We're excited to announce our first-ever code bootcamp! It's a FREE 12-week program in person at Sacramento, California & remote in our Discord. In this bootcamp, we'll be teaching the basics of Web Development: HTML, CSS, JS, & React. Sign up on our site: playfulprogramming.com/events/sacra...

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-...

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

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.

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!

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

📝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.

📝 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.

📚 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!

📚 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!

📚 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

📚 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!

📚 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!

📝 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.

✍️ 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!

📝 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.

🌐 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!

📚 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!

📝 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.

📚 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!

📚 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!

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!

📅 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:

📚 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!

📚 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!

📣 New article — Git: Into the Weeds! The second chapter of our Git series focuses on conflicts, cherry-picking, and submodules!

📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚 In our book club we hang out and talk about an article; however, this week, we're discussing the original proposal for first-class support for Promises in React! Join our Discord and meet us on Thursday, May 29th at 4:30 PST!

ICYMI: We've been releasing chapters of our newest collection, The Art of Accessibility! This collections plans to cover all you need to know about accessibility concerns, from starting concepts to actual paradigms and technologies used to provide more usable products for everyone.

📚 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, May 22nd at 4:30 PST!

📚 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 "JSX Over The Wire"! Join our Discord and meet us on Thursday, May 14 at 4:30 PST!

✏️ The Art of Accessibility has a new chapter out! Labels is all about how we bind identifiable names to forms and inputs to help users navigate our screens with accessibility tools!

📚 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 "Impossible Components"! Join our Discord and meet us on Thursday, May 8 at 4:30 PST!

🌐 Introducing: The Art of Accessibility! Our brand-new book teaches you everything to do with accessibility! With a vast array of technologies and methods of providing valuable experiences to all users, it's easier than ever to design better, more inclusive products.

📚 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 "React for Two Computers"! Join our Discord and meet us on Thu at 4:30 PST!

🎉 Meet our new collection! With "Git: A Guide to Greatness", you'll learn everything there is to know about Git, the ubiquotous version control system for software development. The first chapter is out, and the next will closely follow. 👇

📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚 In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — but this week, we're changing it up! We'll talk about an article and a video! Both are about MCP, or Model Context Protocol. Join our Discord and meet us on Thu at 4:30 PST! Links are below!

Today we're announcing a partnership with Hacker Relay! Hacker Relay is a software engineering jobs platform designed to find high-quality jobs and connect candidates with the positions that fit them the most.

📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚 In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing our latest post, "Scale Your Project with Layered React Structure"! Join our Discord and meet us on Thu at 4:30 PST!

📣 New article! 📝 Unlike some other frameworks like Angular, React doesn’t provide a styleguide that helps you structure and future proof your project. Our new article helps you achieve a better codebase with Layered React Structure — LRS, for short!

📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚 In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Sam Rose's "Turing Machines"! Join our Discord and meet us on Thu at 4:30 PST!

Ever wanted to get into frontend development, or simply level up your designer skills by knowing how your designs are implemented on the web? Our free 10-part series called Web Fundamentals shows you just that!

📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚 In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Minko Gechev's "Developing Statically Typed Programming Language"! Join our Discord and meet us on Thu at 4:30 PST!

IIFEs or Immediately Invoked Function Expressions, once a JavaScript staple, allowed developers to create private scopes before let, const, and modules. Are they still relevant today?

📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚 In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing "A Brief Manifesto", the blog post by Signalium!

📚 No, really, what is a monad? 📚 That's what we're discussing in our next book club! This week's topic is Ryan Marcus' article of the same name. Join us in our Discord, every Thursday, at 4:30 PST!

📝 New blog post! In our newest article we discuss HOLEY and PACKED arrays and how the former are much worse for optimization.

📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚 In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Lin Clark's "ES modules: A cartoon deep-dive" for the Mozilla blog! Join our Discord and meet us Thursday, March 13th at 4:30 PST!

✍️ New article: Why Can't Angular Cast An Element to Another? If you've worked with some of the biggest frameworks, you may be familiar with the pattern of type casting an element into another. This is supported in both React and Vue.

📚 Join our book club this Thursday! 📚 In our book club we hang out and talk about an article — this week, we're discussing Cat On Mat's "Bash One-Liners Explained, Part III: All About Redirections!" Join our Discord and meet us on Thurs, March 6, at 4:30 PST!

🎉 ColdFusion 2025 is here, and it comes with a massive suite of improvements to several of its features. Now it's the best time to set up your own local environment to learn and take advantage of everything that's new. Let's go through how you can do that using Docker!