Superhighway

The Four New Color Palettes added to Tailwind CSS v4.2

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tailwind CSS v4.2 introduces four new palettes to the growing, default color scale. However, these new additions aren’t overly expressive, instead these fresh options introduce a few neutral swatches to the overall offering. Each of the four (namely Mauve, Olive, Mist and Taupe) features a range of rather subtle hues — these are earthy, muted tones that stand in contrast to the more vivid options already available.

I guess in practice, these new palettes go alongside the likes of slate or zinc — all of which are softer color ranges. These new additions may help when you want just a hint of color rather than something more shouty. I figured we’d take a quick look at them to get a visual sense of what they offer:

A Chat with Will Farrell & Luciano Mammino of Middy

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Middy is a simple middleware engine that allows you to simplify your AWS Lambda code when using Node.js.

We caught up with the project’s creator Luciano Mammino and maintainer Will Farrell to ask them a few questions. They stared by explaning how the project came to be:

The idea of Middy started in 2016 when Luciano was working with a company building everything on AWS using serverless technologies. We were among the first early adopters of these technologies and AWS invited us to speak at AWS Summit 2017 in London and present our serverless use cases.

React in 2020: Month-by-Month

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As 2020 draws to a close, I wanted to look back over the past 12 months and highlight what happened in the React ecosystem this year. As such, here’s a brief month-by-month breakdown of the year that was.

🗓 React in 2020 — Month by Month

January

Dan Abramov reflected on his previous decade of work.
The TypeScript team moved to Gatsby for its docs site.
Styled Components v5 was released.

February

React Native grew up and got its own domain name: reactnative.dev.
An official Redux template for Create React app hit 1.0.
React Query 1.0 appeared.

March

RedwoodJS started to pop up on our radar. We expect to cover this a lot more in 2021.
Coronavirus began to throw in-person React events into disarray.

April

Preact 10.4.0 was released.
ZEIT rebranded as Vercel. They’ve since continued to grow and raise more money.

May

Next.js 9.4 was released (fast refresh and incremental static regeneration were the headline features).
Recoil began to be unveiled.
The Gatsby folks raised lots of money.

June

The React core team joined a Facebook employee walkout in solidarity with the Black community.
MDN began to publish React tutorials.

July

Adobe unveiled React Spectrum, a collection of libraries to build UIs.
Microsoft announced React Power BI, for everyone who loves business reporting.
Next.js 9.5 came out.

August

Facebook revealed more about how they use React themselves.
React 17.0 RC1 came out — and had no new features.

September

Kent C Dodds wrote a love letter to React.
We learnt more about React’s new JSX transform.

October

webpack 5 was released.
React 17.0 final was released.
Create React App 4.0 was also released.
...as was Next.js 10.

November

A new Redux fundamentals tutorial was published.
The BBC began to show off its React-based work.
Vue 3.0 came out, keeping React on its toes.

December

The React Christmas advent calendar began again.
React Query 3.0 was released.

The top Postgres links of 2020

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As 2020 finally draws to a close, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look and highlight some of the most popular PostgreSQL links of 2020.

As such, here’s a list of the top ten links shared in Postgres Weekly, an email newsletter reaching over 15,000 PG fans.

🐘 The top ten PostgreSQL links of 2020:

How One Word Unlocked a 9x Performance Improvement

The creator of a personal finance tool experienced a user whose data caused a flood of INSERTs large enough to cause a problem. Here’s the tale of how a simple RETURNING clause enabled a huge optimization in the process.

Our readers' React links of 2020

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As one of the curators on React Status (a weekly email rounding up the latest React news, tutorials, and tools), at the end of each year I like to reflect back on the most popular links from the past twelve months.

So, without further ado, here’s a look at ten of the most popular React links in 2020 —as determined by readers of React Status.

⚛️ The top ten React highlights of 2020:

The Key React Libraries to Use in 2020

What people in tech said about JavaScript when it debuted in 1995

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Time and time again JavaScript is crowned the most popular programming language in the World. Whether you agree with that or not, one thing’s for sure: It’s come a long way since its debut back in 1995.

Whilst Brendan Eich was hard at work creating the now much loved language twenty-five years ago, the O.J Simpson trial was well underway, Ross and Rachel weren’t quite on a break, yet — and Pixar’s Toy Story was mere weeks away from hitting theatres.

2020 Black Friday deals for JavaScript developers

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Note: We do not receive any commission for these links. We’ve just collected deals together here because we didn’t want to clutter up JavaScript Weekly today! :-) We found these deals via this open call and by searching for ourselves.

The annual shopping bonanza that Black Friday has seemingly become isn’t all just getting new socks or half price Amazon Echos — we’ve found a variety of offers aimed at JavaScript developers too.

A Q&A with Nick Sutterer

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Nick is a developer, presenter, and lover of pubs who has created numerous tools and frameworks to scratch his itches with Rails.

You have written a few gems that, in short, go around The Rails Way (trailblazer, cells, reform). How come?

Not because I wanted to oppose anything, but I was more interested in enriching Rails with additional layers as I felt it’s lacking a lot of necessary abstractions. The Rails Way oversimplifies things and you keep a lot of responsibilities in one big class. I didn’t feel that’s proper OOP, so I introduced small, clean, encapsulated objects for view components, forms, parsing and rendering, control flow, and now we got Trailblazer as an umbrella project providing more layers for Ruby frameworks.

A Q&A with Sandi Metz

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sandi Metz is a prolific Rubyist and author that has penned two of the most well-received books on object-oriented programming in recent memory. She also speaks, consults, and teaches, giving us almost 99 ways to benefit from her wisdom.

What were the biggest changes incorporated into the 2nd edition of 99 Bottles of OOP?

The 1st Edition used the 99 Bottles problem as a jumping off point to explore a bunch of Object-Oriented (OO) ideas. It generally solved design problems by identifying code smells and following refactoring recipes. It emphasized a concise programming style where the only code you’re allowed to write is that which the recipes require. (Note: this is actually a lot more fun than you might imagine.)

A Q&A with Michael Hartl

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

His Ruby on Rails tutorial is a rite of passage for many budding Rubyists, including at least one of the curators of this newsletter. We’re grateful that he’s taken the time to answer a few questions today:

Back in 2010 when you did the first Rails Tutorial, did you think it’d be popular a decade on?

I certainly hoped so. I could tell from its design and momentum that Rails had a good chance of being a relevant technology for many years to come. And the Web certainly wasn’t going anywhere!

A Q&A with Valeri Karpov

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Valeri, also known as The Code Barbarian, is a prolific author of JavaScript tutorials and books and was also the person to coin the term MEAN (as in the MongoDB, Express.js, Angular and Node.js stack).

To celebrate the release of his new book, Mastering Mongoose, we’ve asked him a few questions:

Why should MongoDB still be considered for new apps when relational systems like Postgres have added so many NoSQL features in recent years?

A Q&A with David Flanagan

Fri, 29 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

David has been programming since 1981 and getting paid for it since 1985. In 2011, he started working at Mozilla. Since then he’s worked as a full-stack engineer on MDN and at Khan Academy. He currently works on cloud software at VMware and is in the process of releasing the seventh edition of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, a hugely popular JavaScript book published by O’Reilly.

A chat with Ben Ellerby

Fri, 22 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Ben Ellerby is the VP of Engineering at Theodo and an AWS Serverless Hero. He’s the editor of the Serverless Transformation blog and podcast and works to help improve Serverless adoption in startups and large organisations. He’s part of the team that developed sls-dev-tools which we’ve featured recently.

We asked a few questions about his work:

What’s the biggest pain point of working with serverless that you’re seeing?

A chat with Brittany Martin

Wed, 13 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Brittany is a developer, podcaster, and a fitness advocate with a passion for making our industry more diverse. Oh, and she plays roller derby, too.

We asked a few questions about her work:

What’s the biggest challenge about running a podcast? Biggest reward?

The biggest challenge is finding the right mix between experienced guests that will draw listeners and convincing new members of the Ruby community and podcasting to make an appearance. When one of those new guests strikes a cord with the audience or causes me to see a different viewpoint, it makes all of the work hosting the podcast worth it.

A chat with Thibaut Barrère

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Thibaut Barrère is a long-time Rubyist and data engineer who built and maintains the popular Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) framework Kiba.

We asked him some questions about his work:

What inspired you to create Kiba?

A lot of my work since ~2005 has been focused on data integration (making systems speak together), data aggregation etc. I sometimes used GUI-based tools like Microsoft SSIS which, while powerful, are quite far from the coding experience.

A chat with Luca Ferrari

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Luca Ferrari has had a huge impact on the Postgres community in Italy, having been president of the Italian PostgreSQL Users Group in the past and having helped to organize the popular PGDay.it events. He also blogs frequently about Postgres and wrote PostgreSQL 11 Server Side Programming Quick Start Guide for Packt.

We caught up with him to ask about his book, and server side Postgres use cases in particular:

Our readers' top Node.js links of 2019

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s time to take a look back at the year in all things Node.js. To do so, I’ve taken a look over data from the popular Node Weekly newsletter.

The Node Weekly email digest is read by over 45,000 developers — this list is a look at what they clicked on in 2019.

The Node highlights of 2019:

What is Deno, and How Is It Different From Node?

The top Postgres links of 2019

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As the year draws to a close I thought we should take a look back and highlight some of the most popular PostgreSQL links from 2019.

This list brings together what readers of Postgres Weekly, an email newsleter that reaches over 14,000 developers, clicked on over the past twelve months.

The Postgres highlights of 2019:

Don’t Do These Things in Postgres

Yes, a page on the official Postgres wiki was one of the top links of the year. It offers an interesting round up a variety of ‘common mistakes’ in using Postgres, such as "Don’t use char(n)" and "Don’t use serial". Some of these are opinionated, but are well backed up with reasons.

The top Ruby links of 2019

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

With the year coming to a close, it felt like a good time to look back over the highlights of the past twelve months in the Ruby space.

As such, here’s a list (compiled using data from the Ruby Weekly newsletter) that represents what Rubyists were interested in this year.

The Ruby highlights of 2019:

The Ruby Style Guide

This truly one-stop-shop for how to write Ruby code got a facelift back in June. It’s a great resource that can be easily read and maintained by other Rubyists.

The top Frontend links of 2019

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Each year I bring together the highlights of the past twelve months in the frontend space, whether it be a neat CSS tip, some landmark browser news, or a deep-dive tutorial. This year is no different of course, so consider this the highlight reel of what made an impact in the frontend world in 2019.

As a quick aside, the data used to compile this list comes via Frontend Focus, an email newsletter with over 90,000 developers reading it. This list represents some of the most clicked articles of the year.

The top Frontend links of 2019

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The top Go links of 2019

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been another busy year for our favourite Gopher and to close out the year, we’ve taken a look at the data from the popular Golang Weekly newsletter.

The email newsletter is read by over 29,000 developers — here’s a look at what they clicked on in 2019:

The Go highlights of 2019:

Practical Go: Real World Advice for Writing Maintainable Go Programs

Dave Cheney shared this thorough list of best-practice advice for writing Go code, covering indentifiers, package design, project structure, error handling and more. Good stuff.

A Q&A with Eileen Uchitelle of GitHub

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Eileen Uchitelle is a Staff Software Engineer on the Ruby Architecture Team at GitHub and a member of the Rails Core team. She’s an avid contributor to open source focusing on Rails and its dependencies. Eileen is passionate about scalability, performance, and making open source communities more sustainable and welcoming.

What is the most exciting thing you’ve worked on as part of the Rails core team?

Staticcheck in Action

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Too often we discover subtle bugs only after deploying to production. Even in a language like Go it’s possible to write ineffectual code and not catch bugs until it’s too late.

Staticcheck is a static analysis tool for Go code. It has various checks, such as a check for unused variables, a check for deferring the Lock method on a mutex right after locking (the user probably meant to defer Unlock instead), a check for unreachable code, and more.

Piloting Go Within Your Company

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In the years since I first learned Go, there have been several times when I’ve been implementing a feature at work, be it building on top of a Node.js backend or a Java project, and found myself thinking: "If only I could write this in Go!"

I was lucky to first encounter Go at a company that bought into the many advantages of using the language — I got to see first-hand how well it worked in a production environment.