Standing Out in a Sea of Noise

Welcome to the second issue of "Shipping Stuff". As I write this, it is a grey and rainy morning outside so I hope this retrospective over the past fortnight brightens your day a little. I've spent a bit of time this week writing a script in order to better brand my blog content when posted to social networks.

Firstly, thank you so much for being one of my first subscribers. If you have any comments or link suggestions, please respond to this email or let me know on twitter. I'm also hoping to get into producing some new videos for my youtube channel soon as lockdown eases. If you have any ideas for videos, also let me know. Honestly at this point, I'd really love to hear from you for any reason.

Short, Dark and Wealthy

Short Fat Engineers Are Undervalued

No, this is not as bad as it initially sounds. Jeff Schwab compares engineers based on the breadth and depth of their skills. It brings new meaning to the term "jack of all trades" and makes me feel better about my own skillset.

Disqus, the dark commenting system

I've been using disqus on my blog ever since I made it static. I'm likely to remove comments entirely or use a different system after reading this post. A great example of why if you're not paying for it, you're probably the product.

Zero To $5000

Nathan Barry is a well known name in the world of bootstrapped businesses. He's the founder of Convertkit, a successful email marketing business currently making $81k monthly recurring revenue (MRR) with 58 staff around the world.

This 2013 video from Microconf is a welcome reminder just how far he has come in the last 8 years at a point when he was struggling to reach $5k MRR.

Code

Vite 2.0

Evan You covers the release of Vite 2.0 - a build tool for frontend development. Vite makes use of native ES modules and 2.0 represents its first stable release. I'm a big fan of Vue.js so I fully expect this to be just as good.

Create beautiful code with Ray.so

A nice little alternative to carbon.now.sh to create good looking images of your code. Amusingly doesn't have a great thumbnail (they should read my blog for this).

The Open Source Alternative to Firebase

Supabase allows you to create a backend with db, authentication and realtime subscriptions in no time at all. Worth signing up as you get 1 year free of base tier usage of their hosted version while they remain in beta.

From My Blog

Creating Social Images with Puppeteer

A tutorial of how I'm now using Google Puppeteer on my local machine to prepare beautiful social images (like the one above) for my blog. Very simple to do, but great way to brand my content and hopefully make it stand out from the crowd.

My Favourite Tweet

Flask is a favourite Python framework of mine. With Perseverance touching down this week, it was really nice to discover this:

Until next time, keep on shipping!

Ian