Hey there everyone 👋 (I love handwaves) and welcome to the first issue of this newsletter with me!
I have so many things to share for real; from my experiences with my Redis this week, to learning about Segun Adebayo from the README project, purchasing a book on Amazon, learning from Ethanniser, Josh Comeau, and deciding I want to do a 30 USD giveaway to a lucky winner of a challenge I’ll put here xD.
First of all, go try tranpeer that me and Emmanuel shipped to npm yesterday in our livestream!!!
Why this, why now?
Buildaloba was conceived out of necessity as I mentioned in my announcement posts (yes the one with my face on it). I wanted a means to share with a select group of cool people; things I was building, experimented with and learned week-in-week-out. Sharing on Twitter, LinkedIn and Bluesky are cool, but, they are not the right media to share things as completely expressive like these:
Announcement post on my Twitter
What kind of community am I looking to build here?
So, I want this to eventually morph into a cozy group for builders to share things they are working on, collaborate on projects, get inspiration from things I am working on and a place for me to be also narrate my weekly experiences (which I have said over 100 times at this point. Honestly though, we will have a lot of fun here though!
Week #1
So, this week was crazy cos it involved so many eye-opening things. It started pretty mellow with a major launch at work that I was an integral part of on the DevRel side things with getting documentation together, ensuring the tech was working as expected, and eventually collaborating with people across the board for an explosive launch!
Redis palava
After the launch, I resumed a few other things of mine to ensure I regained sanity and a feel of what the real world was still like — maybe my next thing to do was not to resume building my Redis. So, a bit of backstory; for the past 2 months or so I have been building Redis from scratch with Typescript and I have gotten pretty far with implementing a few really good operations:
enum COMMANDS {
ECHO = "ECHO",
PING = "PING",
SET = "SET",
GET = "GET",
CONFIG = "CONFIG",
KEYS = "KEYS",
}
enum RDBCONFIGPARAMS {
DIR = "dir",
DBFILENAME = "dbfilename",
}I went back to building my RDB and the next challenge I had was to implement reading and writing keys into an RDB file.
Redis’ RDB file is a binary representation of the in-memory store. This binary file is sufficient to completely restore Redis’ state. — RDB File Format
So naturally, I have to implement an RDB parser to get that to work and ensure that I am properly reading the file before extracting the data I needed, I got stuck, but, I managed to build the parser.
Where I am currently stuck is hooking the parser up with my Redis class to ensure all runs well, but, like we say in pidgin God go run am. I made a decision to rebuild popular dev tools from the ground up to understand their inner workings and so far so good that has been so awesome!
Oh my God! Segun Adebayo is the bomb!
Moving on! I was doing a random research to find devtools builders in Nigeria and of course, we know Kelvin Omereshone (Lead maintainer of Sail.js)!
I have always been a huge fan of Kelvin and Segun Adebayo for the longest of times, but, then I thought to read up on Segun and I saw like so many things about how he started out being a designer to eventually seeing skill issues from frontend developers he worked with to the popular CSS-in-JS solution called ChakraUI that all we all know and love today. The mind-blowing part for me was that he launched it in Nigeria bro! Yes that same country where we currently have a grid outage and that still also has a few unicorn companies.
I was so motivated! Then he mentioned the things that set in with leading a popular OSS (Open source) project and that just made me remember my days at Million.js, because he was so spot on! He also did talk about a book that he read to handle things and ASAPUU I went to beg my helpers to order it for me on Amazon.
You can read about him and his awesomeness here. I love seeing Nigerians doing well globally, it makes me feel so motivated; I also learned that he was a Unilag student like me!
Then I moved on to learn a few things about Yellow fever; it’s causes and symptoms. Just to be sure I was safe of course. I digress, but, na my newsletter sha.
Ethan steadily making my skill issues rise up
Ethan is someone that I have known for about 2 years now! And in that time, he always makes me feel like I do not know anything, which may or may not be true. For those of you who may not know him, he was part of the team that built Nextmaster (the famed Next.js clone of the Macmaster Carr website) and he is an Effect and Typescript legend.
He made a video last week showing how React Fiber worked in React 18 (with React’s concurrency model) and why it is the way it is and it was such an eye-opener cos wtf?!! I thought I knew Concurrency, but, only after watching the video I knew the difference between Concurrency and Parallelism (look it up, it’s a real thing).
That’s right, he also uses Theo’s studio for his videos!
I did this mad (maybe not so mad sha) deep-dive with Josh Comeau to read about Why React Re-Renders. It was a really cool blog post where he took the readers on a journey of debunking misconceptions, talking about how easy it is to make an impure component in React, debunking the prop-causing-rerenders misconception and so many other things. Give it a read. If you are a mid to senior React developer you may already know these things.
Behind-the-scenes type shii
Me and few friends have been building some really cool projects and we’ll be open-sourcing them to the public really soon! One of them is cutting-edge leveraging Web3 for a popularly known Web2 use-case and the other is us flexing our animation skills.
I can’t wait to share them all with y’all for real so you can create as many Github issues as you want.
On the side, I have something with Google cooking in the kitchen and shout out to Samuel Bassey as we will be working on it together.
Giveaway time?!
This challenge is like no other. I will be giving away 30 USD (in Naira of course) to anyone who can design the newsletter header for “Buildaloba with Tobiloba“. Buildaloba is a newsletter of the people, by me and for the people.
Email your submissions to me at: “adedejitobiloba7@gmail.com“.
P.S: From the next publications, I’ll start curating OSS projects, conference talks, and movie recommendations.