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One-Offs
2.7.2018
There is this sentiment that you don't design the homepage of a site first. For most sites, it's an anomaly. It's unlike any other page and not something to base the patterns you use for the rest of the site or help inform other pages.
You might call it a one-off.1
One-offs are OK! A world without...
Fitting Text to a Container
29.6.2018
There are a number of ways to go about putting some text in a container and having it size itself to fill that container. There are different technologies we can use and different considerations to think about. Let us count the ways.
Magic Number it with viewport units
If you set type with...
Vue + TypeScript: A Match Made in Your Code Editor
27.6.2018
Vue is so hot right now and I’ve been thinking of doing a serious project with it since quite a while, so when the opportunity popped up, I hopped in. But there was a little problem — one of the requirements of the project was to write it in TypeScript. At first, I was super stressed about...
Debugging Node Code in VS Code
25.6.2018
Visual Studio Code has an amazing amount of functionality built in, including support for debugging applications. Although the functionality is there, it took me several tries to figure out how to
Debugging Node Code in VS Code
25.6.2018
Visual Studio Code has an amazing amount of functionality built in, including support for debugging applications. Although the functionality is there, it took me several tries to figure out how to
Animate Calligraphy with SVG
22.6.2018
From time to time at Stackoverflow, the question pops up whether there is an equivalent to the stroke-dashoffset technique for animating the SVG stroke that works for the fill attribute. But upon closer inspection, what the questions are really trying to ask is something like this:
I have something...
Advanced Document Conversions with Filestack
22.6.2018
You might know Filestack from being an incredible service to add file uploading, storage, and management to your own web apps.
There is another thing Filestack can do for you: convert documents into different formats.
For one thing, it can manipulate documents. Take images. Perhaps you would...
An Almost Ideal React Image Component
21.6.2018
Yes, this is a React component, but regardless if you care about that part or not, the "ideal image component" part could be of interest. There is a lot to consider with how we put images on web pages these days. This deals with:
Placeholder space (and then flexible responsive styles after...
UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?
20.6.2018
A good candidate for the Blog Post of the Year from Zach Holman. I think Eric Portis' "w descriptors and sizes: Under the hood" is up there too, but perhaps even nerdier. Ooooh, also Frank Chimero's "The Good Room" is up there. But I digress.
Zach's article is as educational as it is funny.
But...
Building a Fancy Countdown Timer with MomentumSlider.js
20.6.2018
Nowadays there are many Javascript libraries to make it easy the task of adding sliders to a website. Most have a host of features, to adapt the slider to the particular needs of each case. However
Centering: The Newest Coolest Way vs. The Oldest Coolest Way
20.6.2018
This isn't a comprehensive guide to centering things. We have that!
This is just a little observation about old and new. One of the trickier things related to centering in CSS is when you need to center both vertically and horizontally and you don't know the width or height of what you...
Don’t just copy the @font-face out of Google Fonts URLs
19.6.2018
I don't think this is an epidemic or anything, but I've seen it done a few times and even advocated for. This is what I mean...
You go to Google Fonts and pick a font like Open Sans, and it gives you either a <link> or an @import with a URL there in which to ready this font for usage...
Here’s the thing about “unused CSS” tools
18.6.2018
There are a lot of tools that aim to help you remove "unused CSS" from your project. Never a week goes by that I don't see a tool for this being shared or promoted. It must strike some kind of perfect chord for some developers. I care about performance, and I know that reducing file sizes is good...
Show FPS for Steam Games
18.6.2018
There’s nothing more frustrating to a top gamer (outside of bugs in a game) than dropped frames in a video game. If you’re playing a competitive multiplayer game like PUBG or Fortnite, where up to 100 people are simultaneously competing, dropped frames can be the difference between...
The Next Scotch v8: How We're Getting to 1s Load Times
13.6.2018
You might be wondering, "are they redesigning again?!" Whenever I'm asked that, my answer is always a resounding "OF COURSE!"
Sure the Scotch site is currently good enough, but there's alway
Understanding the Almighty Reducer
13.6.2018
I was reently mentoring someone who had trouble with the .reduce() method in JavaScript. Namely, how you get from this:
const nums = [1, 2, 3]
let value = 0
for (let i = 0; i < nums.length; i++) {
value += nums[i]
}
...to this:
const nums = [1, 2, 3]
const value = nums.reduce((ac, next)...
Creating a VS Code Theme
8.6.2018
Everyone has special and perhaps, particular, tastes when it comes to their code editor. There are literally thousands of themes out there, and for good reason: a thing of beauty and enhancement to productivity for one can be a hindrance to another.
It’s been an item on my bucket list to create...
Learning Gutenberg: React 101
23.5.2018
Although Gutenberg is put together with React, the code we’re writing to make custom blocks isn’t. It certainly resembles a React component though, so I think it’s useful to have a little play to get familiar with this sort of approach. There’s been a lot of reading in this series so far, so let’s...
Just a Couple’a Fun Typography Links
22.5.2018
Marcin Wichary made an incredible demo exploring "segmented type" as in, the kind you might see on a display like a microwave, but scaling up in complexity from there.
"Datalegreya is a typeface which can interweave data curves with text."
Airbnb commissions their own new font, Cereal (complete...
Dark theme in a day
21.5.2018
Marcin Wichary has written a great piece that dives into how he used CSS Variables to create a night mode and high contrast theme in an app. There’s so many neat tricks about how to use CSS Variables (Chris has also looked at theming) as well as how to organize them (Andras Galante has...