Hey hey hey,

Mads here again with the Top 3 in Tech newsletter. I unfortunately missed last week because I was sick with the Covid (right before Christmas, go figure...), but here's the last issue of the newsletter for the year. Thanks for following along, and I'll see you all again in 2022. Happy new year!

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1. Writing for developers

As developers, a lot of the work we do is actually communicating. Our job is to understand and solve problems, and we can only do that if we communicate effectively with clients, users, stakeholders etc. And since writing makes you a better communicator, practicing writing will make you better at your job.

You'll also need to be a good communicator to even land a job (or other opportunities like freelancing) in the first place. Unless you're the best developer in the world, you need to convince someone to hire you. And you do that through selling yourself (which is also communicating).

There's also just a lot of similarities between the writing and development process. If you think about it, developing on a project / feature generally has the same flow as writing an article. Let me explain:

​Firstly, you plan and outline what you're actually going to work on. Kinda like the skeleton of your project / writing piece. You choose the tech / topic to work with, and jot down some initial thoughts. Just headlines and bullet points.

Then, you move to the production phase. This is where you just code (or write) to get everything working. It doesn't need to be perfect, and it doesn't need to be pretty. You just need to produce *something* based on your outline. Get to a working state.

The next step is the cleanup. This is where you refactor and improve your code readability, just like how you edit a piece of writing. You remove the fluff and polish the result to make sure everything is clear and does what it's supposed to.

And then you ship it. It's easy to get stuck in permanent feature creep or editing, but that's not how you produce the best results (or improve your own skills). You ship what you have and then iterate from there. Let the feedback from others guide you to improve the result.

Especially if you're new to coding, I think practicing this process through writing is an incredible exercise - and will directly affect how you approach coding problems too. AND you get to improve the essential communication skills all devs need. Sounds like a win/win to me!

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2. State of CSS 2021

Every year, we get treated to the "State of CSS" survey results - and this year is no different! It's a really interesting and cool insight into the trends, features and frameworks around CSS. The survey results also show the changes between the last 2 years, so you get a really good feel for where the CSS technology market is moving (like which frameworks are most popular and has the highest developer satisfaction etc.)

I definitely recommend checking it out if you're doing any sort of web development. You might just learn a thing or two, or discover awesome frameworks or tools you didn't know existed!

​Check out the 2021 State of CSS survey results​

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3. 10 Trending GitHub projects for web devs

The final pick for this week (and the year actually!) is a cool article series. Every week, Iain Freestone posts a list of 10 trending projects on GitHub for web developers, and there's always some really nice projects on the list.

​You can find the list for this week here, but feel free to look through the older articles as well. Lot's of amazing tools and knowledge there to inspire and help you build cool stuff!

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That's it for this year! See you in 2022 - and I would really appreciate if you would share the newsletter with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, by email or copy/paste the link mads.fyi/top3 on other platforms. It really helps to keep me motivated and let the newsletter grow. See you next week ✌

Mads Brodt