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Your Body Text is Too Small
21.7.2018
Several years ago, there was a big push by designers to increase the font-size of websites and I feel like we’re living in another era of accessibility improvements where a fresh batch of designers are pushing for even larger text sizing today. Take this post by Christian Miller, for example, where...
Font Playground
20.7.2018
This is a wondrous little project by Wenting Zhang that showcases a series of variable fonts and lets you manipulate their settings to see the results. It’s interesting that there’s so many tools like this that have been released over the past couple of months, such as v-fonts, Axis-Praxis...
Building “Renderless” Vue Components
20.7.2018
There's this popular analogy of Vue that goes like this: Vue is what you get when React and Angular come together and make a baby. I've always shared this feeling. With Vue’s small learning curve, it's no wonder so many people love it. Since Vue tries to give the developer power over components...
What bit of advice would you share with someone new to your field?
18.7.2018
The most FA of all the FAQs.
Here's Laura Kalbag:
Find what you love. Don’t worry about needing to learn every language, technique or tool. Start with what interests you, and carve your own niche. And then use your powers for good!
And my own:
Buy a domain name. Figure out how to put an HTML file...
PSA: Yes, Serverless Still Involves Servers.
16.7.2018
You clever dog. You've rooted it out! It turns out when you build things with serverless technology you're still using servers. Pardon the patronizing tone there, I've seen one-too-many hot takes at this point where someone points this fact out and trots away triumphantly.
And yes, because...
Design Systems at GitHub
12.7.2018
Here’s a nifty post by Diana Mounter all about the design systems team at GitHub that details how the team was formed, the problems they've faced and how they've adapted along the way:
When I started working at GitHub in late 2015, I noticed that there were many undocumented patterns, I had...
Emojis as Icons
11.7.2018
There are lots of unicode symbols that make pretty good icons already, like arrows (←), marks (✘), and objects (✂︎).You can already colorize these like a normal font glyph. Then, there are emojis, those full-color suckers we all know about. What if you could take just the shape of an emoji...
Build and Understand a Simple Node.js Website with User Authentication
10.7.2018
Building websites with user authentication and management (login, registration, password reset, etc.), can be a huge pain. As a developer there are a million little things you need to worry about:
Building Text-to-Speech Apps for the Web
9.7.2018
Having interacted with several apps over the years, there is a very high chance that you have interacted with apps that provide some form of voice experience. It could be an app with text-to-speech
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...