Week Notes 001

After a really (really) long hiatus, I'm back and want to start blogging again. The last two years have not been conducive to me writing here as much as I would have liked. The pandemic took a big toll on me (and everyone else) and I just didn't want to spend even more time in front of my computer after sitting in the same spot day after day for my job. Things have been getting better for me, so I'd like to come back to this blog to talk about my job and developer experience again. This is the first in a new series of entries following the "Week Notes" trend that I'm definitely very late to. My intention is for this to be a fun way to share some things I've learned, a few links of interesting articles I've read, and things that are going on at my job as I complete work for clients. Thanks for reading!

The Week

This week has been pretty stressful, to be honest. Sitting down to write this on a Thursday night, it's the first time all week I haven't felt super tired or stressed. I joined a new team at work last month, and officially took on the tech lead role (my first time!) with all of its responsibilities over the past week. It's been a big adjustment, and I'm definitely struggling with finding the right amount of doing things myself and leaning on others. It doesn't help that the tech stack is unfamiliar, so I'm learning that on top of helping build a new team. But, over the last couple days, we've really been rocking and that's brought my stress down quite a bit. Hopefully, we'll keep that rolling into next week and all the weeks after.

With my stress coming down, I'm hoping to have time for the side-project I've been planning. I want to build a audio visualizer app using the WebAudio API. It seems like a fun thing to do, to kind of scratch that building things just for the sake of building them itch. I'll be posting about my progress once I get going on that.

A little link roundup

The other main section part of this week notes series is posting some of the articles I've looked at and (mostly) read during the week. I'm going to cheat and include some from last week in this first list to have a bit more variety. I'm a bit of a magpie when it comes to these interesting articles around CSS, JS, UX Engineering, and the general craft or writing code. And over the past year or so, I've been sharing them in the various relevant channels in my work's Slack. So, I thought it would be nice to collect those and share them, for ease of finding them again in one place for future reference.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and things that definitely provide links to way more articles than I'm going to list here. That's generally where I get the articles I read during the week. I'll only be posting the articles I found of particular interest to my own tastes, so I highly encourage you to check out the sources for these if that tickles your fancy.

Most of the newsletters I subscribe to, such as Front-end Focus, are published by Cooper Press, and I've been a big fan for a long time. Other than that, I check out CSS Tricks most days, and Codrops' new collective each week. If you know about other cool newsletters, I'd love to hear about them. Please tweet them at me!

So, without further ado, here are this week's articles, in no particular order:

Send-off

And that's it, folks. Thanks for reading, and I'll be back next week. Have a great weekend!