Holiday Show Recap, Portfolio Inspiration, Generative Winter Art | Frontend Horse

We reached our goal!

Howdy pals, I’ve got some wonderful news: as a community, we raised $10,000 to clean the ocean!

We had over 1,000 viewers stop by and donate over 120 times!

If you missed it, here’s the stream recording, including all 12 incredible guests.

And here’s a playlist of each guest as a separate video.

It was truly a team effort, put together by folks in our incredible Discord community. Leif Niemczik, Ben Myers, and Ryan Trimble spear-headed the effort, with Leif creating all the incredible animations you see in the stream.

All Donations

Community members Mac Pedzich and Ryan Trimble spun up a page on the day of the show to show the donations, sponsors, and the leaderboard. Thanks so much for the super quick work getting this together, pals! Check it out here:

Holiday Snowtacular TeamSeas Donations

Building a JS library from scratch

On Tuesday we had a great stream with Chris Ferdinandi where he taught us the incredibly practical skill of making your own JavaScript library.

He showed us different approaches (OOP or functional? Your choice!) and tons of little tips to make your library easier to use (like using JSDoc to document your API).

I know I’ll be putting his teachings to use quite soon for my own purposes. Highly recommend checking out the video for yourself:

[embed https://youtu.be/ZvYhXr0hSzE\]

Inspiration

Lynn Fisher's new website Lynn Fisher’s new website — lynnandtonic.com

Drop whatever you’re doing. Go open this site on a desktop computer and resize the browser. It’ll probably be the best thing you see all month.

Lynn puts out a wonderful new portfolio website every December. Check past years here.

Generative SVG Snowman — codesandbox.io

Amelia Wattenberger used this adorable snowman to teach us some wonderful SVG techniques for her segment in the Holiday show. Click to generate a new snowman!

Simple Generative Trees — codepen.io

This pen by George has a timeless look to it, and the best part is it’s all generative! Pick just the tree you like, or leave it how it is and get a new tree every second.

Holiday Snowglobe — codepen.io

I love this pen especially because I got to watch the timelapse of it being drawn! Monica showed us how she took this from sketch to CSS during the special.

SVG GSAP Christmas Tree — codepen.io

I love Natalia’s style, and this one is really adorable She’s added some nice, subtle animations, a fun art style, and a nice click effect on the present.

Advent Series

There are two advent series I want to point you towards because they’ve been my favorite so far this year.

Every year our friend Michael Chan does React Holiday, where he teaches you something about React each day. It’s getting better every year, so definitely sign up for that.

If you’re not subscribed to Steph Eckles’s 12 Days of Dev, you’re missing out on really great educational content. It’s a mix of web dev information, like this wonderful write-up on CSS Houdini!

Upcoming Stream

There’s only one more stream this year, and it’s this Tuesday with my good friend Anthony Campolo! We’re going to learn StepZen, which gives us one tidy GraphQL API for all of our data.

Integrating APIs with StepZen GraphQL Studio

Then we’re off until January! I’m taking a couple weeks break, but I’ll still be here with the newsletter, not to worry.

So long, partner

Well, that’s it for this week. Thanks for riding with me.

It’s been a sprint to get the holiday episode ready, and I’m relieved that it’s over and went so well. I appreciate everyone who watched, donated, and helped put it together. This community is incredible and I’m so proud to be a part of it 💜

Have a wonderful holiday!

Your neigh-bor,

Alex