Quote of the month

To put it another way, fulfilling your responsibilities can surprisingly bring you happiness. Like most things in life, this is easier said than done. God knows I've been having a bit of a rough go fulfilling my duties at home, at work, and of course with a new business endeavor that I'm working on with my older brother (more on that later in the year 😆)!
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Rather than getting all stressed out about all the things I have to do, I realized that yes, I do have obligations and responsibilities that I need to fulfill, but similar to Sisyphus pushing that boulder up that hill for eternity, me fulfilling my duties -- which honestly are never-ending -- can bring me joy. If Sisyphus himself found his joy and his happiness with pushing that damn boulder up that hill, I've got no reason to complain.

Dear reader, that's not to say that we shouldn't feel the full weight of our burdens, but rather that we should strive to do our best to fulfill the duties that are laid out in front of us and to have fun while doing it. Believe it or not, if you start pretending like something is fun and acting like it's fun, it sometimes can actually become fun. 🕺
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So how bout it? Let's have some fun this upcoming April!

What I learned this month

I try to learn something new every day... hopefully, some of this is useful to you as well!

• Mar 03, 2025: System Font Stack​
  • TIL about a growing movement on the web where people are choosing to use system fonts instead of loading custom fonts. Over the years, the default system fonts included with operating systems have become quite robust and visually appealing. If you’re concerned about performance or don’t require a fancy web font, this could be a great solution for you.
• Mar 04, 2025: Tanstack Form​
  • TIL: Tanner Linsley, the creator of TanStack Query, Router, and Start, just dropped TanStack Form! True to form, it’s framework-agnostic, headless, and has zero dependencies. It also handles deeply nested objects out of the box, making it a powerful alternative to traditional form libraries.
• Mar 05, 2025: Fontsource​
  • TIL about Fontsource, a free Vercel resource that provides you with information on how to easily install and self-host web fonts. They support all Google Fonts, as well as open-source ones!
• Mar 07, 2025: Better Sleep​
  • TIL about Magnesium Glycinate, a supplement that helps promote better sleep! I’ve been having a tough time falling asleep lately, especially after a tough Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practice, or an intense workout. One of my friends recommended Magnesium Glycinate as a way to help me sleep better. Let’s see how it works… I just ordered some today 😆!
• Mar 13, 2025: Typescript Ported To Go​
  • TypeScript’s compiler is being reimagined. Currently at version 5.8, TypeScript is still written in TypeScript itself, but there are plans to port it to Go for version 7. This change promises to improve compilation times—by up to 10 times faster! True, the speed boost is something we probably won’t see for a few months or years, but I’m super excited to see Go get some much needed love and attention, since you know, it’s my secondary language of choice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ2WjtaPfXU
• Mar 14, 2025: Node Modules Inspector​
  • TIL about the node-modules-inspector – a package that allows you to visualize your node_modules folder, inspect your dependencies, and so much more 🤯! I’m a big fan of the visualizations, since I’m more of a visual kinda person. You can use it in your own project with this simple command: npx node-modules-inspector.
• Mar 21, 2025: Optional chaining​
  • I learned this hard lesson today. Optional chaining is for uncertain values — not uncertain existence. If I’m not sure if a global object exists, I can’t rely on optional chaining to access it. I have to check for existence first.
• Mar 22, 2025: coolors.co​
  • TIL about coolors.co — a superfast color palette generator. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably use it whenever you need to generate a color palette for your side projects, you know, those side projects that you’re totally working on and not abandoning for a while.
• Mar 24, 2025: rss feed generator​
  • TIL about feed, an npm package that allows you to quickly generate an RSS feed for your website! I used it to generate an RSS feed for my blog and my TIL feeds! It’s pretty simple and super easy to plug into your existing project.

Articles worth checking out

Le things that grabbed my attention this month!

• ⚔️ A critique of the NextJs framework and its latest security vulnerability. As if I needed more reasons to avoid NextJs 😆 (JK it's great but not the tool for me).
• ​🚀 [video] - a live stream of epic web conference... I have so much fomo regarding this one particular event 🥲
• ​💅 [reddit] - styled components enters maintenance mode! Some claim it's bad for the environment and JS devs are responsible for deforestation. Wild. 🤯
• ​🚧 react router middleware is getting production ready. Funny, because middleware is definitely in the hot seat this month. Hopefully, they get this right- we've been waiting for this feature for quite a while!

Tool time with Taran

This month’s pick: a new terminal emulator for your toolbelt — Ghostty. I’ve been blown away by its performance on both my home and work machines.

iTerm2 has served me well, but Ghostty has been phenomenal. It’s fast, packed with features, and has thoughtful touches like a built-in theme picker and excellent font rendering.

If you’re in the mood to try something new, I highly recommend giving Ghostty a spin.

Snippet of the month

The below piece of code was the cause of a nasty little bug that we didn't catch until it was almost too late! It ties back to one of my TILs, but I'm curious: can you spot the issue? Hint: it only happens in the node runtime... Give up?

window?.localStorage.setItem('key', 'value')

At first glance, optional chaining makes this look safe. But it's not. In Node, `window` isn’t defined at all — referencing it throws a ReferenceError before optional chaining can even kick in. And so now you see see why that TIL from March 21, 2025, exists... 😅.