weeklyfoo #85 is here: your weekly digest of all webdev news you need to know! This time you’ll find 45 valuable links in 6 categories! Enjoy!
🚀 Read it!
- The Height Enigma: Unraveling the mystery of percentage-based heights in CSS by Josh Comeau / css / 20 min read
📰 Good to know
- Plain Vanilla: An explainer for doing web development using only vanilla techniques. No tools, no frameworks — just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. by Joeri Sebrechts / vanilla / 2 min read
- Tixy Land: Examples of effects with minimal math formulas. by Martin Kleppe / animations / 1 min read
- Hyper-Typing: In this article, I talk about an inherent trade-off in TypeScript’s type system: stricter types are safer, but often more complex. by Paolo Scanferla / typescript / 6 min read
- Four years of running a SaaS in a competitive market: Insights from the founder of OnlineOrNot by Max Rozen / saas, startups / 17 min read
- How to title your blog post or whatever: So you’ve made a thing. I’ll pretend it’s a blog post, though it doesn’t really matter. If people read your thing, some would like it, and some wouldn’t. by dynomight.net / blogs / 8 min read
- What managing up really means: A Practical Guide to Working with Your Manager by Busra Koken / engineering / 9 min read
- Frontends are hard: In this post we look at why frontends have become so hard to deploy and why even the giant cloud providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure have really poor support. by sst.dev / frontends / 8 min read
- Rslib: Build library with Rspack by rsbuild.dev / tools / 7 min read
- Introducing magnetic and zoning features in Motion+ Cursor: Motion+ Cursor is a creative cursor component for React and Vue. Its simple API makes it quick to spin up cursor effects of any kind, from floating tooltips, image previews, to entire cursor replacements. by Matt Perry / animations / 6 min read
- Binary Formats are Better Than JSON in Browsers!: JSON used to be faster than alternatives in browsers, but that’s not the case anymore. For performance sensitive web apps, it is worth considering Avro, Protobuf, or Bebop. by Adam Faulkner / engineering / 12 min read
- Stack overflow is almost dead: Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data at the time suggested that the answer is likely yes by Gergely Orosz / llms, stackoverflow / 8 min read
- How we made billing backendless: We think handling payments on the frontend is a better developer experience. by Ayush / billing / 5 min read
- MCP: an in-depth introduction by speakeasy.com / mcp / 0 min read
- I think the ergonomics of generators is growing on me.: I took a stab at getting more familiar with iterators, iterables, and generators. I think I’m starting to like the ergonomics. by Alex MacArthur / javascript / 17 min read
🧰 Tools
- Scraperr: Scraperr enables you to extract data from websites with precision using XPath selectors. This self-hosted application provides a clean interface to manage scraping jobs, view results, and export data. by Jayden Pyles / scrapers
- React Three: A React renderer for Three.js by docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber / 3d, react
- Aberdeen: A TypeScript/JavaScript library for quickly building performant declarative user interfaces without the use of a virtual DOM. by Frank van Viegen / frameworks
- Gmail to SQLite: Index your Gmail account to a SQLite DB and play with the data. by Marc Boeker / gmail, sqlite
- Starguard: CLI that detects fake-star campaigns, dependency hijacks, licence red-flags and other signs of repository risk. Inspired by the 4.5 million fake stars study, StarGuard helps CTOs, security teams and investors perform fast, automated open-source due-diligence. by Mohamed Ahmed / github, checks, cli
- Airweave: Airweave lets agents search any app by airweave.ai / ai, integrations, agents
- Lumoar: Get audit-ready faster. Lumoar provides the essential tools your startup needs to organize SOC 2 compliance today, paving the way for seamless automation tomorrow. by lumoar.com / soc2
- 9ui: Beautiful, customizable components built with Base UI and Tailwind CSS. by Bora Baloglu / ui, components
- bippy: hack into react internals by Aiden Bai / react, debugging
- PptxGenJS: Build PowerPoint presentations with JavaScript. Works with Node, React, web browsers, and more. by Brent Ely / pptx, powerpoint
- Basecoat: A components library built with Tailwind CSS that works with any web stack. by Ronan Berder / ui, components
- Vectorizer: Convert PNGs to SVGs for free. Not perfect, but free and without registration. by Fayaz Ahmed / sqgs, vector
- A bookmarklet for clearing cookies for the current page: Nothing to add to the title ;) by Henry Desroches / bookmarklet
- WebTUI: Modular CSS Library that brings the beauty of Terminal UIs to the browser by webtui.ironclad.sh / ui
- tscircuit: Make electronics using Typescript, React, and AI tools. by tscircuit.com / electronics, react
- Piny: Visual editor for Astro, React, Next.js & Tailwind that runs in your IDE by getpiny.com / ide
- Awesome Tailwind Animations: Easy peasy animations for your Tailwind project by Miguel Ángel Durán / tailwind, animations
- Makepad: Makepad is a creative software development platform for Rust that compiles to wasm/webGL, osx/metal, windows/dx11 linux/opengl by makepad.dev / rust, frameworks
- atcha: GDPR, WCAG 2.2 AA, and EAA compliant, self-hosted CAPTCHA alternative with PoW mechanism and advanced anti-spam filter. by altcha.org / security, recaptcha
- git-bug: Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in git by git-bug / issues, bugs, tracking
- SVG to CSS: This tool will convert an SVG shape created with path d into a CSS Shape. by Temani Afif / svgs, css
- Autumn: Autumn is an open-source pricing & billing platform by useautumn.com / billing
- Texture: Texture is both a collection of public MCP servers and a platform for creating your own. Each server is a wrapper around an API, allowing you to chat with it using natural language. by Rodney Lafuente / mcp
- xtool: Cross-platform Xcode replacement. Build and deploy iOS apps with SwiftPM on Linux, Windows, macOS. by xtool.sh / ide
- Solidis: High-performance, SOLID-structured RESP client for Redis and other RESP-compatible servers by VCMS / redis
- Ansis: CJS/ESM ANSI color library for CI, terminals and Chromium-based browser consoles. Compatible with Bun, Deno, Next.JS. by webdiscus / colors
🎨 Design
- The Slow Burn: Why UX Debt Quietly Erodes Your Product’s Value by Roland Tomlinson / ux / 10 min read
📚 Tutorials
- Best Practices for Creating a Modern npm Package with Security in Mind: In this tutorial, we’re going to walk step by step through creating an npm package using modern best practices (as of 2025). by Brian Clark / npm / 29 min read
- CSS picture-in-picture video transition using container queries + position: sticky: Just some lines of code. by @jh3yy / css / 1 min read
📺 Videos
- Build a Weather App with Agent Mode: In this clip from Agent Mode Day, Rob Lourens demos new features in Agent Mode and builds a weather app! by Rob Lourens / vscode, ai