The MEAN Stack Developer Newsletter Issue 7 - Refine.dev, tRPC, and Releasing Paid Version
Happy Thanksgiving! A three part Thanksgiving special today - the usual newsletter and the first ever subscription only, the podcast, and the first official paid video newsletter for subscribers only!
Grateful for Learning
A year and two days ago, I was abruptly let go from a great cybersecurity position that left me scared and uncertain of what would come next. While I didn’t know I would be starting the most difficult 365 day stretch of my life, I did know one thing - I really wanted to learn full stack development and make a career out of being a real hacker - one that follows the “Hacker’s Ethic”. Rather than stealing credit card numbers, I wanted to design my own servers and websites.
A year later, I still sit here with no full time position, but I do have a contract gig that I start in a few days. I didn’t know that I had the capability and resiliency to withstand the year that I just did. The worst of it even happened right at the end of the 365 days - right when I truly thought I couldn’t take it anymore. It’s weird, but since I hit the on year mark of the 22nd (date I was fired), things feel so much more optimistic and life seems anew.
You can’t always control your circumstances and you really can’t control what other people do. People will shock you, make you outraged, treat you unfairly - but they will also show you some truly amazing aspects of humanity such as unconditional love, new opportunities, and empathy when you most need it.
Today on Thanksgiving (this newsletter is a day late I know), I choose to be grateful for learning - the one amazing thing in life that you can control. You should always be learning and be thrilled that you have the opportunity to learn and do literally ANYTHING in this world. Anything is possibly.
One year ago I decided, no more WordPress websites with website builders; I’m learning how to code.I then went on to run that first npm init
and have never looked back. It’s been scary, sad, infuriating, joyful, exciting, and magical - all extremes of emotions have corrupted my soul at one point during this last year. But embrace everything you face because whatever adversity you are facing now, will prepare you for something much bigger and scarier in your future. I promise you that.
I’m also thankful for every single on of you who read this newsletter and my first paid customer, Josh Knoedler - thanks Josh! I hope Birddog Lighting is having a good year - oh if you like LED lights, check out my old employer Birddog Lighting here for some rockin sales.
But all of you who read this newsletter mean more than you know to me - this newsletter has been one of the biggest bright spots of the year for me. When I decided to check on this newsletter after almost effectively quitting writing new issues, I saw that 500 - 500 people had read it. I broke down in tears and immediately began writing the next one without hesitation as my heart raced. I finally had created an audience.
Thank you for all of your support and encouraging me to be my best by just clicking on this simple publication. For those of you struggling, changing careers, scared of finances, or whatever it is that feels like it is crushing your will - take a step back and take a deep breath. Go forward with confidence and an open mind, willing and ready to learn. Take your education by the horns and elevate yourself to new places you never thought you would go.
Happy Thanksgiving y’all!
Back to your regularly scheduled programing…
Refine.dev - Build React Based CRUD Apps with no constraints.
Is React your favorite JavaScript UI Framework? Do you like Next.js? Do you like to develop things fast? Do you hate configuring shit? Do you hate developing apps from scratch? - If you are all of these things, I have the framework for you!
Meet Refine, the React framework that makes everything so much faster and easier. I recently found this one on the showcase of the Docusaurus website and I’ve been eager to show y’all this new and awesome framework. Refine speeds up development by taking care of annoying things like authentication, access control, routing, networking, state, management, and i18n - you know, pretty much everything.
This headless framework utilizes helper hooks, components, and providers to seamlessly integrate your application to any UI design system. Refine really shines when it comes to Admin panels, dashboards, and internal tools. Fire up any of the examples on their website to get a feel for developing with this new kickass framework. I have a tutorial video for Refine in this week’s paid video newsletter - sign up below!
tRPC - Easily build and consume fully typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation.
This is a framework that has taken the dev world by storm - I had to really dig into this once I kept reading articles about everyone switching to tRPC instead of GraphQL and the REST Framework. It was created for full-stack developers and makes it easy to write API endpoints for both the frontend and backend of your project.
Looking at the docs on this project can be overwhelming - I suggest starting with the example tutorial that is included to get an idea of how it works. After you build an endpoint or two, you can then venture into websockets, SSG helpers, or subscription services. I have included a tutorial of tRPC on the paid newsletter for this week as well so you can check out how it works before you use it. But this is one that I think will become a standard before too long with the messy nature of APIs.
Draft.js - A rich editor framework for React, by Facebook.
Have you ever been blessed with getting a crazy request for a text editor by a client who wants a custom button that renders user smells into the browser? No? Umm, well me either - but JUST IN CASE THIS HAPPENS TO YOU (IT TOTALLY NEVER HAS HAPPENED TO ME), Draft.js is here to save your day!
Created by Facebook, Draft.js is the number one way to create a fully custom rich editor for your clients - or hell, maybe you need one yourself to key bind that pesky escape button that seems to be stuck on your MacBook. Whatever your need is, Draft.js lets you customize your rich text editor to your heart’s desire. Send us pictures of your new favorite text editor after you try this awesome framework out!
Liqvid.js - Create interactive videos in React.
I am about to build app for hosting my new course I’m creating (more to come on that in a bit!) and I came cross this tool while going through the vast ecosystem of React. Liqvid JS actually allows you to edit the video while it is playing - how cool is that? There’s a lot to do here, so I recommend you play with it yourself, but I’ll tell you about some of the main features.
Liqvid integrates with Three.js, KaTeX, MathJax, and XyJax so it is a great educational tool - I mean it was built to be used for tutorials. You can also link to a specific time so it is easy for students to interact with the most important parts of your tutorial. There are also plugins that offer you the ability to extend this awesome tool. I interact with this tool on my paid video newsletter that you can subscribe to for a 15% off today!
Yew - A web framework for Rust.
So I have been using Rust more and more lately, and while Yew isn’t really new to me, I had to share it because it is a great framework and I also want to talk up Rust while I can. Rust is a great language that you should check out if you haven’t yet - it is incredibly fast and super secure. Yew is probably the best framework I’ve found so far for Rust and I am going to use it in the paid newsletter.
It’s a little different than what you’re used to - HTML is still HTML, but not really. You would call MTHML more like the way you would in calling HTML in JSX. There’s server side rendering with Yew and the docs show you how to create components and piece your site together. I highly recommend checking out the paid video to get a feel for how it works, or you can check out their playground if you know Rust.
Other links, tutorials, articles and cool stuff
Fireship.io has released a new Supabase and React course and it is awesome! I have completed part of it and it is a great, quick way to learn React and Supabase.
Oh yeah, Fireship.io also release a new JavaScript course as well - check it out!
Ever tried out the FREMP Stack? It’s an awesome web dev stack that uses Flask, React JS, Mongo DB, and Python. I’ll share how to set it up on the paid newsletter.
Want hack your way to $1,000? Join the Mongo DB Atlas Hackathon and complete your solution by December 8th! This Hackathon is being sponsored by Dev.to, one of the sites I use to blog - you can check out my profile here. (I need to finish my React Style Guide series.)
Deno now has npm capabilities, meaning you can run all the same packages of npm that Node runs! Now you have to switch over to Deno…
Thanks for reading - listen to my podcast and try out the paid subscription for tutorials!
Well another issue is wrapping up but I have to urge y’all to check out all my content! I will be putting out the free podcast later today as well as the paid video newsletter when I complete one final tutorial - but I have big news for those of you that subscribe now! I will be putting out double video newsletter tutorials for the next month - that’s twice the content for one month only, so sign up today! You’ll get access to all the videos when you subscribe.
Please share this post with others to help me and your dev buddies out! My old boss Josh was the very first subscriber and it was a really good feeling - it helped out immensely but also it was motivating to put out more content. Hopefully that will give y’all motivation to subscribe and justify paying for my content - if not, I really would just think it is awesome for anyone to share this with someone because I love sharing the gift of tech and web development with everyone. Better yet, you can gift a subscription to somebody for Christmas - that’s a gift that you can’t get wrong ;)
See y’all next week!