Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

JavaScript Gom Jabbar

Sebastian De Deyne

You stop to count how many tools and parsers work on your codebase: TypeScript, esbuild, swc, babel, eslint, prettier, jest, webpack, rollup, terser. You are not sure if you missed any. You are not sure if you want to know. The level of pain is so high you forget about anything else.

We've come a long way, but we're not there yet.

Blogs, more than ever

Sebastian De Deyne

It’s been an odd few days with the changes on Reddit and Twitter – the only two major social media platforms I browse.

Platforms are great portals for discovery, but a guarantee for longevity is not their strong suit. And while the fediverse is interesting, my Mastodon experience feels more like a detox than something that stands on its own.

As for good content, I get most of that from blogs anyway. And as long as the internet exists as we know it, we’ll always have them.

Here’s a selection of my favorite blogs and sites from my RSS reader.

Our Spatie company site doesn’t have an RSS feed, but our products each have a blog of their own. Subscribe to their feeds if you want to stay up to date with Flare, Mailcoach, and Ray.

Blogs, more than ever

Sebastian De Deyne

It's been an odd few days with the changes on Reddit and Twitter – the only two major social media platforms I browse.

Platforms are great portals for discovery, but a guarantee for longevity is not their strong suit. And while the fediverse is interesting, my Mastodon experience feels more like a detox than something that stands on its own.

As for good content, I get most of that from blogs anyway. And as long as the internet exists as we know it, we'll always have them.

Here's a selection of my favorite blogs and sites from my RSS reader.

Our Spatie company site doesn't have an RSS feed, but our products each have a blog of their own. Subscribe to their feeds if you want to stay up to date with Flare, Mailcoach, and Ray.

Fibonacci estimates

Sebastian De Deyne

Estimating software projects will never be my strong suit, but I’ve learned using numbers from the Fibonacci sequence to judge the size sets me off to a good start.

To estimate a task (in hours or days), I only use numbers from the Fibonacci sequence:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…

The further along the Fibonacci sequence, the bigger the difference with the next number becomes. This aligns well with how we should estimate, because the bigger the task, the more unknowns there are.

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

Sebastian De Deyne

A lovely essay by Henrik Karlsson on writing, blogging, and the power of the internet.

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. […]

That is against our purposes here. A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people.