DeveloPassion's Newsletter #21 - Communities makes us stronger

Welcome to the 21st edition of my newsletter. What a week! I thought that I’d have time to work on my projects, but instead, I’ve spent a lot of time in the hospital. Life is always full of surprises! In the last edition, I’ve mentioned that our baby should arrive soon, but apparently, he’ll be arriving even sooner than anticipated! We’re now rushing to get everything prepared for his arrival, and that leaves little time for other things. As the saying goes “whatever you do is your priority”. And, clearly, my baby is my number one priority right now ;-) Still, I wanted to take a bit of time to check in and say hi to you all!

As you know, I’m embarked on a journey to improve the way we manage our personal knowledge. I firmly believe that all knowledge workers like us can benefit a lot from better prioritizing our learning, and keeping track of what we’ve learned about. I personally did this for years using various approaches, and really don’t regret it. Although I feel like the tools at our disposal are limited, and force us to maintain knowledge silos. I’ve got wiki pages, Evernote entries, pages in notion, notes in Obsidian, highlights in Readwise, my books, my blog articles, this newsletter, bookmarks, files on my NAS, and more. And it’s a real shame that all this information is scattered around and not all in a single place. I really have no doubt that we can do better and learn more efficiently. What I want is a personal information hub. That’s why I’ve decided to create a new community for people interested in getting started or getting better at personal knowledge management. You can join us using the following link: https://dsebastien.net/pkm-community

TypeScript 4.4 has been released a few days ago. As usual, it brings awesome new features. Here are my personal favorites:

And there’s more! Check out the official release notes over at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-4-4/

Nrwl Nx is another rocket ship that’s hard to follow. I’m constantly amazed by how cool Nx is. A real shame that “so few” developers even know about it! With the 12.8 release, it now supports micro-frontends based on Webpack 5’s Module Federation plugin. That support is in the form of Angular executors and generators. Nrwl has published a guide to show how to start using this: https://nx.dev/latest/angular/guides/setup-mfe-with-angular. With this version, there are also some changes with the integration of React & Storybook. Nx now includes a dedicated preset to simplify the Storybook setup and to share the same Webpack configuration as the React app. Nx 12.8 also introduces support for TypeScript compiler plugins for NestJS. This is cool because NestJS 8 has added support for those back in July (https://trilon.io/blog/announcing-nestjs-8-whats-new). This support in Nx means that we are now able to use the new Swagger TSC plugin of NestJS. Check out the following links to learn more:

By the way, there’s a free online conference dedicated to Nx in September: https://ti.to/nrwl/nx-conf-2021

Many of you have appreciated the list of books that I’ve shared in the previous edition. So I’ll continue to share some with you! One book that I want to highlight this week is one that focuses entirely on Angular Ivy, called Accelerating Angular Development with Ivy: A practical guide to building faster and more testable Angular apps with the new Ivy engine. This book, currently available for pre-order has been written by Lars Gyrup Brink Nielsen and Jacob Andresen. Knowing Lars, I have no doubt that this book is going to be full of gems. If you’re an Angular developer, then definitely check it out. I also want to continue sharing books that have influenced me over the years. Here are three that I strongly recommend:

Reply to this e-mail, and tell me about your own favorites. Or better yet: join us on Slack and share those with all of us!

Here are a few links that I found interesting this week:

The Software Crafters community is growing. I’m thrilled to see more and more of you over there! Don’t forget to join the Slack channel of our community. It’s a friendly and cozy place to discuss IT, Software Development, code quality, productivity, and more! Here is the invite link: https://join.slack.com/t/softwarecrafterstalk/shared_invite/zt-umgx3v06-4rtJ20PXz867GTPzCk1zeQ