to be working at a company where I thoroughly enjoy what I get to work on, and I get appreciated for it as well :)


#19
July 27, 2021
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🤯 Karma theme has over 5000 installs

Hello there!

What a week it has been — my VSCode theme cross 5000 installs! I never thought people would like something that I’d created for myself but here we are 😄. I’ve also been busy with DMs from people after Remote’s announcement.

#18
July 20, 2021
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🦄 Remote became a unicorn!

Hey there!

The remote.com/careers link was broken in the original email earlier — here’s the corrected one!

Once again, if you’d like to explore roles at Remote — I’m always here for any questions you may have, and you can also check out our public handbook to get a feel of what we’re all about! 💜

#17
July 13, 2021
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🦄 Remote became a unicorn!

Hello there!

This week’s slightly-late issue is here! I was under embargo until now, and I really wanted to include this in the newsletter:

Remote is officially a unicorn!! 🚀

#16
July 13, 2021
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✈️ Everyone's got a coding co-pilot now!

Hello there!

Hope you all had a terrific week, and definitely no career-anxiety over the GitHub Copilot announcement 👀 Seriously though—I’m beyond excited to see everything that this new era of AI-aided programming will bring on!

I beat my highscore on and also on a over the weekend! Oh boy, what a week indeed 😄

#15
July 6, 2021
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🚀 Next.js 11 and Polywork are here!

Hello there!

Guess who completely forgot to mention the Next.js 11 release last week, even though he’d already updated his website with it? Certainly not me 😅

#14
June 29, 2021
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⁉️ Questions, questions everywhere!

Hello there!

I added a small page on my website about frequently asked questions that I got last week, after I got the same question from 2-3 people in a single week (pssst! It was about those “colorful plus-sign thingies” on my desk 😄).

#13
June 22, 2021
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⚛️ React 18 is here!?!

Hello there!

What a week it’s been — we (finally) heard from the React team about The Plan for React 18, I love that there is finally more communication from their side (Thank you @cassidoo!). Speaking of which, the was great too! Lots of interesting tidbits in there, including the revelation that React’s initial name was “FBolt”, and the . 🤯

#12
June 15, 2021
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🧈 A butter-smooth mobile navigation drawer with Framer Motion

Hello there!

I added some much needed improvements to my website over the past week, and got to use framer-motion finally. I love that it can take care of a lot of concerns and use cases (animations and more) that you’d have to handle yourself — my tweet showing the changes to handle the reading progress bar is a good example of what I’m talking about.

#11
June 8, 2021
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A broken live component, no more!

Hello there!

I resolved a bug in the live component that I’d shared last week — thanks to Shubham for pointing it out! The bug would cause any modifications that you’d made to be cleared when you would change the theme 😅

#10
June 1, 2021
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💡 We're more (a)live than ever before!

Hello there!

I hoped to write a blog post this past weekend, but instead I ended up fiddling around with implementing a live playground on my website — it’s not ready yet™, but feel free to check it out, break things and share your feedback :)

To read

#9
May 25, 2021
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Notion's API is finally here!

Hello there!

I hope you had a great week — I fiddled around with the ✨ finally released ✨ Notion API and created a new page on my website to see all the keebs (and related things!) I’ve bought so far. The API is still in beta, so feel free to play around and explore it :)

#8
May 18, 2021
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