What happened last week - issue #100 🎂

This week: Statamic, WordPress, UX and more

What happened last week

Hurray - 100th issue 🎂 It took me longer than it should, but I made it before the end of the year. But it’s a nice number and I’m happy about it.

Last weeks were pretty hectic on many fronts. The good news is - most heavy lifting this year is done already and soon I will start my time off. I won’t lie - I’m a bit tired of this year and I need some time off, so I can recharge before next year.

For example, last week I visited the 4Developers conference and I shared my knowledge about Astro. It was cool, but I felt that December wasn’t the best month for organizing conferences.

Soon, I will share some more news because I have another confirmation for 2025 and I will co-organize something too. So, the next year will be exciting too.

Interesting links

Unicon - the easiest way to use icons in Laravel and Statamic — Maciek Palmowski

Last time, I wrote a bit about Unicon already, but I decided to create an article about how it works and how to integrate it with Statamic.

Modern Work Fucking Sucks — Joan Westenberg

This amazing article describes perfectly the modern workflow. We are spending most of our time either coping data from one place to another or automating these things. The thing that we often are doing, is the work itself.

I’m really happy that I’m working in a bit more chaos-driven company.

Sliders degrade UX (so do this instead) — Adam Silver

A great article explaining some problems with sliders (not image carousels) and reasons why it’s better to use a checkbox or two inputs instead.

PHP 8.4 Is Here: Top Features You’ll Love and Why They Matter — James Carter

James explains all the most meaningful changes in PHP 8.4. I really love features like array_find or property hooks.

Why we switched to Astro (and why it might interest you) — Stefano Verna

Stefano from DatoCMS explains why they switched to Astro. I found the reasons for the switch very interesting - React became much more complicated + they wanted to make development simpler (and fun). It turns out that Astro is great for this. I also enjoyed how they managed the caching to make the website both dynamic and as quick as possible.

AI is taking your job — Kent C. Dodds

“AI is taking your job” - when I saw it, my initial thought was “here we go again”, but then I saw who is the author. So, Kent did an amazing job looking at this from a totally different perspective - AI-powered filtering of CVs, etc. Just read it - it’s a great eye-opener.

WordPress Multi-Multisite: A Case Study — Scott Fennell

A great case study showing what you can achieve with JS and WordPress API. It’s a long one, but it’s definitely worth reading. Also, cool that CSS Tricks is publishing cool stuff again.

Refactoring Statamic content with Distill — Jack Sleight

Distill is a great addon for Statamic that lets you modify the data in a very straightforward way. And it’s damn easy to use too.

Next-level frosted glass with backdrop-filter — Josh W Comeau

Josh always reminds me of three things:

• how small details matter

• how dumb I am when it comes to CSS

• what an amazing educator he is

This tutorial solves the problem I never even thought of and the final result is amazing.

And how was your week? Did you learn something interesting? Don’t hesitate to press the reply button or share your thoughts in the comment section.

Cheers,

Maciek