Playful Programming

Who says you can't have fun and improve A11Y at the same time? We're working on themes! This isn't the final theme selection UI by any means, but shows how flexible our design system (ran by @pratti.bsky.social) is Been a lot of fun just testing out! It's enabling a ton of added A11Y work too...

Good engineers don’t just write good code — they communicate clearly. Poor communication slows teams down, creates confusion, and turns small problems into big ones. Strong communication does the opposite: it makes teams faster, calmer, and more effective.

Promotions don’t always accelerate careers. Sometimes they quietly end them. The shift from individual contributor to leadership changes the skills that matter — and not everyone is prepared for that shift. A promotion isn’t just recognition. It’s a different job.

Final weeks of the Web Fundamentals Bootcamp. No more isolated exercises. We’re introducing routing (CSR vs MPA, dynamic paths with TanStack Router) — then you design your own project.

Week 10 of the Web Fundamentals Bootcamp continues: We’re applying Context in a small app — then zooming out to understand how state management fits into the broader ecosystem.

Week 10 of the Web Fundamentals Bootcamp: We’re stepping into dependency injection with React Context. How do you share data intentionally across part of your tree — without prop drilling or losing consistency?

AI has changed how @santoshyadav.dev builds software — not through replacement, but by shifting roles. Devs can iterate faster, explore more options, and validate ideas sooner. The bottleneck is no longer typing. It’s thinking clearly.

In the Web Fundamentals Bootcamp today: We’re moving from theory to practice — fetching real data and handling it correctly in React. Because “it works” isn’t the same as “it’s modeled well.”

In the Web Fundamentals Bootcamp this week: We’re tackling the part of React that causes the most confusion — effects. Why they re-run. Why cleanups matter. Why StrictMode exposes mistakes.

In-person vs remote teams isn’t a preference debate. It’s a systems design decision. In-person teams run on proximity and implicit context. Remote teams run on documentation and async clarity. Different constraints. Different strengths.

Week 8, Day 2: Refactoring static UI into dynamic systems. We’re taking a hardcoded card layout and: – Replacing hidden elements with true conditional rendering – Converting repeated markup into .map() – Extending it to support user-created content

Week 8 of Web Fundamentals Bootcamp: We’re making HTML dynamic. No more static markup. We’re rendering based on state. – Conditional logic – Rendering lists – Keys (and why they matter) If this part has ever felt confusing — this week is for you.

Making mistakes in public is uncomfortable, especially in technical spaces where confidence is often performative. But avoiding mistakes doesn’t actually make you better. It just makes learning quieter and slower.

Week 7 of the Web Fundamentals bootcamp is here and we’re starting React! This week introduce its core ideas: components, JSX, props, state, effects at a high level, and event handling. It’s all about understanding how React thinks and how pieces fit together as you build UI.

More services are adding ads, integrating AI by default, and making decisions about how your data is used, often without much say from you. That shift is what pushed @ladybluenotes.dev to rethink where her data lives.

Onboarding is changing — and AI is accelerating the shift. New hires now arrive with AI tools, different expectations, and less patience for outdated onboarding flows. This creates real pressure on documentation, team practices, and how knowledge is actually transferred.

It's official, "This is Learning" and @playfulprogramming.com are combining forces! We're elated to have them joining our ranks as we continue to grow. Our joint goal remains the same as it always was: Foster an open community aimed squarely at teaching software engineering.

With new content from "This is Learning", we now have 820 articles live on our site today! We just checked — that's 1,400,000+ words 😱 That's a lot of posts to learn programming from!

Web Fundamentals Bootcamp — Office Hours Today at 6pm PST/9pm EST This is where the DOM concepts click. We’re practicing real browser interactions, from simple click handlers to scoped DOM queries.

We’re working directly in the browser in today’s Web Fundamentals Bootcamp. Scripts, selectors, DOM updates, and events—no frameworks, just how JavaScript actually talks to the page. If you want JS to feel predictable instead of magical, join us.

Reading technical books cover-to-cover is overrated. What matters is extracting the content without burning time. In this post, hear about how to break down a pragmatic way to read technical books & docs like a working developer—not a student.