Weekly Links: August 5th

JavaScript and the Web

The Cost Of JavaScript in 2018 | Addy Osmani

This was a great breakdown of how exactly large JavaScript bundles cause sites to be slow and how that impacts business needs. These type of advocacy pieces have a tendency to clump all businesses together a bit too much¹, but Addy is pretty reasonable about that and it’s important for every front end dev to understand these tradeoffs and problems, even if they don’t need to make them top priority for every project.

Programming Tools

On Switching Code Editors | Chris Coyier

I’m in the middle of possibly switching to VSCode from Atom, which I switched to from Vim, which I switched to from Sublime Text, which originally introduced me to a world beyond overweight IDEs like Eclipse. So I can relate to this article, and it’s a great framework for thinking through switches. I will say, I don’t necessarily think I’ve made the best choices here. I’m not sure that since I’ve learned Vim keybindings, any of my switches have actually increased my productivity. There’s a cost to learning new tools, even when they have shiny new stuff. grumbles a bit and then goes back to chasing the shiny.

People Are Going Crazy Over Framer X | Aaron Adler

My twitter feed was blowing up with people talking about Framer X this week, a tool for designers to build interactive designs/prototypes based on React. This post is a little old but was the best summary of the concept I could find. Framer X is still in a private beta, so it will be interesting to see what happens when it goes public.