Week Notes 7
This week has had plenty going on.
I started working from my new desk space that I’m hiring in my pal’s studio in Cheltenham. Without a doubt, it’s been one of my most productive weeks in a long time.
I was getting a bit worried about my own stress levels and the root cause was I was worrying about how much I was achieving each day vs how much I had left to do. Working at home is amazing (I still worked at home on Friday), but being away from the chaos of a toddler and baby certainly helps me with focus.
I also worked about 40% less hours this week, and instead of catching up on client work in the evenings, I chilled out and put out a side project instead!
Speaking of side projects: this week I pushed out Tatl! It’s a tiny library to give your Web Components a little structure.
As is usually the case with my recent JavaScript side projects, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Vue. I love how Vue structures components and one thing Web Components certainly lack is structure. Tatl gives you this structure along with some local state, prop types and getters/setters.
I started working on Tatl while I was at No Divide, but parked it so I could settle back into freelance. I pulled the project back out this week and at first, decided to try and "finish it". I had a second think and realised that there are lots of smarter people than me, so I just pushed it up and asked for feedback.
I got really good feedback from Nick which resulted in a pretty drastic API change which should make everyone’s lives easier. That’s the true spirit of open source!
I’m going to keep tapping away at Tatl because I love Web Components and see the future of the platform using them a lot. I also think they’re a hell of a useful design system asset, which I hope to explore more, too.
Hopefully I’ll roll Tatl into a project. I’ll at least refactor https://mybrowser.fyi with it in the nearish future.
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Hi 👋, I’m Andy — an educator and web designer
I produce front-end development tutorials over at Front-End Challenges Club and Piccalilli. You can sign up for updates on Piccalilli to stay up to date with its progress.