💎 Product Gems Weekly #2

Hi! Welcome to the second issue of the Design Meets Code newsletter! I'm building a new habit of summarizing my weekly discoveries and sharing them with you.

Before diving in, I wanted to share some things I'm working on that you might find interesting.

I'm using Beehiiv for sending these newsletters. While it's a great tool, I found it difficult to write directly in their editor since it doesn't fully support markdown. After trying maaaany note editors in my life, today I got an unconventional idea - why not use my code editor?!

I currently use Cursor, a fork of VSCode with great AI features. With its Pro version, I get unlimited access to Claude AI, currently the best performing LLM for code and text. It's refreshingly simple - pure markdown, great tooling, and familiar keyboard shortcuts from coding. For mobile access, One Markdown helps me sync and edit via iCloud.

Bluesky (a more decentralized alternative to X) was booming last week, and I kept coming back to experiment with posting there. It would be great if one day it becomes mainstream and we all have more control and ownership of our data.

This week I also started working stealth on a new product - an open source Next.js directory website template. It will be a very simple first version that I'll release open-source and for free. If it gets some attention, I'll likely design and build more features for a Pro version. Initially the plan was to build a landing page website builder, but after some experimentation it felt too challenging at this point. It feels much better starting simple as a code template. Let's see how that goes.

I hope to finish and release the free template next week! Keep an eye on my X and Bluesky.

Besides that, a regular freelance design work week awaits, where I'm currently working on a mobile app for football clubs, building a feature to guide fans about pre-match stadium events.

Now, here's what caught my eye this week:

My top picks of the week:

🥇 OpenAI launches SearchGPT and Google introduces Search Grounding, marking major advances in AI-powered search.

🥈 The web scraping game is changing with AI tools. Check out how to scrape 99% of websites with 3 different techniques.

🥉 Jonathan from AJ&Smart on Startup Ideas Podcast teaches how to build "funnels" (landing pages) and how they're often totally different from your website (spoiler: very sales focused and content heavy).

Development picks

💠 Learn about the concept of Boneless, skinless & lifeless UI and how it differs from headless UI.

💠 Meta open sources NotebookLlama as their version of NotebookLM from Google.

💠 Drizzle ORM that I use with Next.js and PostgreSQL now supports RLS (Row-Level-Security) which should make writing application-level authorization easier and more reliable.

💠 Learn SQL joins once and for all.

💠 Check out the new DOM components for Expo which makes building apps across web and mobile native easier.

Design picks

💠 Talented Design Engineer Emil Kowalski is launching animations.dev next week - a comprehensive course on web animations. Worth checking out if you want to level up your animation skills.

💠 Vytas shares his thoughts about Startups' timing with Design Systems being "[either too early or too late](https://x.com/VytasBu/status/1851543061811155439)" - good insight for product teams

💠 A new website design trend in Tech SaaS - minimal, text-heavy, monotype font landing pages. Check out the new Planet Scale website redesign.

💠 Edit pictures with AI directly in Figma with the new Unblocked AI Figma plugin.

💠 Create a stunning mesh color gradient in Figma with this mini tutorial.

💠 Check out this cool dissolve effect UI exit animation.

💠 An interesting idea: editing videos by editing Markdown?

Business picks

💠 I purchased a very practical SEO course from a fellow indie hacker I trust.

💠 ElevenLabs has created an app that generates a unique voice based on your X profile - test out how your X profile sounds!

💠 Use this smart searchEmail function directly in Google Sheets to find emails from any website.

💠 Soverin - an interesting directory of AI agents and other AI tools.

Quote of the week

That's it for this week!

Found something useful? Got cool stuff to share? I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line – your finds might make it into next week's issue.

If you know someone who'd like this too, feel free to pass it along!

Stay curious,
Edgaras