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Sounds about right down here in Texas 😓

Jenn suggested I do some color studies from the master, Ken Sugimori. Here's a lil Diglett study from the original Pokémon art!

I received notice from Vercel, the host of this very website, that Node 14 and 16 were being deprecated. This very website was developed with a local version of Node 12! 😱

I didn't anticipate any breaking changes with Node, I'm not using edge case functions here for this website, but I wanted to do my due diligence for Vercel.

What started as a harmless updated nearly ended in a nightmare for me. Come along as I regale the tale of NVM, Next 13, and npm package versions!

NVM

Node Version Manager is exactly that — a utility for loading multiple versions of Node on your machine and switching between them. I'm already using multiple versions of Python, so I decided it was time to give NVM a whirl.

Installation was pretty straight forward following Digital Ocean's guide.

So the switch is made: Node 12 updated to version 18.

NPM

On to testing my site locally with npm run dev. Doing so alerted me to a few conflicting dependencies, which was a surprise. Seems nvm also manages npm versions as well, which is great! This new version was catching potential issues in my packages. The conflict was mainly between react testing library and react.

Easy enough, I adjusted the version numbers and ran npm i

Next Version 13

Suddenly, surprise!! My starter project that this is based on left this in the package.json:

  "dependencies": {
      "next": "latest",
   },

I've never seen that before, and with good reason. Latest will upgrade the major version when available, bringing breaking changes along with it! Suddenly, my Next <Image /> elements weren't sizing correctly, and my <Link /> tags were deprecated.

All fine and well if this were a production site I had ample time to maintain. But, that, this is not.

Long story short — a dive into trying to upgrade to version 13 ultimately ended with me setting my next version to "^12.0.0" for simplicity's sake.

Deployed Build

Surprisingly, I only ran into this issue locally. It lead me to wonder why I wasn't seeing the same errors from Next 13 on the live site.

I thought that it might be because the Next version is set through the CLI or on Vercel, but neither are true.

It seems that it's likely actually dependent on the node version. Here's Vercel's upgrading guide on the matter:

The minimum Node.js version has been bumped from 12.22.0 to 14.18.0, since 12.x has reached end-of-life.

The minimum React version has been bumped from 17.0.2 to 18.2.0.

I'm just shy on both of those, so I imagine there were some checks that fell back to a previous version of Next in those cases.

Moral of the story: beware of "Latest" versions in your package.json files!

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Ah yes, the ol' "Piano Playin', Chocolate Eater Blues."

Yes.

I've written about the infamous 250 box challenge over at Drawabox. I've admittedly started and forfeited the challenge a couple of times. I resisted the 50% rule at my own peril.

And I'm here to say I'm so glad I went back in and saw it to completion.

The challenge is outlined on their site, but for anyone unfamiliar, the gist is to draw boxes. In three point perspective. In ink. And extend your edges to their vanishing points.

It's a bit gnarly, which is why Uncomfortable and the community around the site are very adamant about the 50% percent rule. Even if you don't learn any technique, I think the 50% rule of balancing study with play is a fantastic lesson to carry into any practice, art or otherwise.

It's tempting to assume the reward of completing it is simply to really nail boxes. But here's what all you learn along the way:

• Improved line quality
• Comfort with failure
• Intuitive perspective
• Spacial reasoning
• Balancing play with study
• Persistence for a craft that's not easy to pick up

Best yet, these all culminate in the following lessons on drawing bugs and animals. Those lessons are where things really started to click for me as far as seeing every drawing as a combination of shapes that can be manipulated in 3D space. Even if the ultimate goal is a flat, 2D image, an understanding of 3D underneath all that makes it all the easier to play with those shapes.

I've looked at a few different avenues for getting started with drawing: Proko, Andrew Loomis, Preston Blair. I'd say, though, drawabox is where I'd recommend someone brand new start out. The material can be dense, but uncomfortable does an amazing job of starting right away with the meat of what you really need to invent with your drawings.

At this point, I'm up to the cylinder challenge, getting ready to start lesson 6 — Drawing Everyday objects. I think most folks will get the most mileage out of completing up to about where I am, but I'm excited to see how this last leg of the course builds.