Weekly Reads | January 10th

I will start with a short story. This week i’m really proud that i’ve finished my work on a preview server system. I’ve started that journey way back in the beginning of June 2018. It was an interesting task with the goal to get a “serverless” solution to present the client their component library behind authentication. The stack was basically chosen already: AWS Cloudfront and Lambda@edge. Lambda@edge was pretty new and nowhere was good documentation of how to accomplish that. I experimented a lot with Dynamo db, basic authentication and came up with a solution based on jwt-tokens, Cognito, Dynamo db, ECScontainers, SQS messaging and Cloudfront. It worked and we deployed it to some of our clients.
There was one addition to make up: conditionals what should be behind the authentication systems. I started again with some experiments and thought a lot about that task and possible solutions. I did not actually started to work on that task again until the end of 2018. I started rebuilding the infrastructure in code with terraform, rewrote code, made npm packages, added functionality, wrote tests and it worked last night after long hours of thinking, testing and coding.
Here’s what i’ve learned: focus on building working solutions and do not try to make it the prettiest in the world, you’ll always have code smell somewhere or even a lot (⚠️ you can find a lot of non idiomatic go code and ugly code here 🙌: https://github.com/jurekbarth/pup).

What a great candidate for ItJustWorks Code of the year

Now let’s go on with the most interesting development related links the team read about this week:

1. Top JavaScript Frameworks and Topics to Learn in 2019
   A data driven approach to gather the hot stuff for 2019. Pretty interesting to see all these data.
2. A comprehensive look back at front-end in 2018
   A year in review, did you notice how much changed this year? One thing stayed against predictions the big three frameworks stayed: react, vue and angular
3. Understanding the Virtual DOM
   An article about what a virtual dom is and how it differs from the “regular” dom.
4. Frontend Performance Checklist
   As every year, Smashing Magazine published it’s next version of the frontend performance checklist. The quick wins are 🔥 and should not be missed on any new site in 2019.
5. Ask HN: Go-to web stack today?
   Whats the web stack of 2019, this conversation gives you some hints on what you may consider for your next project.

Have a fabulous weekend and see you next week again 🙌