Why centering stuff is hard, Local First, and WebAwesome.

1. Centering Things is also Hard™

There was a great article by Nikita Prokopov (of Fira Code fame!) that rose to the top of Hacker News for a bit: https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/. Also a good reminder that front-end is hard in it’s own special ways. Make room, naming things and cache invalidation.

2. Local First Podcast

I’m definitely feeling the hype around Local First. It feels like this is going to be a huge thing for the future of web development. Why shouldn’t my app work offline? Can we somehow make Laravel apps work local-first?

Anywho, I’ve been enjoying this great podcast by Johannes Schickling: localfirst.fm. The latest episode features James Long, who was the first person I heard talking about CRDTs a while ago when he was first building Actual—probably on this episode of Full Stack Radio. I think this space is huge 👀.

3. Turso Driver for Laravel

Speaking of hype trains, SQLite is so hot right now. I’ve had my eye on Turso for a bit, but now it seems like we can actually start playing with it in a Laravel context thanks to Nick Potts’s Laravel-LibSql Driver

Speaking of distributed SQLite, SQLite Cloud looks pretty interesting, too.

4. WebAwesome Web Components

I’ve never used web components before, but I get the sense they will be the default for off-the-shelf components (rather than specific to any front-end framework). Built by the Shoelace.style team, now acquired by FontAwesome, WebAwesome will now be v3 of Shoelace. There was a great Syntax.fm episode with the creators.

Speaking of which, how do you incorporate web components in Laravel, anyway? Turns out there is a pretty good documentation page on Shoelace.style for Laravel. e