Top picks — 2024 January

Published: 2024.01.31 · 4 minutes read

Hi folks! January is over, so I distilled a dose of the web resources I found particularly interesting from the past month to keep my monthly routine. The shocking news from Apple is the highlight, and I can assure you it has nothing to do with Vision Pro, although this one is an interesting beast.

I would love to ask you for a favour. I have published monthly top picks for almost nine years now. I deliberately chose not to add analytics scripts on this website, but I would like to know if you find these monthly collections useful. If you read this series, please drop me a quick comment below or ping me on Mastodon. I would appreciate it.

Now, let’s look at my top picks from January 2024.

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Dark Visitors#

The list of potential AI robots that can scrape content from your website is longer than we would like. This resource is a comprehensive list of the known ones with a helpful guide on limiting their access to your website. If you care, your robots.txt file can suddenly grow from a classic 3-liner to a lengthy rules set. Messy as hell!

2023 JavaScript Rising Stars#

This resource is an exciting collection of JavaScript projects that have gained popularity in the past year—nicely categorized by the stack, framework, tooling, platform, and testing categories. Very well done, Michael Rambeau.

When “Everything” Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024#

Do you remember the left-pad incident in the JavaScript ecosystem in 2016? Since then, we have occasionally heard about another package ecosystem misuse. The everything package did it again by locking all the other dependencies to the registry and also caused DOS (denial of service) to anyone who tried to install it. The author apologized for the mess he had caused, but it still shows the maturity of this ecosystem. Situations like this make me like Rust even more!

Designing better target sizes#

Ahmad Shadeed is a prolific writer, and his in-depth articles about particular UI and CSS subjects are incredible. This one is just next level. It took me forever to read, understand and appreciate detailed interactive examples. I can’t imagine how long Ahmad had to prepare such a masterpiece—one of the best deep dives in a long time.

Types vs Interfaces#

I can’t tell you how many times I read about this subject over the past few years. I also published “TypeScript interface vs. type” a few years back. This take by Nathan Shively-Sanders, one of the TS maintainers, is a good explanation of why we even have two similar features in the language in the first place.

Modern CSS, the state of the web, Safari’s progress, and more! With Jen Simmons#

Kevin’s channel is one of my favourite CSS resources on the Web. This guy works hard to record incredibly well-explained videos about bleeding-edge CSS features or practical use cases of commonly misunderstood features. He also occasionally invites great guests, and Jen is one of my favourite human beings on the Web—excellent conversation about browsers, Webkit engine, vendor collaboration and more.

Reading QR codes without a computer!#

I was always wondering how QR codes work. This interactive explainer is incredible. It makes me want to convert everything to QR codes now!

Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union#

This one came out of nowhere, but it is one of the most significant announcements for developers in years. Apple iOS enables developers to use a browser engine other than WebKit. WOW!

New frameworks and APIs for alternative browser engines — enabling developers to use browser engines, other than WebKit, for browser apps and apps with in-app browsing experiences.

Zed is now open source#

I mentioned this editor multiple times on my blog before. I like that someone is here to compete with Visual Studio Code, and the team behind Zed is the same team that built Atom a decade ago. Now equipped with a new Rust-based toolkit, they are building cool stuff and making it publicly available. I tried Zed before, and I liked it a lot. My fingers crossed for this app!

Deno 1.40: Temporal API#

Deno is not slowing down. Temporal API just landed. It is an excellent time to learn the basics of this API, as in no time, all browsers will support it. One of the most anticipated features is slowly getting an adoption.

Comments#

• Maciek Rotto

  2024.01.31, 08:53, #2ae18c29

  I always find them useful! 🫡

  • Piotr Gacek

    2024.01.31, 10:13, #4b950b23

    Same! I love to read them in my spare time

• Frederico Ferreira

  2024.01.31, 19:35, #10b0f232

  Your monthly picks are amazing. I'm more of a backend guy so a lot of it is lost on me, but even for me there's always interesting content. I love the QR code link. 👍 Hope you keep it up.

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