Quote of the month

Hey Reader,

It’s been a few months since I’ve sent out a newsletter to all y’all fine folks, and some of you might be thinking, “It’s because he got lazy,” or “He just forgot about it.” But that’s not the case. Back in June, my family suffered a loss—my grandmother passed away.

What followed was a whirlwind: grieving, following through with the cultural traditions around loss, and reorienting myself to life without her. She was a big part of my everyday rhythm, someone I cared for and spent time with daily.

That’s why this exchange between Frodo and Gandalf feels so resonant. We don’t get to choose the times we live in or the challenges that come our way. But we do get to choose what we do with the time given to us.

For me, that meant slowing down. Allowing myself to feel the weight of everything. Permitting myself to stop grinding, stop pushing, and simply be fully present in the moment.

My friends, what I want to leave you with in this month’s quote is this: Allow yourself to be present, in whatever capacity you can. If you’re at 50%, then let yourself be at 50%. If you feel only 20% like yourself, that’s okay—be at 20%. You don’t always need to be at your best, and you don’t always need to be full throttle. Give yourself the space and the grace to embrace your own humanity in every season.

​

What I learned this month

My top pick of things I picked up this installment

• May 02, 2025: headless ui​
  • TIL about headless ui - a library from tailwindlabs that gives you access to unstyled ui components that integrate beautifully with tailwind. If you’re wondering how I found out about this, Wapplyzer revelead it to me 😆!
• May 05, 2025: Show your react router routes​
  • too long for the newsletter… visit my site instead 😆
• May 05, 2025: ts-reset​
  • TIL about ts-reset - it’s like CSS resets but for TypeScript! Shout out to Matt Pocock (and the team) for this! Here’s an example of one of the rules: There are way more rules so I encourage you to give it a read and maybe incorporate it into your project!
• May 07, 2025: threadreader​
  • TIL about Threadreader, a tool that helps you read Twitter threads way more easily. Oh sorry, it’s not Twitter anymore, it’s X. Whatever, Elon. Whatever the hell it’s called now, Threadreader will unroll the tweet storm into a single, cohesive, consumable chunk of content.
• May 09, 2025: So. Much. Raycast​
  • Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Another today I learned about Raycast 😅. But hear me out, this YouTube video that I’m about to link you to is bonkers. Like I said before, this is the tool that our Macs should have shipped with because finder just can’t compare! There are over a hundred cool things you can do with Raycast… and I’ve just scratched the surface because, oof, there’s so much cool stuff and so little time 😂. https://youtu.be/NuIpZoQwuVY
• May 19, 2025: supabase​
  • Today I learned about Supabase, an open source alternative to Firebase. It being open source also means I can self-host it, which I love ❤️. But anyways, I played around with it this weekend in an attempt to build out a proof of concept for a course platform I want to build out for my Brazilian Jujutsu business, and I have to say I’m quite impressed 🤯.
• May 28, 2025: clipboard.js​
  • TIL about clipboard.js, a library that allows you to copy text to the clipboard. It’s pretty simple to use, it’s also pretty lightweight, and it’s declarative af.
• May 29, 2025: open source secrets management​
  • TIL about infisical, an open source secrets management platform. It allows you to easily store and manage your secrets across your team and tech stack. And oh, did I mention that you can self-host it too? 😎
• Jul 23, 2025: Ai Resume Matcher​
  • TIL about Resume Matcher, a full stack web app, that you have to run locally, that will reveal your resumes compatibility score and crucial keywords 😎. It’s still in active development, and to be honest, I had to do a little finagling to get it to work locally, but I’m really excited to see how it evolves. With the resumes I’ve used and job descriptions I’ve uploaded, I think the original scores that I got were pretty good but the updates the app suggested, like adding numerical data and percentages, definitely would have improved the overall appeal of my resume.
• Jul 28, 2025: tldr​
  • too long for the newsletter… visit my site instead 😆
• Aug 04, 2025: es-toolkit​
  • TIL about es-toolkit, a modern alternative to lodash and underscore. It promises improved performance (potentially 2-3 times faster), smaller bundle size (~97% less than lodash), and even offers a compatibility layer to ease the transition for existing codebases from lodash to es-toolkit.
• Aug 14, 2025: dyad​
  • TIL about dyad, a free and open source alternative to things like V0, Lovable, and Bolt. If you don’t know what these tools are, they’re basically AI powered web app builders that allow people to create apps with natural language.
• Aug 27, 2025: ebooks to audiobooks​
  • TIL that you can convert ebooks to audiobooks with audiblez 📚!
• Aug 31, 2025: Beacon API​
  • TIL about the Beacon API! It’s a way to send asynchronous and non-blocking requests to a web server. It’s useful for sending analytics data to a server before the page is unloaded!

​

Articles worth checking out

Le things that grabbed my attention this month!

• ⚠️Nx had a security vulnerability! - A malicious version of `nx` and supporting plugin packages were published to npm that scan the user's file system for credentials and posts them to a GitHub repo under the user's account. Scary stuff 🤨
• 🤔 AWS CEO thinks replacing junior staff is the dumbest thing he's ever heard - If you don't know where I stand on AI replacing humans, I think the AWS CEO and I are on the same page -- we need humans in the loop and failing to train up the next generation because "AI is going to do everything" is one of the dumbest statements a person can make.
• 💪 What if you tried hard - This post by Aaron Francis reminded me that I needed to get back on the grind and start intentionally living my life again -- off autopilot. Great read!

​

Tooling

Alright, my tool of the month is CleanShot. It is my preferred tool for taking screenshots on my Mac!
​
Why I love it:

• Blur sensitive content
• Add annotations quickly and cleanly
• Capture scrolling screenshots
• Record GIFS and screen recordings easily

The only downside? You might not be able to install it at your workplace (I'm not able to 😂) because we take enterprise security very seriously! But if you can install it, I highly encourage you to give it a spin.

​https://cleanshot.com/​

​

Snippet of the month

Sometimes the best “script” you can run is one that reminds you to chill. Run this in your browser.

// Sometimes the best productivity hack is... no hack at all.
function relax() {
  console.log("Take a deep breath. You're doing fine.");
  console.log("Not every moment has to be optimized.");
  console.log("Give yourself permission to just be.");
}
relax();