WDRL — Edition 248: Performance, Building Color Palettes, JIT-Design, XSSStrike, And Maker to Manager.

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Hey,

Plans are plans but sometimes reality has something different for us. I hadn’t planned to skip two weeks but after an exhausting week followed a week of sickness.

What does career change mean? Is it about climbing up a ladder, is it changing the purpose of your work? There’s a common misconception in many companies. When, for example, developers get promoted they at some point become a manager. But this is not climbing up the job ladder, instead it’s a completely different job that requires different skills and motivation. It’s why so many people get upset with their own jobs, with their developers, or vice versa with their manager. It would be much better if you give people the opportunity to change the job if they want to be a manager and then help them learn the different skillset. But most importantly, as nearly everywhere such promotions are related with a salary raise it is important to let people stay in their area of work (e.g. development) while giving them a raise. There’s little use to pay people who aren’t comfortable in their position more than people who are. Let your employees decide what they wanna be — independent of salaries. And as an employee we should make job decisions not based on money but based on where we can add most value with our work and feel comfortable with.

News

• From now on PageSpeed Insights, likely still the most used performance analysis tool by Google is now powered by project Lighthouse which many of you have already used additionally. A nice iteration of their tool that makes it way more accurate than before.

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• Explore structured learning paths to discover everything you need to know about building for the modern web. web.dev is the new resource by the Google Web team for developers.

UI/UX

• How do you build a color palette? Steve Schoger from RefactoringUI has a great attempt for this that matches reality.
• Matthew Ström’s article Just-in-time Design mentions a nice solution to minimize the disconnection between product design and product engineering. It’s about adopting the Just-in-time method for design. Something that my current team was very excited about and I’m happy to try this out.

Security

• This neat Python tool is a great XSS detection utility.

Web Performance

• Addy Osmani shares a performance case study by Netflix to improve Time-to-Interactive on the well known movie on demand streaming service. This includes switching from React and other libraries to plain JavaScript, prefetching HTML, CSS and (React) JavaScript and the usage of React.js on the server side. Quite interesting to see so many unconventional approaches in one post and the benefits of this. But surely this is only another one of these “what works for us doesn’t need to be the perfect approach for you” articles so take it more as an inspiration than blindly copying to your own project.
• Harry Roberts explains all the details that are important to know about CSS and Network Performance. Yes, many of these facts are widely and long known but this is not only a comprehensive collection of all of them but also has some very interesting newer tips later in the article, especially when you have async scripts as well in your code.
• I love the tiny ImageOptim app for batch optimizing my images for web distribution. But now there’s an impressive Web App called “Squoosh” that lets you optimize images perfectly in your web browser. It’s made by the Google Chrome team and as a bonus you can also resize the image and choose which compression to use, including mozJPEG and WebP.

CSS

• Oliver Schöndorfer shows how we can serve a Variable Font to modern browsers while others get a fallback web font. This is especially interesting as Oliver goes deep into optimizing the fallback font and adjusting it via CSS in order to match the variable font as closely as possible in case a font swap happens during page load.
• Andy Clarke shows what’s needed to redesign a product and website to support bright and dark modes that lately were introduced to several Operating Systems and will soon be supported via Media Queries by various browsers.
• While background-clip is not super new, until now it has been very useful due to the lack of browser support. But nowadays, as Sime Vidas shows, CSS Background Clip is widely supported and gives us great opportunities to enhance the text styling on our websites.

Work & Life

• Marcus Wermuth reflects on why Becoming a manager is not a promotion but a career change.

—Anselm