I hope you have been well.

May has been a crazy month for me — lots of personal and family related struggles. Thankfully, most of these issues are now resolved and I think I can get back to work once again. (I hope).

Articles

In early May, I wrote an article about Table Accessibility in 2024. But I didn’t get a chance to release it. Here it is.

To keep things short, you might be able to use CSS Grid with Tables without ruining accessibility soon. The only culprit that prevents us from doing this is… Safari.

In the meantime, we have to depend on aria roles. But writing them can be a hassle. This is why I created a Table component to help. (More on this later).

Astro Recipes

In my Stripe and Astro article, I announced that I’ll be working on Astro recipes. (Think mini-courses, small and specific).

I’m glad to let you know that the Stripe + Astro recipe is now available in Magical Dev School. I’ve also added a Svelte variant if you wanna improve what we’ve built with Svelte!

Along with this, I included other recipes — about Astro basics, JavaScript, etc. These are in various stages of WIP right now.

I’ve pretty much completed the Astro and JavaScript recipe at this point. This will show you the basics for using both Vanilla JavaScript and frameworks with Astro.

I hope these make your subscription to Magical Dev School more interesting and valuable for you!

If you have something you wish that I would cover, let me know and I’ll see what I can do about it!

Splendid Labz

You may know that I’ve been working on a suite of tools for web development — for layouts, styles, Astro Components, Svelte Components, etc. that will play incredibly well on Astro.

This month, I’ve created a Table component after completing my Table Accessibility research.

This Table component does the following:

1. Lets you use familiar table elements like table, tr, th, and to.
2. Creates appropriate aria roles depending on the element you used.

These combined makes it easy for you to use CSS Grid with Tables without ruining accessibility! (I’ve also included default table styles (with CSS Grid and Subgrid) so you can style tables easily).

To top it off, I also added fancy bits to help you align certain columns to the center or right — no need to manually create css with nth-child selectors yourself!

When is this ready?

I’m honestly not sure. 2 months would be a reasonable bet because there’s quite a bit of work before I can release the whole Splendid Labz suite.

I hope to get it out as soon as I can. But I don’t want to rush and produce subpar work. So fingers crossed!

The work includes:

• Building a full Stripe integration with accounts, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations etc.
• Creating the authentication system with Astro DB and an auth solution.
• Designing and building the Splendid Labz website
• Writing docs for each of these components…

Although this is a lot of work, I’m still really excited to share the Splendid Labz suite with you — this has already changed the way I build websites and applications. (So much faster, so much more efficient, so much joy in using the components).

I think it will change the way you do it too. Can't wait to put this in your hands.

Word of thanks

Today I realized that many people have subscribed to Magical Dev School for over a year.

If you’re one of these people (or soon to be), I want to thank you for supporting Magical Dev School and/or purchasing the courses and workshops I’ve created.

Your support has been invaluable — it has allowed me to keep going despite the difficulties I’ve been facing in both my professional and personal life.

I sincerely hope Magical Dev School has been living up to (and beyond) your expectations. If not, please let me know and I’ll do my best to improve.

Thank you once again.