/newsletter

Happy New Year!

I spent the last two weeks working on a lil' personal project with SvelteKit — I'm ready to say I'm a fan, it's such a neat experience! Although it definitely takes some time to get used to the differences coming from React. 😅

I came down with a cold last week, and have been catching up with all the goodness that was announced at the Next.js conf! It looks like the JS community has quite never been this active in some time, what a time to be a part of this transformation that we're seeing! 😅 With React server components becoming a reality, and Remix becoming a part of Shopify and tooling like Turbopack and Vite becoming more mainstream, we're all in for a ride.

It's been quite a week 😅 I had a family member ill with dengue—so the majority of my last week was just repeating to myself: "fuck. mosquitoes." 🙃

Happy Dussehra! This week I've been working on revamping my homepage content—it's been so, so long since I've touched it and it felt kind of outdated to me. 😅 If you're interested, you can check it out at staging.sreetamdas.com. 👀

I'm back from React India conf—OMG it was the best time I've had in so, so long. If you missed the talks and wanna catch up, you can watch the VOD on YouTube. There were a bunch of great talks, and my personal favourites were: Supercharging your dev experience with Turborepo and Code crimes for good component APIs.

I've been working on making some improvements to this newsletter's archive over at sreetamdas.com/newsletter, you can check out my progress. Truth be told, I'm very much looking forward to all the new stuff that's going to be introduced in the next major version of Next.js (you can read more about them in the Layouts RFC).

What a week it's been: I (finally) published the latest version of Karma! Who would've thought working on a VS Code theme update would take me literally months? 😅 (It also has a new 💫 light mode!)

I spent most of the week finishing up the next version of Karma that I've teased earlier—I'm super happy with how everything looks and even had someone beta test it out and fixed up some more things!

Wanna share this with someone? You can send them here 😄

It's been a big week for me: something I worked on for quite a while is finally out! Check out Remote's Employee Cost Calculator 👀

Sorry I haven't sent an issue in a lil bit, but Happy 🇮🇳 Independence Day!

It's been a long week with so, so many things happening. I set up my new workspace finally and it looks so pretty! Pics to follow soon, I promise!

I'm visiting Bangalore (again!) for a couple of weeks—let me know on Twitter if you wanna meet up. 👀

It's been a while. 😅 I'm back after taking the last month off—I got super busy with a buuunch of different things, I even visited Bangalore after so long!

I learnt a used a bit of Svelte for a personal minisite this week. It felt really neat and fast but I almost missed JSX! I realised that I'm not a huge fan of templating syntax, especially versus using JavaScript. 😄

I attended Devs for Ukraine, it was such a great conference with a stellar lineup—you can catch the VOD! 😄

I spoke on a Twitter space last weekend, on State management in React—it was my first time and I think did okay? I've had stage fright since...forever, so I was pretty nervous. 😅 (yes, even though it was just audio and virtual)

Today's a special day: it's been officially a year since I started this newsletter! (and published it regularly 😅) It's had such a great positive feedback loop effect on me through the weeks, and hopefully you've liked it too! 😝

Hope you're having good time wherever you are—it is officially need-to-take-multiple-showers-a-day weather here in Bhubaneswar. 😅 I had some fun solving the puzzles over at Break the Code 2 by .Tech and also talked to a couple of people over the weekend! This was the first time I've ever done this and I think it went well enough that I'd do it again—keep an eye on my Twitter or reply here if you wanna talk!

This week I moved a buuunch of my React.useContext code over to Zustand! I was pretty impressed by Zustand last week and I especially loved that I could VERY easily configure it to persist the /foobar state—I even added a small helper to migrate the data (from localForage/IndexedDB to Zustand, in case you're interested).

Hello hello!

I've been busy this past week finishing something that I've wanted to do for quite a while—you can now view this newsletter's archive right on my website! Like always, I got carried away and made more changes that I originally intended to. 😅 Check it out and let me know if I can make improvements!

I moved yet again last weekend and now I'm in the outskirts of my hometown: Bhubaneswar. I finally got a chance to settle down and unpack the stuff that I'd got back from the US—and got to put on my new keycaps, and IT LOOKS SO GOOD! 🤩

The world is a not-so-fun™ place right now and I hope you and your loved ones are doing okay. It's unfathomable to me that any of this is possible in this day and age.

I'm in the middle of travelling, so this is gonna be a short one—but boy there have been exciting things this past week! 😄

Hello hello!

I travelled to California and Los Angeles last week to visit some relatives here. (Hence the delayed newsletter issue 😅) If you're interested, here's my hot take: NYC > LA. I mean, LOOK at this view.

I witnessed a snow storm here in New York last week! (it's so cold that the snow is still here after 4 days 🤯) I've always been a winter-loving kid but NYC really has me questioning if I love winters as much. 😅

It's now been almost two weeks since I've been on my time-off, and I've seen so much of New York already! There's so many things that have surprised me here: the vehicles are so big, you can simply drink the water from the tap directly(?!?!!), and there are like 1787812 varieties of cereal. 😮

The secret's out of the bag: After a bunch of luck with my US Visa, flights and US immigration, I’m in New York City visiting my girlfriend for a month!

Hope y'all had a great week. I flew into Delhi from Kolkata for the final part of my top-secret work™, and I'm hoping my luck continues on for a couple more days. 🤞

Hello there, Happy New Year!

I hope your return to work is going peachy. 🍑 I'm in Kolkata for some top-secret work and if everything goes well, I'll have some exciting news to share sometime next week. 🤞

Wow, we're finally here. It's the end of 2021.

It's almost the end of the year—wow, that was quick. 😅 Everything is cold and slow, and I hope you get to have a festive end to the year as well!

Last week, we had React Conf 2021 with a plethora of great talks! My favourite talks were React Developer Tooling and React without memo, but there's a buuunch of great ones in official playlist. I'm also impressed by how the team has gone about Suspense and Concurrent ~~mode~~ features. It's an exciting time for React!

I I got promoted; I'm now a Senior Frontend Engineer!!! 😄🥳🎉 This means a lot to me. I genuinely enjoy working with everyone here at Remote and it is amazing that Remote celebrates me as well!

I'm back in my hometown and dropped off my lil' baby brother! He's all grown up now, and I definitely hugged him extra tight today. 😢

I travelled through east Sikkim last weekend—It's a truly serene landscape, and very, very cold. I shared some pictures too!

React India finally happened last week—if we were on the same table in the lounge, hi again! Like any conference, the lounge/booth conversations were equally exciting as the actual talks themselves, especially when there were so many interesting people to interact with too! (Disclaimer: I may or may not start preparing for the React India 2022 conference CFP already 👀)

It's been an eventful week for me—I celebrated 3 years of dating my girlfriend! I (finally) became eligible for the Hacktoberfest rewards as well (you should be too! Go check your dashboard)

Doing my best impression of MKBHD So I've been living in the mountains for almost 10 days now, and I'm all settled in! With this move, I realized that apparently all I need in life is good internet (to video call my girlfriend, duh). I'm just trolling, but I really can't find things to complain about — I mean look at the view from my evening jog!

Life update: I moved to the foothills of the Himalayas! I've been posting photos and am still in awe of where I am. Living in a place as remote as this is a whole another experience and I cannot wait to share more about it. 😍 I did want to add though that I moved here with my parents and younger brother since this is where my Dad is posted out currently. I'll be writing more about the whole move on my blog, so stay tuned! You can even subscribe to my blog's RSS feed. 😄

I got to visit my mother's ancestral home in a little village today, had a ton of great food and met a bunch of relatives. I also made a ton of progress with adding shiki as my syntax highlighter — I'm actually almost done! You can check out a live preview of how it looks and check out my tweets for a comparison of how it compares to what I was using earlier (prism-react-renderer, incredibly popular and probably your choice of syntax highlighter as well!)

I'm writing out today's newsletter slightly late: I got to visit the Jagannath Temple in Puri. We hadn't been able to go for a couple of years now (something related to a global pandemic maybe?) so it was a surreal experience! We had to leave super early in the morning (by 5AM) to reach in time, so I spent most of my afternoon catching up on sleep. 😅

I'm in the middle of moving, so long Vizag! 👋I'm at my ancestral home in Bhubaneswar at the moment and missing Bangalore weather a lot! Being home and having a change of scenery is sweet though. I'll be moving again in a couple weeks to Kalimpong, and I'm sooo looking forward to that. 😄

I got mdx-bundler working, yay! It's live now and you can take a look at the PR. I haven't had much success in benchmarking the results after removing MDXJS completely, but it definitely feels like the right decision. MDXJS seems to have come back to life with a v2 though — I'm gonna wait and see how that turns out. 👀

I FINALLY HAD A BREAKTHROUGH THIS WEEK! 🎉 I'd been meaning to move away from the way that I was using my .mdx files for my website since it was pretty hack-y.

Hope you had an amazing week! I finally merged my PR adding a "view counter" to different pages with Supabase and crossed 500 commits (over ~500 days) on my website's code repo.

I got my second dose of the vaccine. 😄 With the number of cases in India showing a slow rise again, I'm glad I can sleep just a lil' bit easier now.

What a week it's been — I've spent the last couple days listening to Donda! I also saw quite a few people I know posting their mechanical keyboards — Oh man, I couldn't be happier seeing so many people getting into this not-so-niche-anymore lil' hobby that I used to think I was alone in! 😄

I'm back from my bout with Dengue fever! I spent a couple of days at the hospital under observation to make sure that I went into the recovery phase, and my blood platelet count is finally increasing again. 🙌

I got dengue over the weekend, and all I can say is: F**k mosquitoes! My weekend was a cycle of medicines and bed rest.

I spent the weekend learning about two new things! This recent tweet from The New York Times' coverage about the Olympics pushed me to finally check out Svelte. React query has been on my radar for quite a while now. I love pretty much everything about it, and definitely want to use it in my next project 😄

I'm back from Bangalore after my PTO — it was surreal to be able to get out of the house, and I got to meet my girlfriend as well! I love her a lot, and she totally didn't ask me to write this 😄

I've been on leave for the past week and enjoying time away from, well, pretty much everything! And to top it off, I got a raise at work! 😄

What a week it has been — my VSCode theme cross 5000 installs! I never thought people would like something that I'd created for myself but here we are 😄. I've also been busy with DMs from people after Remote's announcement.

Hey there!

The remote.com/careers link was broken in the original email earlier — here's the corrected one!

This week's slightly-late issue is here! I was under embargo until now, and I really wanted to include this in the newsletter:

Hope you all had a terrific week, and definitely no career-anxiety over the GitHub Copilot announcement 👀 Seriously though—I'm beyond excited to see everything that this new era of AI-aided programming will bring on!

Guess who completely forgot to mention the Next.js 11 release last week, even though he'd already updated his website with it? Certainly not me 😅

I added a small page on my website about frequently asked questions that I got last week, after I got the same question from 2-3 people in a single week (pssst! It was about those "colorful plus-sign thingies" on my desk 😄).

What a week it's been — we (finally) heard from the React team about The Plan for React 18, I love that there is finally more communication from their side (Thank you @cassidoo!). Speaking of which, the Twitter space they hosted was great too! Lots of interesting tidbits in there, including the revelation that React's initial name was "FBolt", and the React logo even has a nod to it. 🤯

I added some much needed improvements to my website over the past week, and got to use framer-motion finally. I love that it can take care of a lot of concerns and use cases (animations and more) that you'd have to handle yourself — my tweet showing the changes to handle the reading progress bar is a good example of what I'm talking about.

Hello there!

I resolved a bug in the live component that I'd shared last week — thanks to Shubham for pointing it out! The bug would cause any modifications that you'd made to be cleared when you would change the theme 😅

I hoped to write a blog post this past weekend, but instead I ended up fiddling around with implementing a live playground on my website — it's not ready yet™, but feel free to check it out, break things and share your feedback :)

I hope you had a great week — I fiddled around with the ✨ finally released ✨ Notion API and created a new page on my website to see all the keebs (and related things!) I've bought so far. The API is still in beta, so feel free to play around and explore it :)

I just published how I added a chameleon text effect on my website! I love that I was able to add live examples throughout the post and how it all turned out. In case you missed it, you can check out how I use it for my "fancy pants" page

I created a new landing page for my VSCode theme — Karma! I created the theme in the beginning of 2020 and it's been getting love ever since 💜

I added a new page to my website! I love how it turned out, and I'll be writing about how I achieved the "chameleon text effect" (thanks for helping with the name Pritam!) soon.

I wrote about how I added an RSS feed to my blog! I've written after quite a while so I would love any feedback that you may have :D

I added an RSS feed to my blog! It was simpler than I thought and I'll write about it soon. I also launched my own discord server last week. Feel free to drop in and talk about mechcanical keyboards, code and everything else in between :)

I'm getting back to working on my website! I'll be adding a (proper) mobile layout and RSS feed to begin with, and I'll be writing about my experience with it. Stay tuned for that :)

Happy 2021 :)