Monthly Grinder
At GG Development we strive to learn new things every day. This blog series aims to collect the most exciting, shiniest nuggets of knowledge from the collective GG Development hivemind. Sometimes it’s a new piece of tech, sometimes it’s engineering lore re-remembered, but either way it’s something noteworthy.
Without further ado, here’s what we learned this month:
- If you’re having a tough time picking a favourite coding font, this site gives a good overview of the choices. (Or you can just pick Fira Code)
- If you thought Bootstrap’s utility classes were the best thing since sliced bread, then Tailwind CSS is sliced bread itself: it’s utility classes only! (which is not as horrible as it might sound at first)
- We messed around a bit with version-controlled diagrams, automatically generated from a simple plain-text format, using PlantUML. Getting the layout right for bigger diagrams is tricky, but usually it works well with minimal fuss.
- Turns out pair programming is surprisingly great if you’re not limited to a single keyboard and monitor. Code With Me is Jetbrains’ plugin for that, adding Google Docs style multi-cursor editing to your IDE.
- The gap is closing between “what CSS can easily do” and “what you actually want to do”, with the flexbox gap feature being one handy example. In case your browser does not support this yet, there’s still a workaround to accomplish the same thing in a much more complicated manner (…because with CSS, of course there is)
- When experimenting with database schema changes, lightweight snapshots are a handy tool to have in one’s arsenal. You can save and restore them, similar to a full backup, but in a fraction of the time.
- If you’re tired of fat Docker images, here’s an interesting article on the various tools you have to slim them down.
- Automating everything is great, so might as well enforce architectural constraints automatically, with simple unit test-style code. That’s ArchUnit.
- Fun link of the month: Whack-A-Mole! …but exclusively in CSS. Utter madness, yet there is method in it.
That’s it for this time, see you next month!