I'm back! - and there's a lot to discuss

So, it’s been quite a while since my last post. I must admit - I took quite a long break (about 3 months). But, to not make it even longer, I’m going back to regular writing. Proper blog posts will come back beginning with next week. Today, I’d like to provide you with a quick overview of what I’ve been doing for all this time, and what’s next for this blog - after all, you deserve some explanation. ; ) Let’s get to it!

In contradiction to any possible believes, I didn’t abandon blogging. Instead, I’ve taken a break only to improve my skills, and the blog itself. I used the free time to reflect on my previous posts. I analyzed what was good about them and what can be improved upon. To quickly summarize it, here are the most important things that I’ve noticed:

• A need for more in-depth topic reviews and quality checks to prevent any misinformation (happened a few times before - sorry).
• More code snippets to work with and additional playgrounds for readers to interact with.
• Change content formatting - use more italics instead of disruptive bold formatting to empathize on different parts and keywords of the blog post.
• Create better titles - ones that are interesting to the reader, but don’t feel like click-bait.

Now, this is more of an informative post rather than anything else. Thus, the points above are meant to inform you of the upcoming changes, as well as serve as a TO-DO list for me. Also, if there’s something I’ve missed or forgot to mention, I’ll be more than happy to read your feedback in the comments section below - that’s what this post is for! It can be anything - from content-related recommendations to topics suggestions and any other form of constructive feedback! The comment section is yours!

Apart from all that, what else I’ve been up to? Well, something that I’ve been planning to do for quite a long time now - website redesign. It was meant to be special and unique… and oh boy will it be! Sadly, big projects require time, and even all the free time I’ve had until now, didn’t allow me to finish it. I’ve made some impressive progress though! To give you an overview of at what point I am right now, here’s what’s already done:

• A dedicated, written in vanilla JS UI framework! It cleverly utilizes template literals, performs all DOM operations in batched rAF calls, and is simply amazing IMHO (obvious bias). Here’s a small snippet to give you an idea of what it feels like:

// ...
View(() => {
    return Node(({ classes, state, styles, on }) => {
        state({ color: "red" }, true)
        on("created", () => {
            setTimeout(() => {
                state.set("color", "green");
            }, 1000);
		});

        return `<h4 ${styles({
            color: state.get("color")
        })}${classes([
            "hello"
        ])}>Hello World!</h4>`;
	});
}).render();

Right now it’s already quite well-tested but, as I want to do it just right, I’m planning on open-sourcing it together with the upcoming release of the redesign, which util this very framework at its core!

• A UI framework would be hard to use without any pre-made components. And that’s something that I’ve also paid attention to. Thus, I created a relatively small (~20 components), but very useful components library. It features a simple, minimalistic design and color palette, together with colorful shadows and gradients! It’s currently a bit more in WIP state and needs some improvements, but it’s quite usable.
• Finally, quite a big portion of the blog redesign process itself is already done. But, there are still a lot of things to do and improve upon, just to make everything right.

So, I think the most important question on your mind right now is - “What does it all means for me?” Well, apart from experiencing the newly redesigned blog - quite a few things actually! First and foremost is the fact that you’ll have a new open-source UI framework, together with a component library at your disposal. As I said, I’m planning to open-source it together with the launch of the redesigned website, but, if you want to be able to test it even earlier, or maybe you want to contribute to this project right now, just hit me up in the comments or via Twitter / Facebook / Email and I’ll see what I can do!

Anyway, for now, I’m still not done with all this stuff, but I can’t allow this break to go on any longer - it’s harmful to the blog. Like I’ve said - there will be a new blog post next week (most likely on Monday), so stay tuned for that (some VS Code stuff is coming!). For now - that’s it! Again the comment section is yours and have a nice day!

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