December Engineering Monthly Round-Up

As we take strides into the new year, we hope that everyone achieved their goals in 2022. At OAK’S LAB, we did great work building strong products and playing a vital role in helping our founders attack their business goals, and we look forward to the new year and the direction that we are heading in. Let’s kick off 2023 with a newsletter about what we were reading and discovering in the last month of the year.

News & Exploration

Logical Border Radius

Michelle Barker has a confession about writing ‘border-radius’. Because it is difficult to remember the order of the values, she almost never does it shorthand. It turns out there are several ways to make the border-radius different, and her walkthrough (complete with code examples and graphics) should help you be able to write ‘border-radius’ shorthand in no time.

Create Games with JavaScript

Did you ever want to write a game with JavaScript? If you did, this tool is for you. Melon JS is a “fresh, modern, & lightweight” game engine that you can use to write your game. It’s fast (built with HTML 5). It’s free (forever). And it’s elegant (with all of its features). Go forth and create!

Renaming useEvent

With the confusion of ‘useEvent’, a new RFC has been proposed for React to rename it and explain ‘useEvent’ and the scope changes included with it.

SvelteKit receiving Auth Support

With over 300,000 downloads per week, the Vercel team has seen the popularity and the power of NextAuth.js. Now, they want to bring authorization to SvelteKit. While conceptually similar to Next.js for React, SvelteKit will provide an opinionated framework for building Svelte applications, and the SvelteKit Auth is the first framework outside of Next.js officially supported, built on top of the new @auth/core decoupled library.

The Ugly Other Half of Creativity

This article from Jason Lengstorf (host of the “Learn with Jason” podcast) does a deep dive into the concept of creativity. His ultimate discovery: “Creativity happens in two stages: first, unbounded imagination; then — more importantly — ruthless editing.” With a major emphasis on editing as the “ugly other half” of creativity, the article gives great advice on how to hone in your creative imagination in order to produce big new things.

MDX on React-Native

Have you ever wanted to use MDX on React-Native? Well, now you can. MDX is a powerful tool to write your documentation. Check out this GitHub page to discover the universal MDX implementation for Expo (React & Metro).

Next.js, Gatsby, NuxtJS, Nest… Which One to Choose

Comparing JavaScript frameworks to find out which one is the one for you seems like the next big thing these days. Aside from the humourous fact that they all are starting to sound alike, this deep dive article from Twilio looks at the requirements for a web application, goes into a detailed comparison of the Next.js, Gatsby, NuxtJS, and Nest frameworks, and discusses how to choose the best one for your project. Dive in.

A Few 2022 Wrapups

End-of-the-Year Wrapup from the Google Developer Team

In this article, the Google Developer Team looks back at all the features that became interoperable throughout 2022. The Interop 2022 initiative saw browser compatibility issues identified by web developers tackled by all major browser vendors and stakeholders. And it doesn’t stop here. Check out the article to see all the progress that browsers have made, and make sure to go to Interop 2023 to submit your proposals for what should be solved in the new year.

GitHub Unwrapped

Do you want to see how your year has been on GitHub? Check out GitHub Unwrapped to see a personalized video of your GitHub 2022 activity and share it with your fellow devs.

A Final Challenge

We’re closing it out with another engineering challenge brought to you by Cassidy Williams. (You can subscribe to her newsletter for all things new and cool in the world of web development.)

Given a string of any length, which contains only digits from 0 to 9, replace each consecutive run of the digit 0 with its length.

If you or someone you know is looking for an engineering position either remotely or in Prague, check out our job openings. We’re hiring!

Our Jobs

Do you want to shape the future and help build companies from scratch? Here is a list of job openings available right now at OAK’S LAB.

• QA Analyst (Tester), Prague
• Senior Frontend Engineer (React), Prague, Remote
• Tech Lead, Prague, Remote
• Senior Full Stack Engineer (Node.js / React), Prague, Remote
• Senior Backend Engineer (Node.js), Prague, Remote

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That’s the end of the December 2022 Engineering Monthly Round-Up. Thank you for reading, and we hope you’ve enjoyed the articles, libraries, and insights we shared. We look forward to seeing what next year brings our way. If you have any comments, suggestions, or other interesting material to share, please feel free to comment below or send me an email directly at ugur@oakslab.com. Thank you again, and we’ll be back next month.