I've been a fan of CodePen for many, many years, and it's one of the few services I spend money on to help support. A few months back, they released an entirely new version that dramatically improved the service (CodePen 2.0) and it just made me more happy I was a supporter. Just a few days ago they announced more changes including a full API. I thought it would be fun to add a display of my recent pens. Yes, I thought that would be fun, because that's the kind of nerd I am.
Ok, I lie, this demo is also pretty simple, but I wanted to break the pattern of the last few posts and at least pretend this example is a bit more complex. As I try to find excuses to write more TypeScript, I thought a great example of that would be a simple RSS aggregator. You hit the site, tell it the feeds you care about, and it renders a date sorted list of entries.
Happy Sunday, my fellow nerds. If you've been keeping up with my posts (all 4 of you - thank you!) then you know I've been experimenting with TypeScript (and Vite) recently. This past week I decided to try building a real "app", and of course by app I mean something incredibly small, but a bit "real world"-ish to kind of get a feel for what the development process felt like.
This will be a quick one - but as I think more about TypeScript and how I'd like to learn (and play, and build silly demos), I naturally thought it may make sense to look at how I'd use Alpine.js with that stack. Alpine's been my go to library for web apps that reach the level of complexity where I'd like some help with DOM manipulation and such. I don't always use it, because (imho) the default stack should be as vanilla as possible (obviously I'm going a bit off ranch with these explorations into TypeScript and Vite) but Alpine is lightweight and simple and just a great little library in general. What follows isn't necessarily a "template" as it's got a bit of template code with it, but I thought it would be helpful to share. As always, let me know what you think!
Happy "Football is Back" season to those of you who celebrate. I'm currently watching my Saints take on the Ravens (who are also a favorite of mine) and hoping for our first win. The last few weeks have been incredibly busy (I feel like I always say that, sorry) with a trip for work that then morphed into a short vacation with my wife and I which included my first Blizzcon (which is freaking cool as hell) and our first visit to Disneyland. (We've been to Disney World a few times.) I think we both agreed that Disney World is cooler, but the crowds and - most importantly - the weather - was much better in California.
I've been a bit worried lately. Of course, my friends will tell you that's my norm. But more specifically, I've been worried about my coding skills. As I use AI to generate more and more code, and it does that job well, I kinda miss actually writing code. I've also had a bit of writer's block in terms of topics to cover, and especially in the area of the web platform. A few days ago it occurred to me - I've never really dug into TypeScript. Sure, I've used it, many times, in the fourteen or so years it's been out, but many times I kinda guess at what I'm doing and it was never my default for projects. Partly that's due to my philosophy of avoiding a build step in my projects and just KISS in general.
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