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The New Good Ol’ Days
22.11.2019
Eighteen years into this game, I love to reminisce back to the good ol’ days of the early to mid-2000s when there was an explosion of creativity on the web. It felt fresh and unbridled, with boundaries expected to be pushed at every turn, and they were. This was mainly down to one thing, the thing...
Growing Accessibility Conversations
22.11.2019
I started this year on a new path at Knowbility — to help people and organizations create accessible content and apps. But what was exciting and helped motivate me more were two things:
WebAIM's Accessibility Analysis of One Million Page Homepages. With over 97% of sites having WCAG failure...
Everything and Nothing
22.11.2019
I've been thinking about the question for a solid month now. What about building websites has you interested this year? The question pervaded my solitary thoughts and played in the background during my conversations. I’d love to just tell you the answer I’ve come to, but the more interesting part...
Highlights from Chrome Dev Summit 2019
22.11.2019
Ire Aderinokun has made another round-up summary of some things that piqued her attention during this year’s Chrome Dev Summit and there’s a lot of exciting news! There’s the :is selector (which Geoff wrote about a while back) as well as logical properties, updates to standard form elements,...
Smarter Design Systems Tools
22.11.2019
What has me really excited about building websites is largely around design systems and the design tools we use to build them. Though, design systems are certainly not limited to websites.
Closing the Gap
In the ever-so-hot-right-now world of design systems, one of the most common phrases people...
Weekly Platform News: Contrast Ratio Range, replaceAll Method, Native File System API
22.11.2019
In this week's roundup: Firefox's new contrast checker, a simpler way to lasso substrings in a string, and a new experimental API that will let apps fiddle with a user's local files.
Firefox shows the contrast ratio range for text on a multicolored background
According to Success Criterion 1.4.3...
How Building in the Open Can Change Our Industry
21.11.2019
I have to admit, I'm a developer who hasn't built a website. When I first read Chris's question, I sat in silence for at least a minute. Which technical topic did I want to discuss? A new library, programming language or best practice? Nothing, in particular, came to mind. Is that because I'm a...
Embrace the Political
21.11.2019
The tech industry has long held the belief that technology is apolitical. People are flawed, but the machines? They are neutral. They are pure.
This is ridiculous, of course. People make the machines. We write the algorithms that can't recognize dark skin tones. We decide to downplay or ignore...
What the web still is
21.11.2019
Being a pessimist is an easy thing to fall back on, and I’m trying to be better about it. As we close the year out, I thought it would be a good exercise to take stock of the state of the web and count our blessings.
Versatile
We don't use the internet to do just one thing. With more than...
Emcee Tips for a Conference or Meetup
21.11.2019
There are some great resources out there to help conference speakers give better talks, but fewer for people who are preparing to take on the role of emcee at meetup or conference.
I've been fortunate enough to emcee conferences more than 20 times now, most recently JAMstack_conf which I help...
Create Amazingly Stable Tests Your Way — Coded and Code-Less
21.11.2019
Testim’s end-to-end test automation delivers the speed and stability of AI-based codeless tests, with the power of code. You get the flexibility to record or code tests, run on third-party grids, fit your workflow and tools including CI, Git and more. Join the Dev Kit beta to start writing stable...
Embracing the Universal Web
21.11.2019
There are constantly new features appearing in browsers—from subgrid to variable fonts to better developer tools. It's a really great time to be re-thinking everything we know about design on the web. Responsive design has served us well over the years, but it's still rooted in the limitations...
It’s my job, and yours.
21.11.2019
The role of ethics in our modern web space has been on my mind for the past few years and I suspect it will occupy my thoughts increasingly as I move forward. With each encounter of a questionable feature or setting on a website, I can't help but think of all of the people involved and...
The future is bright, because the future is static
20.11.2019
I've been doing this web thing for money for 10 years this year and although I haven’t been around as long as some folks, I feel like I've seen a few cycles come and go now, so let's say that hot new things are often cynically viewed, initially. This milestone of mine has also got me in...
The Typed Object Model
20.11.2019
I help write technical documentation and one feature I've been writing about this year that has really stood out is the Typed Object Model (or Typed OM). If you haven't come across it yet you would be forgiven as it's pretty new. It falls under the CSS Houdini suite of API's and on the surface...
Techniques for a Newspaper Layout with CSS Grid and Border Lines Between Elements
20.11.2019
I recently had to craft a newspaper-like design that featured multiple row and column spans with divider lines in between them. Take a look at the mockup graphic here and see if it makes you sweat at all. If you’re like me, you have been around a while and know just how difficult this would have...
Variations on Theme: Reinventing Type on the Web
20.11.2019
If anyone knows anything about me, it’s usually one of two things: that I have two outrageously fluffy dogs, or that I like fonts and typography. Like, really really like them. So while I am super excited about how well Tristan is doing with his hydrotherapy —we’re walking 50% further than he...
Build your own React
20.11.2019
Wowza! Rodrigo Pombo’s article about how to build React from scratch is fantastic, not only because it’s well written, but because of the outstanding interaction design: each line in the code examples ge highlighted and explored in further detail as you scroll down the page.
This makes it super...
No, Absolutely Not
19.11.2019
I think the difference between a junior and senior front-end developer isn't in their understanding or familiarity with a particular tech stack, toolchain, or whether they can write flawless code. Instead, it all comes down to this: how they push back against bad ideas.
What I've learned this year...
JAMstack, Fugu, and Houdini
19.11.2019
What has me really excited about building websites recently is the fact that we, as front-end developers, have the power to do so much more. Only a few years ago, I would need a whole team of developers to accomplish what can now be done with just a few amazing tools.
Although...