Playful Programming
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playfulprogramming.com
Playful Programming
@playfulprogramming.com
The perfect place to learn all kinds of programming, from introductory ideas to advanced abstractions.

Join our Discord!

https://discord.gg/FMcvc6T
Choosing your tech stack can be a challenging decision to make, especially if you've never led a team before.

To help, we have a new article on the site where Courtney walks us through how he decided what tools to use to build a job searching pipeline tool:

playfulprogramming.com/posts/how-i-...
How I Chose The Tech Stack For Job Helper
Choosing a tech stack isn’t just about picking trendy tools, it’s about aligning architecture with real-world needs.
playfulprogramming.com
November 7, 2025 at 3:31 PM
Dithering is an important concept to many program's aesthetics...

But how does it work under-the-hood??

We're fortunate enough that Damar is willing to join us for tomorrow's book club to answer this question!

Come join us in our Discord to hear Damar share his insights:

discord.gg/FMcvc6T
November 5, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Getting apps to be local-first can be a huge challenge. Luckily for us, TanStack has a new library to help solve that problem: TanStack DB!

Join our book club tonight at 4:30PM PST to talk about an interactive article on TanStack DB to learn how it can help your applications.
October 30, 2025 at 8:38 PM
Software itself is only part of the picture for many within the engineering space!

Join @crutchcorn.dev as we dive into the first of a new series of blog posts. It outlines how they were able to join a company as VP of Engineering and lessons they learned along the way!
I've been doing some reflecting on my past engineering roles and lessons learned from them.

This week, I'm both celebrating and acknowledging the danger of my career jump into management:

playfulprogramming.com/posts/naviga...
Navigating the Risks in Leadership
Understanding the challenges and rewards of stepping into leadership roles.
playfulprogramming.com
October 21, 2025 at 8:58 PM
We recently learned that our Discord was not accepting invites due to a bug in Discord! 😱

This issue appears to have been resolved after toggling a switch in our settings. If you've been trying to join us, please try again - we'd love to have you ✨

discord.gg/FMcvc6T
Join the Playful Programming Discord Server!
The perfect place to learn all kinds of programming, from introductory ideas to advanced abstractions. | 2606 members
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September 26, 2025 at 7:17 PM
📝New article alert!

Specificity in CSS is one of the most misunderstood and important concepts in the web dev space. It refers to the algorithm that browsers run when trying to decide which CSS declarations to apply to HTML elements.
September 24, 2025 at 7:57 PM
📝 We have a new article!

While Next.js is inherently SEO friendly, making proper use of metadata, sitemaps and structured data can help boost your website’s visibility.
September 11, 2025 at 7:44 PM
📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚

In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Dan Hollick's "What is a color space?" article!

Join our Discord and meet us on Thursday, September 11th, at 4:30 PST!
September 8, 2025 at 9:36 PM
📚 We have a very special book club this Thursday! 📚

For this week's book club — where we hang out and talk about a dev article — we're joined by the author of an awesome interactive blog post about "Big O": @samwho.dev

Join our Discord and discuss the article with us all!
September 3, 2025 at 1:31 AM
📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚

In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing @joshwcomeau.com 's "An Interactive Guide to SVG Paths" article!

Join our Discord and meet us on Thursday, August 28th, at 4:30 PST!

discord.gg/FMcvc6T
August 26, 2025 at 11:28 PM
📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚

In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Lee Robinson's "Reflections on the React community" article!

Join our Discord and meet us on Thursday, August 21st, at 4:30 PST!
August 19, 2025 at 7:01 PM
📚 Join our book club today! 📚

In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Framework Field Guide's "Linters, Formatters, and Type-Checkers" article!

Join our Discord and meet us on today, August 14th, at 4:30 PST!
August 14, 2025 at 5:48 PM
📝 Once again, what are monads?

Our new article is out, and it covers a topic that's been explained many times, in many different ways: Monads!

Monads are a staple of functional programming but, for some, the resources available explaining them don't cut it.
August 13, 2025 at 6:04 PM
✍️ Our newest article is out!

Hooks are great tools that provide better code reusability and performance improvements to your codebase. In our new article, we teach you hooks work, from a functional standpoint, and also how to build them!
August 6, 2025 at 4:46 PM
📝 New article: You should be using unitless values for line-height!

In our new blog post we lay out why unitless line height values are good for maintainability, and accessibility.

Unitless values inherit from the parent, ensuring it works on all value types.
July 23, 2025 at 8:37 PM
🌐 The History of React Through Code

We have a new article for you, and this is a big one. 👀

There were many criticisms of React's design throughout the years, but how valid are they? Our new article explores that and much more!
July 9, 2025 at 11:45 PM
📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚

In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing own our article, Framework Field Guide's "Styling" article!

Join our Discord and meet us on today, July 10th, at 4:30 PST!
July 8, 2025 at 10:28 PM
📝 New article: Next.js Promise Racing!

In this quick article, we show how you can use React Server Components to display a loading spinner in case a Promise takes longer than a specified amount of time.
July 4, 2025 at 9:27 PM
📚 No, really, what's a monad? 📚

That's what we're gonna answer in today's book club!

Every Thursday we hang out and discuss an article; this week, it's Ryan Marcus' article about monads — whatever they are.

Join us today on Discord at 4:30 PM PST!
July 3, 2025 at 6:30 PM
📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚
In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Stanislav Vishnevskiy’s "How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5,000,000 Concurrent Users"!

Join our Discord and meet us on today, June 26th, at 4:30 PST!
June 26, 2025 at 7:15 PM
Today we’re proud to release the first 3 chapters of Framework Field Guide’s second book: Ecosystem.

This book discusses the tools surrounding frameworks — we're going to talk about all the capabilities that are unlocked when using them and their usefulness!
June 18, 2025 at 9:07 PM
📅 Now that we've reached the halfway point of 2025, it's time to recap what Playful Programming has been up to so far! Here's a big-ish thread to get you up to speed:
June 12, 2025 at 7:01 PM
📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚
In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Brandon Dail’s "Fault Tolerance"!

Join our Discord and meet us on Thursday, June 12th at 4:30 PST!
June 10, 2025 at 12:15 AM
📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚

In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Dan Abramov's "RSC for Astro Developers"!

Join our Discord and meet us on Thursday, June 5th at 4:30 PST!
June 2, 2025 at 9:29 PM
📣 New article — Git: Into the Weeds!

The second chapter of our Git series focuses on conflicts, cherry-picking, and submodules!
May 28, 2025 at 11:00 PM