This is issue 007 of href.email, your dose of interesting links about tech, dev and design.

This week we don't have a main topic so we're going to share an extra large bag of links! First some technical news and articles. Then all about design, creativity, and more.

Lots of exciting releases:

• Tailwind 4 is in beta. Its main features are raw speed (full builds are up to 5 times faster, incremental builds up to 1000 (!) times) and a new CSS-first configuration. No more tailwind.config.js—all CSS!
• Vite 6 is out. While it's a significant release, we're mostly excited that it lays the ground work for it's future Rust-powered foundation.
• PHP 8.4 just dropped. Property hooks are one of the most exciting PHP features in recent years allowing us to specify get- or set-only properties, and indirectly allowing us to finally specify properties on interfaces! (Which got Nuno really hyped up)

And some fun technical articles:

• If you hate waiting for your frontend to build you'll love Julia Evans' latest article on importing JavaScript libraries without a build system—ES modules have come a long way while we weren't watching!
• Here's your annual reminder to embrace the platform if you want to build a resilient frontend. Bramus makes a good case for the rule of least power. "The Rule of Least Power suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose."
• This one did rounds a few weeks ago but we're still impressed by Sam Rose's interactive introduction to queuing.
• TDD means writing test before writing the implementation. We're already happy to hear you're writing tests at all. (Right?) But TDD can be a great way to gradually work towards an implementation, as per Luka Peharda.
• The absolute minimum you should know about Unicode in 2023 is still the absolute minimum you should know in 202�.

• As per James Bedford: you're allowed to create for the sake of creating. "I overthink experimentation because it doesn't neatly fit into aspirations or might not be beneficial to what I am doing now. I overthink writing something that doesn't squarely fit into a topic that I have given myself as a writer. I feel a sense of guilt when I have spent too long on something that doesn't necessarily move the needle on my career - and this is something I am keen to move away from."
• We like to slap line and bar charts across all dashboards we come across, but Nick Desbarats has a thing or two to teach us about data visualization 📺.
• We raved about BlueSky a few weeks ago. If you're not convinced yet, Justin Jackson put together a great comparison video between BlueSky and X.
• Okay one more BlueSky link and we'll shut up. Nightsky is a beautiful real-time visualization of all BlueSky activity.
• If you're an enthusiast of exploring shiny new productivity tools instead of actually getting things done, you might want to tinker with Craft's new task-focused v3.
• The ultimate guide to the UX of LEGO interface panels you never knew you needed.

PS: This will be the last edition in 2024 since we'll be Christmas Eve-ing two weeks from now. Happy holidays and see you next year! ⛄