There's a pattern that keeps showing up in software engineering: the tools that give us the most leverage also demand the most structure.

Version control unlocked collaboration at scale, but only after teams agreed on branching strategies. Linting and formatting took out a lot of opinions during code reviews, but first we needed to have settled the "tabs vs. spaces" debate. CI/CD pipelines sped everything up, but only once contributors agreed upon a definition of done. AI coding tools are following the same arc, and the teams getting the most out of them have already figured this out.

By the time you're reading this, the plane that will land our family on Bonaire will have touched down on the tarmac at Flamingo Airport.

This year felt a bit quieter on the outside, but when I look back at everything that happened it was anything but dull. A conscious decision to chase fewer big highs and lows. More small moments that added up to something meaningful. (And we'll get to that in the end!)

If you're (like me) liking the ease of hosting with Netlify and are using Nuxt to power a static site, there is probably a rule of thumb which predicts when you'll need a form on your site. Luckily, Netlify has support built in, but you need to set up your configuration correctly for it to work.

Let's see what we need to do in order to add a concise form (you'll know how to take it from there, I'm sure) and get submissions in your Netlify dashboard.

Ah, the JavaScript Date object. It just doesn't cut it, does it? Working with dates can be daunting or maddening! So rather than using the Date object, we've been resorting to libraries (like moment.js or date-fns) that tackle the complexity for us. We're getting at a comfortable space right now, with the Temporal API!

It's not widely supported right now (experimental stage), but close to being finalized and adopted by major browsers!

In the fast-paced world of software development, why reinvent the wheel when you can just copy-paste someone else’s? We live in a copy-paste culture, where solving problems often means borrowing what already works.

And that’s exactly what npm packages and tech conference talks have in common. Both are shortcuts. Both exist so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Let’s explore how these two seemingly different worlds share the same philosophy of borrowed brilliance.

Thinking about speaking at a tech conference? That’s awesome! But before you start planning your victory dance 🕺, let’s go over how to make your talk not just good, but downright unforgettable.

Before You Start… 🎤

For this very blog I sometimes want to do internal linking. A common practice for my writing is to have a heading that marks the beginning of a relevant section. Rather than managing the anchor links by hand, I used the `documentToHtmlString` method (provided by Contentful to convert the document structure to HTML structure) to do it for me and generate predictable anchors.

If you host your application or website on Netlify and have it intregrated with Github, you have the advantage of pretty good automation in your pipeline on opening a merge request.

If you also happen to have end to end (e2e) tests, you can easily point them to the preview deployment, to automatically verify that your vital features are still functioning!