As DEV got hit by another wave of spammy listicle idiot posts thanks to “artificial intelligence”, instead of compiling a personal 2023 DEV wrapped I decided to publish an update of my 2021/2022 DEV reading list to give good, high-quality posts some more links and visibility!
Some good, high-quality posts – a subjective and incomplete selection by a senior web dev:
Table of Contents
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About DEV, Quality, Creation and Curation
- Rants and Parody Posts
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About Coding, Web Design, and various Aspects of (Web) Development
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML Development
- JavaScript and TypeScript Development
- Other Web Development Articles
- WordPress and WoCommerce Development
- Using Linux and other Developer Resources
- Some more of my own DEV Content
- Other Excerpts from my DEV Reading List
- Remarks
- Where to find your own Reading List on DEV.to
About DEV, Quality, Creation and Curation
DEV might have become a victim of its own success, having attracted a large community of beginners and a growing number of shady creators trying to trick them into becoming followers and customers of their low-quality schemes. There have been similar discussions elsewhere, and I still think that DEV can offer an alternative to (e)X-“Tech Twitter”, medium, or StackOverflow for people tired of toxic gatekeepers and hateful sinfluencers.
- The robot invasion of Dev.to
- Is it too late to fix the problem of AI clutter on the web?
- The Conundrum of the “Top X” Articles 🤔
- Anti-FOMO
- Technical Writing Process: How To Write A Good Technical Article
- Why do you write?
- Is Dev.to victim of its own success?
- dev.to is for webdevs and beginners – I have data to prove it 🐙
- It’s impossible to get a voice in here
- It IS possible to get a voice here! [tips to grow on DEV.to + a mini rant!]
- Stop rewarding quantity!
- What if DEV became the new Twitter-like platform for developers?
- Decentralizing Social Media
- Exploring Mastodon & Thinking about the Decentralized Web
- Drop your Mastodon social links here.
- Best Mastodon servers…go 🦣
- How to Get Into Mastodon
- 7 Reasons Why I Quit Writing On Medium.
- Of Chickens and Pigs – The Dilemma of Creator Self Promotion
- Why developers need to stop being “tech fanatics” 🙅🏻♀️🙅🏻♂️
- Let’s talk about our social media intake, shall we?
- STEM & Twitter: Verified Bias
- Twitter – My Advice is To Give Up
- Unfriending Facebook, Instagram and Goodreads
- Help fight spam in our community! 🙌
- DEV Community Satisfaction Survey Results! (October 2022)
- Destructive arguments used in technology discussions on social media that have to die
- Toxic Online Behaviors In the Developer Community
- The Language We Use Matters
- AI and Ethics
- 8 Ways to Support Women Developers
- We’ve Been Here Since the Beginning
- Sometimes I Feel Like I’m Invisible – Experiences of a Woman in Tech
- A Look at Gender Demographics in the Developer Community, Part 2
- What Makes You Stay In A Community?
- Get your own DEV wrapped for 2023 🎁
Rants and Parody Posts
- 🚨 🚀 25 Reasons (You MUST Know!!) Why “Listicles” Are BAD for dev.to 🤯 👿 🚨
- 24 Antipatterns to Avoid in 2024 🚫2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣🚫 🤖💩🤡🤯
- 13++ More 🤯 Amazing 😍Tips for writing listicles [that will 🧨 blow people away]
- Web3 – just your typical post!
- Has Stack Overflow Become An Antipattern?
- I enjoy life-long learning, but…
About Coding, Web Design, and various aspects of (Web) Development
- Rethinking the Modern Web
- Emotion-Driven Development
- 6 Procrastination Triggers And How To Overcome Them As A Designer
- What to do if you are not assigned any good projects at work?
- Error handling: Are You In Charge or In Chaos?
- Beyond Googling the Error Message
- How to get answers on StackOverflow
- The Complete Guide To Using One Monitor As A Programmer.
- One Too Many Monitors
Frontend Development focused on CSS, HTML, a11y
- Accessibility, SustyWeb, SDGs, and upcoming European Legislation in 2024/2025 🇪🇺⚖️
- What’s new in WCAG 2.2
- Building (or Rebuilding) a Website with Accessibility in Mind
- My Advice to a Developer New to Accessibility
- Tabbing Tactfully
- Form input validation without JavaScript
- Permissions (access control) in web apps
- Make Beautifully Resilient Apps With Progressive Enhancement
- I am not that excited about new CSS features
- Back to Pure CSS?
- Why I never understood CSS-in-JS
- Why We’re Breaking Up with CSS-in-JS
- Why do I distrust CSS Frameworks (and why should you, sometimes)?
- How-to: CSS Table Swipe Interaction
- How To Create A Resizing Header With Plain CSS
- One Line – Sticky Header using CSS
- Creating Animated Gradient Texts (pure HTML and CSS!)
- Fantastic CSS border animation
- CSS :has(.parent-selectors) 👪
- :where :is CSS?
- Why is z-index not working?! – Explaining CSS Stacking Context
- Grid vs Flex: Where to use which? 🤔
- CSS Units – rem vs em
- How to provide an accessible high contrast alternative to a pastel color scheme? 🎨
- CSS Funstuff: Animated Waveforms
- Generate P3 Color Variations from RGB Hex Values
- Future of CSS: color-mix function 🎨
- Super Useful CSS Resources
JavaScript and TypeScript Development
- Bun hype. How we learned nothing from Yarn
- “Hype” & “Garbage”? An Honest Look at the State of JavaScript Survey’s Track Record
- Decoding Why 0.6 + 0.3 = 0.8999999999999999 in JS and How to Solve?
- Getting started with TypeScript as a JavaScript developer
- Using JSDoc to write better JavaScript Code
- https://dev.to/melguachun/relearning-the-past-vanilla-javascript-single-page-application-437i
- The Return of Server Side Routing
- Server-Side Rendering (SSR) Vs Client-Side Rendering (CSR)
- Why Efficient Hydration in JavaScript Frameworks is so Challenging
- Avoiding boolean flags and impossible states when using declarative data fetching with React and Typescript
- How to Implement CORS and Authentication in NodeJS
- Instagram-like page transitions with Svelte
- Movement and Visibility Detection with CSS and JS 👀
- SolidJS – React meets Svelte?
- Voby: Simplifications Over Solid – No Babel, No Compiler
- You don’t need React for building websites
Other Web Development Articles
- How to get up to speed in a new codebase, fast
- Importance Of Landmarks
- Simplify your monorepo with npm 7 workspaces
- What’s my local internet address?
- Printable Lazy Loading 🖨️
- Serverless and its not so Server-less Nature
- Automating Tests using CodeceptJS and Testomat.io: First Steps
- Planning Your Next Cypress.io Tests with Testomat.io
- Automated Visual Regression Testing with BackstopJS
- GDPR Compliant User Consent Management with Klaro
- Headless CMS collection for Developers
WordPress and WoCommerce Development
- Develop a local WordPress theme using Docker
- Useful Tools and Thoughts for Migrating WordPress Content and Configuration
- Should we use WooCommerce Block Theme Syntax in 2022?
- Testing a local WordPress Instance on BrowserStack
Using Linux and other Developer Resources
- Google alternatives?
- DeGoogle
- Running macOS inside Linux with Docker-OSX
- How to Configure Static IP on Ubuntu
- How To Take Static And Animated Screenshots On Ubuntu
- How to create short and concise technical videos
Finally, here are some more posts that caught my attention on the practical DEV, that did not fit in one of the technological or community categories.
Other Excerpts from my DEV Reading List
- The State of Developer Conferences (in 2023, not recovered after the pandemic)
- 7 Key Red Flags To Watch For In Software Job Listings
- Why I Stopped Interviewing with Companies That Require a Coding Test
- Hey Tech Recruiter, Here Are Some Tips from a Developer
- Things Strong Developers Do That Drive Their Team Crazy
- Imposter syndrome is about systemic discrimination
- From Software Developer to Ethical Hacker
- I quit my job to make free web tools
- Software Engineering and Neo-Slavery.
- The dirty secrets of the IT Staffing industry
- Project Prism: on the road to building an open smartphone
- Preventing burnout 😴
- Defensive estimations and time management
- Who is Speaking On Your Behalf?
- Speaking at Tech Conferences – What to Talk about?
Remarks
This list is based on its 2021/2022 predecessor. I added new stuff from my 2023 bookmarks and kept most of the previous content. I will probably update this post several times to add some more finds in 2024.
“No developer must read this” negates the Dunning-Kruger claim prevalent in spam post titles, which we sometimes try to mock in the parody section. Post like “24 repositories EVERY developer MUST use in 2024”, plus several emojis and some pseudo-high-quality images generated by “artificial intelligence”. Please spare me!
I used to claim that the main reason to save and publish a reading list like this is to help myself and other senior developers find content apart from the many beginner’s React and JavaScript tutorials, but I’d rather have that kind of low-quality content back than the more obvious spam that prevails the “relevant” selections these days. Hopefully, DEV will find a way to curate and eliminate. Otherwise, this community will eventually become history, and AI will quote some of our posts from back when we still made an effort.
This is a very subjective list, but we are subjects. It is basically another annotated collection of some DEV posts, including my own and other people’s work, that I consider to be valuable reading, covering CSS, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, WordPress, Shopware, Symfony, Laravel, Linux, tools and hardware setup, as well as conceptual aspects like accessibility, usability, sustainability, performance optimization, and ethics. I also like to read and write rants, and I engaged in discussions about DEV itself and other communities and social media platforms.
I regularly cross-post articles on various platforms, including my own weblog, open-mind-culture.org, my DEV blog, my tealfeed, medium and my new hashnode blog.
Where to find your own Reading List on DEV.to
dev.to/readinglist is a link to my full reading list, but beware, it will take everyone to their own DEV reading list instead.
