Quote of the month

Holy hell, friends, this quote hit pretty hard this month! To be honest, and this might have been apparent from my last newsletter broadcast, but I was definitely working my way through a funk. But thanks to some very astute words from a pretty good friend of mine, I was able to improve myself as a person.

This friend held the mirror up to me and, through not so many words, described the kind of person that I had become. I am eternally grateful, or at least I'm grateful for now, to this friend for helping me see the faults that had not become apparent to me.

Friends hold up a mirror. This month, one of mine showed me truths I hadn’t seen in myself. It stung, but in a good way — like a reset. Habits slip slowly, and sometimes we need those pointed words to bring us back.

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What I learned this month

I know it's light. Deal with it 😆.

• Sep 12, 2025: css nth tester​
  • TIL about this neat little tool that lets you test your CSS nth-child and nth-of-type selectors.
• Sep 17, 2025: :user-valid and :user-invalid​
  • TIL about :user-valid and :user-invalid pseudo-class selectors! They function similarly to :valid and :invalid but :user-valid and :user-invalid are only applied only after a user has significantly interacted with the input. In the example below, you’ll notice that the first two inputs will not have any border styling applied until the user has interacted with the input. Conversely, the last two inputs will have border styling applied immediately 🫢.
• Sep 28, 2025: google stitch​
  • TIL about Stitch, an AI-powered tool that helps application developers (like me 😎) build pretty high-quality UIs that we can then export to Figma. I’m using it right now to help me build out a UI for a course platform for our jiu-jitsu school.

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Articles worth checking out... for the month

• 🔥 [video] - Frontend Fire; cracking the web dev interview -- This podcast episode definitely left me more aware of the current state of the hiring practices in our industry. And yeah, I'm pretty shocked by how even after almost a decade of interviewing, the interview process is still as broken as ever 😭.
• 🥳 [article] - TanStack Start v1 is coming soon to a machine near you -- I've always been a big supporter and fan of the TanStack libraries (ever since React Query) and their ecosystem as a whole, so I'm super excited to see their metaframework play almost hit v1.
• 🤔 [politics] - Maybe don't take pictures with divisive world leaders? -- Given how the current CEO of Vercel is cozying up with Netanyahu of Israel, some people are definitely feeling a hankering to move off of Vercel and onto a platform that's a little bit more politically aligned with themselves. I swear, people, y'all should just listen to HR and remember, treat Politics and Religion as topics to avoid when you're at work 😅

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Tooling

I’m probably the last person to hype up AI or call something a “game changer,” but honestly, Google Stitch has been just that for me.

As an engineer, I’m overflowing with project ideas and applications I want to build, but one thing always slows me down: I have zero visual design skills 😂. I’d rather spend my time coding, not agonizing over layouts and mockups. At the same time, I don’t want to throw together a half-baked app with no thought behind the routes or pages. That friction often stops me from even starting.

This is where Google Stitch comes in. I just describe what I want — the routes, the pages, the flow — and it generates the designs. For example, I’m currently building a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu course content platform. I explained my vision, fine-tuned the outputs a bit, and suddenly I had usable designs that let me focus on actually building.

For me, this solves two big problems:

1. I don’t have to pay a designer upfront for a product that may or may not make money.
2. I still get something tangible to look at, which keeps me motivated and focused on the fun part — coding.

If you’ve been sitting on an idea but lack design skills (like me), Google Stitch is worth trying. It just removes that initial barrier to entry.

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Snippet of the month

console.log("Sorry y'all, I ain't got a snippet this time!")

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