Finding new clients as a freelancer is hard. Learn how open-source can help you in that — and why it beats most other marketing strategies. Throughout the past few years, I published several open-source projects. Some became an overnight success, and some didn’t even get a single star on GitHub…

Nowadays text editors like Notion let you easily format text with a bubble menu near your selection. Let’s build one! Nowadays tools like Notion achieved quite a leap in terms of text editing experience. They introduced new patterns which seamlessly integrate into our flow of writing. One of these new…

As a beginner, you don’t think about coding style. Implement these three principles to improve your code base immediately. Over the course of the last months, I had the opportunity to mentor a group of talented new web developers who participated in TechLabs’ digital shaper program. It was really fun…

Improve your Next.js-based blog with OG images generated with @vercel/og. Throughout the years, Open Graph images became more and more important. Most modern tools (like Slack, Facebook, or Twitter) automatically show a little preview image of your website whenever you share it. …

Lexical is a new framework for building rich text editors. Let’s build a simple WYSIWYG editor with it. In April 2022, Meta open-sourced Lexical — “an extensible text editor framework”. Given that it powers some of the most popular web apps in the world, it especially focuses on accessibility and…

Have you ever wondered how syntactical sugar like styled just magically works? Let’s recreate this functionality using tagged template strings in Javascript. If you used tools like styled-components or graphql, you most likely came across tagged template literals. A new Javascript feature that was introduced with ES6. In styled components…

How to put Cal Newport’s deep work concept to practice? These 3 tips helped me over the last years. In his 2016 book, Cal Newport coined the term Deep Work, which essentially means working on a single task for prolonged periods without getting distracted. A concept that back then could…

Going all-in on one’s beloved side-project? Sounds great! But how do you know it is the right project and time to do so? Let’s take a look at a simple concept. Side projects are increasingly popular. Partly because it has become easier than ever to create and distribute. …

ESM and CommonJS are Javascript’s module systems. Let’s understand how they compare and when to choose which system. ES Modules (or short: ESM) and CommonJS (or short: CJS) are the two module systems in Javascript that are actively being used. Module Systems allow us to share and reuse code easily…