Jamie Wright

A web development book earns its place only if it survives contact with the current platform and changes what you actually write on Monday.

Nobody forgets their worst manager. You can probably name yours right now. You can probably still recite, with unsettling precision, the exact thing they did that made you close your laptop and stare at the wall.

So you've been living in Zed for a few weeks, the honeymoon speed rush has settled, and you're ready for the features that don't announce themselves.

Not an AI system. Not a project management platform. Not a custom-built operations tool.

The leadership shelf is the worst shelf in Waterstones. Most of what's on it is one decent idea stretched to 280 pages, wrapped in a cover with a lighthouse on it.

Zed is what happens when the same people who made Atom, rebuild the idea in Rust, rendering on the GPU, with performance as the founding principle.

Sublime Text should, by all the usual logic, be dead. It costs money in a market where the dominant player is free.

VS Code has absorbed so many former must-have extensions into the core product that most setup guides are recommending you install things it already does. The ultimate VS Code setup is a fast one, and fast means minimal.

Here's what I actually use it for on a Tuesday (because most of every Monday you're stuck in a meeting).

I spent years moving away from building things with my hands.

Not a website. Not an app. Not anything with a deployment pipeline or a sign-off chain. A beer.

The first project I fully managed without writing a single line of code was worth more than £250k.

How many places have you worked where someone's said this?

I put my metaphorical hand up. The useful thing about saying "I can do this better", even if, like me, it was only ever to yourself, is that it immediately changes your position. You're not complaining anymore.

Pinpointing speed bottlenecks is the first step you should be taking when trying to improve the performance of your website.

I’ve pulled together this list of extensions specifically to help you become a faster and more efficient web developer.

Snow effects get a bit of a bad rep on the Internet. Whilst some may think they’re a bit, well, tacky, there’s nothing that quite says Christmas like a few snowflakes drifting gently down the screen…