It powers nodejs.org. It has 7.8k stars on Github.
It was installed 5x as much on NPM in the last 4 months as it was in the previous 5 years. https://metalsmith.io

I've been doing a lot of outreach to individual users, websites, and related Github projects, yet community involvement is hard to get by. If you value copy-left or free open-source software and are interested in bloat-free nodejs static site generation or build pipelines, please reach out.

I have a full-time job and am thankful for any help, be it feedback on the Gitter chat: https://gitter.im/metalsmith/... maintaining one of the 15+ core plugins, creating starters or writing blog posts.

I quietly refactored an entire NodeJS express in-house framework that was written in Java style (dependency injection, inheritance, inversion of control) and split it into typed, composable, parameterized, testable middlewares in 2 weeks (including some complicated ones like a custom Openid Connect flow)

Now comes the hard part: convincing the Java-devs who wrote it that it is useful

"at least 3 alphabets"

Developing front-ends used to be about translating a business use case to an interface. Now I spend days and weeks getting tooling to integrate properly: webpack, babel, React, Vue, SSR, Nuxt, NPM packages, build & CI pipelines, storybooks, and resolving incompatibilities. It's become such a grind I haven't had a single satisfying, productive workday since 4 months.

Pseudo-flexible working hours suck. I get the "choice" to start work between 7:30-9:30 AM. I'm a night owl so waking up at 6AM is not an option. Why can't they just allow to start at 10AM and finish at 6:30PM? Between 7:30 & 9:30 is peak rush hour and I'm bound to lose 1h30 in traffic for 30km (normally it would take half an hour) and start my workday pissed off.

Pps with Nuxt experience, please help: Nuxt has a config option "ssr" that can be set to false: https://nuxtjs.org/docs/...

My question is: what is the point of using Nuxt if you set ssr to false, considering that I would use a lighter solution for static sites, or just Vue for an SPA?

In most businesses, self-proclaimed full-stack teams are usually more back-end leaning as historically the need to use JS more extensively has imposed itself on back-end-only teams (that used to handle some basic HTML/CSS/JS/bootstrap on the side). This is something I witnessed over the years in 4 projects.

Back-end developers looking for a good JS framework will inevitably land on the triad of Vue, React and Angular, elegant solutions for SPA's. These frameworks are way more permissive than traditional back-end MVC frameworks (Dotnet core, Symfony, Spring boot), meaning it is easy to get something that looks like it's working even when it is not "right" (=idiomatic, unit-testable, maintainable).

They then use components as if they were simple HTML elements injecting the initial state via attributes (props), skip event handling and immediately add state store libraries (Vuex, Redux). They aren't aware that updating a single prop in an object with 1000 keys passed as prop will be nefarious for rendering performance. They also read something about SSR and immediately add Next.js or Nuxt.js, a custom Node express.js proxy and npm install a ton of "ecosystem" modules like webpack loaders that will become abandonware in a year.

After 6 months you get: 3 basic forms with a few fields, regressions, 2MB of JS, missing basic a11y, unmaintainable translation files & business logic scattered across components, an "outdated" stack that logs 20 deprecation notices on npm install, a component library that is hard to unit-test, validate and update, completely vendor-& version locked in and hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars.

I empathize with the back-end devs: JS frameworks should not brand themselves as "simple" or "one-size-fits-all" solutions. They should not treat their audience as if it were fully aware and able to use concepts of composition, immutability, and custom "hooks" paired with the quirks of JS, and especially WHEN they are a good fit.

"I'm not distracted, I'm just very focused on something else"

Excuses that sound legit pt.2
PS: guilty

"I don't shy away from complexity, I avoid it when possible"

Excuses that sound legit pt. 1
PS: guilty

Anyone know of a good non-opinionated ESlint default config that does a little more than eslint:recommended? I find eslint-config-airbnb-base & eslint-config-standard to be way too annoying and restrictive

Really, Sass? Poor judgment for a styling tool

Typora was the best (closed-source) free markdown editor. As soon as it hit the first stable release, it became non-free. Luckily, you can still download the last beta from https://typora.io/releases/all (click Dev/Beta releases -> scroll down to 'More Beta')

So until now the default env var User directory paths for Windows were all located under %userProfile%. To my surprise:

cd %userProfile%\Desktop

no longer works. Indeed, when you are even just signed in to OneDrive (which is the default, even if you disabled backups!), these retards decided it was a good idea to move all the standard library folders one level up to %userProfile%\OneDrive\ instead.

And the worst is that the locations continue to be swapped when you enable/ disable OneDrive.. WTF Microsoft

1. Open private browsing window
2. Navigate to https://github.com

That's a really well-designed and inspiring product landing page.

Follow-up to my exp with Travis CI: https://devrant.com/rants/5006826

As my allotted credits are set to expire on December 23, I sent a request for 25k monthly OSS credits to Travis support on December 18.
Mind you this is only half of the credits of their lowest subscription price and I didn't ask for extra CPU, so not much to ask.

While for the previous credit request, I got an answer within 24h, this request has gone unanswered for over 2 working days and I noticed it got labeled with "Priority: low" although I will be unable to continue my OSS work in 2 days.

Let's see whether they plan to really uphold their promise that "they will always support open-source"

So I was browsing the https://travis-ci.com website and was bothered by the weird gradiants, familiar layout and awkwardly timed animations (normally I only use https://app.travis-ci.com).

I navigated to all their top-level pages and paid attention to the incoherent/ sluggish design (see screenshot). So I got this feeling that it was a cheap-ass Wordpress template purchased from Themeforest and implemented by a webmaster with little to no dev-skills.

Sure enough, I checked the Wappalyzer extension and it is using Wordpress. Compare that to the old https://travis-ci.org which was custom-built on Ember and looks professional.

I'm aware of the negative PR they have generated over the past year but gave them the benefit of doubt and they have been good in their support and credit allotments, but man... that WP site looks so amateurish and marketed to the wrong target group. I don't know maybe I'll be forced to reconsider

To the reactjs-centered fucks who develop the popular web component viewing software called storybook: have you ever heard about semver?
89 alpha/beta/rc releases for a minor update 6.3 -> 6.4 with "100's of fixes and enhancements" "in preparation of the HUGE 7.0 release". Gee I wonder will it have 1000's of bugfixes? How bug-ridden is this software?
Every minor upgrade since 5.x is backwards-incompatible and requires a day of frustration finding out in how many more fucking NPM packages you split your codebase just because it's cool. I know move fast and break things, but some of us have other things to do than resolving node_modules incompatibilities you know. "No just hit 'npx sb upgrade' you say". I did, I really did! And the browser showed a blank screen of death with tons of cryptic React errors, it really did! Thank God you abstracted away all your dependencies in that sb command, now you can't even read the docs about what could have gone wrong with a specific sub-package. You have @storybook/html but the docs redirect to React pages, so good luck if you use something else

This is so sad... like.. the IDEA of storybook is great. But why did faith put the capacity to develop such a tool into the hands of people who think the world centers around React and JSX.. HTML should have been the default, and then you build on top of that for your fav framework, not the other way around

Poll: how do you manage Git?
A) CLI
B) GUI

My answer: A
Tally: A:1 B:0

I know streams are useful to enable faster per-chunk reading of large files (eg audio/ video), and in Node they can be piped, which also balances memory usage (when done correctly). But suppose I have a large JSON file of 500MB (say from a scraper) that I want to run some string content replacements on. Are streams fit for this kind of purpose? How do you go about altering the JSON file 'chunks' separately when the Buffer.toString of a chunk would probably be invalid partial JSON? I guess I could rephrase as: what is the best way to read large, structured text files (json, html etc), manipulate their contents and write them back (without reading them in memory at once)?

My brother-in-law's mother's face when she was telling me that she was forced to use 2FA Microsoft Office for work..
"They think we're all IT ppl or what"

Just realise how complex the "simple" 2FA activation step is for someone without the slightest IT curiosity. Not super-democratic either.. (eg. For someone who uses a library PC and has no phone)

Programming deeply inspired me before it became my day job. Before Facebook conquered the front-end and API code space. Before Electron apps. Before D. Trump became president. Each of those dealt a hit to either my passion for dev or motivation to create software for others

After a few years in IT you don't find job. Job find you!

Found this snapshot of the state of webdevelopment in 2012 in one of my old self-study notes/blog drafts. What progress since! Do you remember?

Aaargh! Stop the bleed!

*Me watching my investments in crypto*

I enjoy watching her 3-second processing mental context switch gaze when I ask my girlfriend a question while she's on the phone scrollin' or chattin',

*goes to hardware store to purxhase some RAM*

It's from 2019 but only found out now.
Sons of a ****

'Cuz every time we merge, I get this feelin'.
And every time we merge, I swear I could diff.
Can't you see my merge conflict, wanna force push commits,
in the remote history of Git

https://youtu.be/4G6QDNC4jPs?t=32

So recently a 0-day exploit was discovered in WP plugin Kaswara Modern WP Bakery Page (https://zdnet.com/article/...).

A customer's shared hosting space was taken down (about 6 websites) after this vulnerability had been exploited and although we removed the malicious code, & changed credentials the hosting company demands we update ALL Wordpress plugins to latest AND provide them a virus scan report of our local PC before putting the webspace back online??? WTF???

That just strikes me as outrageous. Thoughts?

Was in awe for the democratic potential of the worldwide web, and wanted to help realizing it. I was blind to its corporate potential back then.

The longer I work on front-end the more controversial my opinions become:

- Styling a button with display:flex is dumb.
- The DOM is not hard, unlike what the React team wants to have you believe.
- Specifying a <form> action matters, even if it's empty
- ES5 was the real JS revolution, ES6 mostly sugar-coated marketing
- Disciplined BEM (S)CSS is simple and flexible enough for most needs (vs CSS-in-JS, CSS modules)
- If editor support for Jsdoc were as advanced as Typescript, you wouldn't need the latter.
- There are cases where using floats and inline-block displays is better than the flex CSS box model