urban weekly #85

Plain Vanilla - An explainer for doing web development using only vanilla techniques. No tools, no frameworks — just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. vanilla

Tixy Land - Examples of effects with minimal math formulas. animations 🔥

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. typescript

Four years of running a SaaS in a competitive market - Insights from the founder of OnlineOrNot saas, startups

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. blogs

What managing up really means - A Practical Guide to Working with Your Manager engineering

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. frontends

Rslib - Build library with Rspack tools

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. animations

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. engineering

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 llms, stackoverflow

How we made billing backendless - We think handling payments on the frontend is a better developer experience. billing

MCP - an in-depth introduction mcp 🔥

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. javascript

The Height Enigma - Unraveling the mystery of percentage-based heights in CSS css 🔥

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. scrapers

React Three - A React renderer for Three.js 3d, react

Aberdeen - A TypeScript/JavaScript library for quickly building performant declarative user interfaces without the use of a virtual DOM. frameworks

Gmail to SQLite - Index your Gmail account to a SQLite DB and play with the data. 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. github, checks, cli

Airweave - Airweave lets agents search any app 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. soc2

9ui - Beautiful, customizable components built with Base UI and Tailwind CSS. ui, components

bippy - hack into react internals react, debugging

PptxGenJS - Build PowerPoint presentations with JavaScript. Works with Node, React, web browsers, and more. pptx, powerpoint 🔥

Basecoat - A components library built with Tailwind CSS that works with any web stack. ui, components 🔥

Vectorizer - Convert PNGs to SVGs for free. Not perfect, but free and without registration. svgs, vector

A bookmarklet for clearing cookies for the current page - Nothing to add to the title ;) bookmarklet

WebTUI - Modular CSS Library that brings the beauty of Terminal UIs to the browser ui

tscircuit - Make electronics using Typescript, React, and AI tools. electronics, react

Piny - Visual editor for Astro, React, Next.js & Tailwind that runs in your IDE ide

Awesome Tailwind Animations - Easy peasy animations for your Tailwind project tailwind, animations

Makepad - Makepad is a creative software development platform for Rust that compiles to wasm/webGL, osx/metal, windows/dx11 linux/opengl rust, frameworks

atcha - GDPR, WCAG 2.2 AA, and EAA compliant, self-hosted CAPTCHA alternative with PoW mechanism and advanced anti-spam filter. security, recaptcha

git-bug - Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in git issues, bugs, tracking 🔥

SVG to CSS - This tool will convert an SVG shape created with path d into a CSS Shape. svgs, css

Autumn - Autumn is an open-source pricing & billing platform 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. mcp

xtool - Cross-platform Xcode replacement. Build and deploy iOS apps with SwiftPM on Linux, Windows, macOS. ide

Solidis - High-performance, SOLID-structured RESP client for Redis and other RESP-compatible servers redis 🔥

Ansis - CJS/ESM ANSI color library for CI, terminals and Chromium-based browser consoles. Compatible with Bun, Deno, Next.JS. colors

The Slow Burn - Why UX Debt Quietly Erodes Your Product’s Value ux 🔥

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). npm 🔥

CSS picture-in-picture video transition using container queries + position: sticky - Just some lines of code. css

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! vscode, ai 🔥

weekly news

Published on 2025-05-19, last updated on 2025-05-19 by Adam

Comments or questions? Open a new discussion on github.

Adam Urban is fullstack engineer, loves serverless and generative art, and is building side projects like weeklyfoo.com, flethy.com and diypunks.xyz in his free time.