Newsletter 001 — January 10, 2021
Tech Newsletters
A short, irregular digest of reading and tools gathered by Frederick D: design and front-end surveys, developer workflow notes, and a handful of projects worth bookmarking.
Why a newsletter
A loose collection, not a schedule
The idea came from reading an essay on curation being a form of creation, and from the long habit of following a Chinese tech weekly whose format proved useful to borrow.
It is called a newsletter because the update rhythm is uncertain — weekly, fortnightly, or monthly. The first issue is thin on its own, but every issue needs a beginning. Writing long pieces that never get finished is worse than jotting down fragments, which tend to keep some value.
Articles
Reading picked out this issue
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1.
2020 design tools survey results
Useful even for readers outside UI/UX, because the classification shows which functions a contemporary design workflow now covers: brainstorming and ideation, user flow, UI design, prototyping, handoff, design systems, user testing, and versioning. Of the tools I know — Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD form one group while Axure sits slightly apart — Figma leads in most categories of this survey.
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2.
Talking, typing, thinking: software development is not a desk job
A reflection on the talking and typing that surround real development work, and where the craft actually happens.
Curating is itself a creative act, and a good-taste business model is worth studying on its own terms.
A newsletter from a humble programmer is really just a habit of writing things down. The format suits a working developer because it turns scattered bookmarks into a small, shareable record — a way of keeping notes on design, front-end craft, and the tools that quietly shape daily workflow. Rather than chasing a fixed publishing rhythm, the irregular schedule becomes part of the charm: something arrives when there is genuinely something worth sharing, and nothing arrives when there is not.
The subject matter leans toward the visual and the practical. Surveys and essays about typography, layout, and interface design sit alongside notes on build tooling, code organisation, and workflow habits that make the work lighter. A handful of small projects get mentioned because they earn the attention, not because they fit a trend. The overall tone is closer to a reading list with commentary than to a curated roundup, which keeps the whole thing feeling personal rather than automated.
For a programmer who writes a blog, a newsletter can function as a compact companion piece — a place to gather material that does not justify a full article but is too useful to lose. It also offers a low-friction way for readers to stay in touch with the work, since each issue is short, self-contained, and easy to skim. Over time the accumulated issues become a kind of annotated archive, useful for the author and for anyone curious about how a small studio practice evolves.
Resources
Tools and links worth keeping
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A
Public APIs
A collected list of free APIs useful for building side projects.
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50
50 Projects 50 Days
Fifty small front-end builds for practicing browser techniques.
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H
Hugo
The static site generator behind this site's newer pages.
Also noted in passing: a Chinese-language regional tech daily, and the growing set of CSS and JavaScript frameworks such as Bootstrap and Tailwind, preprocessors like Sass, and libraries such as Vue.js and React.
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