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Hello 👋🏻.

Welcome to my "Week in Review" series. Many of us edit images for their next social media post, YouTube video, or article. It can be a frustrating process when it comes to removing backgrounds from images. A team from Vienna made this a lot easier for us and I will show you how.

Please, share your thoughts with me in the comments below or on Twitter.

Remove any background with a few clicks

Thanks to Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and other photo editing apps it has become easier to remove backgrounds without much effort. But what if there's a tool that can do this within your browser, without installing an app? Luckily for us, there is one: remove.bg.

It is super easy to remove backgrounds now. Visit the site, upload the picture you want to edit, and wait a few seconds. You will see the result instantly on your screen and can further customize the output. If you are happy with the image, click download and you are good to go. Fantastic, isn't it? Let me show you an example:

📗 Books

I should allocate more time to read and finish "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us". I still have 20% of the book in front of me. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These are the three main areas of motivation 3.0 in Daniel H. Pink's point of view. It makes a lot of sense to me when I read those chapters. The old "if-then" motivation model (e.g. you do this and I'll pay you) does not work in all areas of our modern work environment. People need other types of motivation, and that is the main topic of the book. I can relate to the examples he mentions and describes.

What are you currently reading?

⛓ Links of the Week

• Have you ever thought twice when copy and pasting shell commands from the web into your terminal? No? You better should!
• "The key prop is a mechanism for controlling component instances." says Kent C. Dodds in his article about React's key property. The key property can be very helpful and you should know what it is capable of.
• Maintaining a unified styling (font-sizes, colors, spacings, ...) across multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Web, ...) can be a time-consuming task. In the common scenario, you have a theme file in each one of them. What happens when the CI guideline changes and one color has to change? You'll need to open every project, find the color, and replace it. This is the time when it makes sense to think about implementing Design Tokens.
  • Create a Design Token documentation with the Storybook Design Token addon
  • or use Amazon's "style once, use everywhere" Style Dictionary solution, which I want to try soon.
• Boost your rendering performance with content-visibility.
• Have you created your own product and do not know how to promote it? Both Marketing for Engineers and Awesome Visibility curated an extensive list of resources to get started.
• Do not copy and paste the information you gather from the web par for par into your knowledge database. Or as Zettelkasten puts it "Stop Relying on a Source and Have Faith in Your own Thoughts". In their article, they made me aware of the Collector's Fallacy too. How do you preserve insights, solutions, and other pieces of information? How does your knowledge system look like? If you want to read more about this topic, take a look at the Zettelkasten overview.
• Speaking of preserving knowledge, this is the "Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books: How to Distill Ideas to Accelerate Your Learning"
• I am a huge CodeSandbox fan when it comes to presenting solutions or playing with packages for JavaScript apps. In the last week, I started to use and try two other tools as well: webcomponents.dev and StackBlitz. What's your favorite one?
• Raf explains how to manage Docker containers with Portainer and manage public access with the Traefik reverse proxy in his latest article.
• Create simple yet easy to maintain animations in React with React Transition Group.
• Last but not least, if you ever need to mock window.localStorage or window.sessionStorage in your Jest tests, use jest-localstorage-mock.

🐦 Tweets of the Week

Bye, bye, 42/2020.

See you next week - thank you. 👋🏻

Stefan

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