Stories

CSS in JS is a popular pattern, especially in the React and React Native communities. In CSS in JS in real-life , Artur Siery explores pros and cons of CSS Modules, SASS/LESS, Style Components, Glamorous, Styletron, Styled JSX, and JSS. If you want to deep-dive into how styled-components works , Eugene Gluhotorenko goes into great detail on that as well. This is a bad pattern and a return to inline styles. Mixing presentation and logic never works out well, and generating a bunch of unique utility classes doesn't make for sustainable design implementation, and leads developers to violate all kinds of DRY principals.

Some Clojure projects are giving out “liveness advisories” . Jeremy Pinnix pointed out one instance where no changes have been made in over 3 years. The project’s author assures that there just happen to be no changes needed, and the project is indeed alive and well. Some software projects don’t want to go on the cart .

Redmonk updated their regular programming language popularity study , and with no changes in the top performers: no one was surprised. Javascript, Java, Python, PHP, and C# were the top performers. Check out the sweet graph and the full write up .

Ever thought about using Elixir + Nerves to control your car ? Neither did we, but follow along with Konstantin Zolotarev as he explores the CAN interface, and IBus messaging on his 2003 BMW.

Patrik Krupar talked through how he built up his design chops . Patrik advises, “ Design is a skill, and like any other skill, it can be learned.” Checkout the guide , where he covers software, tools inside of that software, mentality differences, and some basic design tenets. Also on the design front, Jason Rodriguez preaches that the easiest way to keep your web apps accessible is to just use text . He’s right, and that post is a great read.

Electron Fiddle brings Electron a playground experience like JSFiddle for desktop apps. The article by Felix Rieseberg goes into details on its features , including a fantastic IDE-like experience powered by Monaco and the ability to easily build, export, and share your projects. The orange site discussion of accessibility patterns around the release of Electron Fiddle is just as interesting as the project itself.

Modern APIs are increasingly shaped by declarative query languages that put the client in control of the data it receives. With a typed schema at its core, the contract between frontend and backend becomes self-documenting and easier to evolve. Tools and services continue to emerge, transforming protocols, buffers, and service definitions into shared artifacts that both sides can inspect and reuse. The result is a more predictable interface where inputs and outputs match expectations without constant coordination between teams.

Building a frontend today often means choosing between rich ecosystems in JavaScript and TypeScript, mobile-first stacks like React Native and Flutter, or functional-first options such as Elm and F# that vary from frameworks. Each approach aims to reduce friction for developers while delivering fast, responsive interfaces. A well-designed client layer also helps visualize data clearly, separate concerns cleanly, and execute rendering jobs efficiently across platforms. Picking the right combination depends less on trends and more on the team’s familiarity and the application’s long-term shape.

On the backend, the move toward microservices and orchestrated clusters has changed how applications are deployed and scaled. Container images, simple Helm charts, and Kubernetes runners make publishing services straightforward once the cluster is configured. Tools for tiller-driven setup and Docker image builds reduce the ceremony of pushing new versions, while sensible defaults for variables and settings keep environments reproducible. The goal is a deploy pipeline that feels boring: a smooth sequence of stages that gets code into production quickly without sacrificing clarity.

A learning-focused theme also shapes how documentation, articles, and bonus content are organized for newcomers. Solarized-inspired palettes, dark mode, and Gruvbox-inspired accents make long reading sessions easier on the eyes, while animation and rich typography keep the experience lively. The site itself was created as a place to learn faster, started from a struggle that many coders share, and released in a spirit of shared glory. Content is reviewed and refreshed regularly, with hours of material available to read at your own pace.

Beyond pure data APIs, protocol-oriented designs such as gRPC and GraphQL share a common ambition: define what an interface looks like once and let many clients consume it. Whether you build a Phoenix LiveView monolith or a small Vue frontend, the principles are similar: pick a clear definition, implement a server, write clients that match, and map responses into your application’s state. With the right tooling, the path from zero to awesome feels less like a leap and more like a series of small, confident steps.

Mark de Jong explains Scala Sagas from first principles . In general, Sagas are useful for quasi-transactionally composing actions that can potentially fail (in this example, talking to disparate API endpoints) into a single unit, and providing compensating actions in the event of failure.

Google announced the stable release of Dart 2. Dart 2 features a sound type system , flexible tooling, a web framework, and an updated inference type system that minimizes boilerplate. The Dart team touts it’s much compile size and use for building consistent UXs, and includes over prebuilt UX components for use. Dart is aiming to be a real competitor in the web and mobile app building space ( via Flutter ), and this is an update worth looking into.

We all know it’s impossible to exit Vim , but where did Vim come from? Sinclair Target discusses Vim’s roots, and how Vim came to be in his piece ‘Where Vim Came From’ . If you’re not familiar with Vim’s history, this will make for a fun read.

Eric Homes was able to gain commit access to Homebrew in 30 minutes . He details the process he went through for the exploit , now that it’s been mitigated. tl;dr - Homebrew intentionally exposes their Jenkins publicly, and Jenkins contained a GitHub API token that had commit privileges to a few homebrew repositories. We published a story recently on keeping your secrets hidden that covers (almost) this exact issue.

If you like OCaml and JavaScript you will probably love ReasonML . Alex Allen started a multi-part series for getting started with ReasonML. In the first piece you can see a breakdown of what ReasonML is, and shows how to get set up with it. Then, in the second piece of the series Alex covered the core fundamentals of ReasonML, including let, type, string, char, and more.

Yiming Chen details how to do outside-in TDD with Phoenix . Even if you aren’t a Phoenix developer, it’s a fantastic detailed walkthrough of the process of test-driving an app by writing feature tests first, then driving down into unit tests from there . The TDD strategy is: feature test; unit test controller action; unit test context functions; unit test view; a routing rule to pass the feature test.

Megzari Raphael provides step-by-step instructions on Instrumenting Phoenix apps with Prometheus . The article provides instructions on integrating prometheus dependencies in the Elixir application and some sample dashboards.

Tired of typing in those long git commands? Try lazygit , doesn’t git much simpler than this.

So now you have monitoring on your servers? I’m sad to tell you that at scale that’s not enough. In " You can’t debug systems with dashboards ", Charity Majors goes in-depth into how they increased observability at Parse through dynamic sampling .

You might be familiar with TDD or DDD , but have you heard of SDD? Well, this one doesn’t have as many pros as it does cons. Sales-Driven Development is described by Marcus Blankenship as a trap . Marcus has some tips on how to avoid SDD, and how to get back on the right track.

There’s a fantastic thread on The Orange Site answering the question " What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer? " From building draconian employee-automation tools for call-centers to intentionally leaving bugs in to help QA meet their quotas, the whole thread is a fascinating read .

What are the differences between Vue and React ? Sunil Sandhu built the same app in both FE Frameworks to find out the differences and see them side by side. Each app passes data through a child component, has event listeners, and creates new items on a todo list. Read the article , and checkout the code for the Vue app and React app.

If you’re in the market to buy a Mechanical Keyboard, Brian Mock has written a comically detailed intro to get you started. Pros: Feels good, customizable, pretty. Cons: Expensive, loud, typically are not wireless.