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Developer Diaries 15

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Hello and welcome to the Developer Diaries 15! August is over already, but summer is still going strong in Germany. August was a great month. It was very hot, but I enjoyed it a lot!

đŸ‘šđŸ»â€đŸ’» Work

Last month, I built my first online shop with Shopify. I get it now why Shopify is the GOAT of web shops. Their product is very good. Even without coding skills, you can get your products to sell online in under a few hours.

I used their React Framework Hydrogen based on Remix to build a headless E-Commerce site. I learned a lot, and I documented the whole process in a blog post. Make sure to check it out below.

Besides that, I worked on a website to reduce the client-side JavaScript to improve the Page Speed Score on mobile. It’s great how many tools we as developers get from the browser nowadays, like the code coverage Opens in new tab from Chrome

It’s a great help to figure out what JS is used and what’s just imported, wasting space and recude download speed. On the website, moment.js was used to format dates in a specific way. That reminded me of a previous job, where we used moment.js heavily and already had the discussion around whether we needed that or couldn’t native JS solve these tasks.

Thankfully, there’s this great article on GitHub Opens in new tab where people made an in-depth comparison , and the conclusion is: yes, you don’t need it!

By removing moment.js and using basic JS to format dates, I could reduce the client-side JS by almost 50% and make it much faster to load on mobile.

📝 Blog Posts of the Month

Here are the blog posts of August 2023:

I’m pretty happy about the e-commerce website write-up because it’s a great starting point if you consider building your first headless online shop. I documented all the steps I took to get up and going with the shop I recently built.

🎓 TIL Posts of the month

Here are the Today I Learned posts of August 2023:

đŸ‹đŸ»â€â™€ïž Fitness

My current fitness routine is running two times a week, and doing my bodyweight strength workout two times a week. I’m motivated to start my week with a 5k run, and I’m curious how long it will stay that way.

I can imagine that I’ll go back to running once weekly as soon as the weather changes to more autumn and rainy. I also would love to integrate cycling into my fitness routine, but it doesn’t fit well right now. I’ll see if this changes when I switch back to indoor cycling later this year.

📚 Reading

I finished three books this month. I got hooked on the Silo Series because it’s running on Apple+. I managed to avoid trailers and spoilers and try to finish the books until I start the TV series.

Project Hail Mary might be one of my favorite books. The story is just wonderful. I’m really into science fiction right now, even though I thought that I disliked that genre. But I think I especially like the books from this genre, which start in a relatable environment and then enhance into more science-fiction.

I added a few books from this section to my want-to-read list, and I hope they are similarly beautiful. Anyway, here are the books from this month:

🎙Podcasts

I listened to the Syntax.fm Opens in new tab episode with Ryan Florence recently. It’s a great talk about not only the framework Remix but also about the web, web technologies, and the ways they’re evolving in general. I took a lot of inspiration and further thinking from that.

đŸ•čVideo Games

I’m still big on Zelda. It still feels like I haven’t even finished half the game. So much to see!

That's it for this month. See you in the next one!


I hope you enjoyed this post and learned something new. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via Email Opens in new tab.

If you want to support me, you can buy me a coffee. I would be very happy about it!

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I wish you a wonderful day! Marco