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Slide an Image to Reveal Text with CSS Animations
29.1.2019
I want to take a closer look at the CSS animation property and walk through an effect that I used on my own portfolio website: making text appear from behind a moving object. Here’s an isolated example if you’d like to see the final product.
Here’s what we're going to work with:
See the...
Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS
29.1.2019
David Heinemeier Hansson has written an interesting post about the current state of web design and how designers ought to be able to still work on the code side of things:
We build using server-side rendering, Turbolinks, and Stimulus. All tools that are approachable and realistic for designers...
The Slow and Steady Refactor
28.1.2019
Over the past week or so, I’ve been reading Refactoring by Martin Fowler and it’s all about how to make sweeping changes to a large codebase in a way that doesn’t cause everything to break. I bring this up because there’s a lot of really good notes in this book that have challenged my recent...
Table design patterns on the web
28.1.2019
Chen Hui Jing has tackled a ton of design patterns for tables that might come in handy when creating tables that are easy to read and responsive for the web:
There are a myriad of table design patterns out there, and which approach you pick depends heavily on the type of data you have and...
Need to Test API Endpoints? Two Quick Ways to Do It.
25.1.2019
Here's a possibility! Perhaps you are testing your JavaScript with a framework like Jasmine. That's nice because you can write lots of tests to cover your application, get a nice little UI to see the output, and even integrate it with build and deploy tools to make your ongoing development work...
Creating Your Own Gravity and Space Simulator
25.1.2019
Space is vast. Space is awesome. Space is difficult to understand — or so people tend to think. But in this tutorial I am going to show you that this is not the case. Quite the contrary; the laws that govern the motion of the stars, planets, asteroids and even entire galaxies are incredibly simple....
Putting the Flexbox Albatross to Real Use
24.1.2019
If you hadn't seen it, Heydon posted a rather clever flexbox layout pattern that, in a sense, mimics what you could do with a container query by forcing an element to stack at a certain container width. I was particularly interested, as I was fighting a little layout situation at the time I...
Using React and XState to Build a Sign In Form
24.1.2019
To make a sign in form with good UX requires UI state management, meaning we’d like to minimize the cognitive load to complete it and reduce the number of required user actions while making an intuitive experience. Think about it: even a relatively simple email and password sign in form needs...
Use monday.com to Boost Project Organization and Team Collaboration
24.1.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Front-end development relies on organization and solid communication. Whether you're part of a team that builds large-scale sites or you're flying solo with a handful of quality clients, there are many pieces and steps to get a project from start to finish. And that's...
Successful WordPress Freelancing
23.1.2019
Andy Adams released a book for aspiring WordPress freelancers. It's meant to take a lot of the guesswork and the roadblocks that many folks often hit when making the decision to fly solo and rely on WordPress development for a stable source of work and income.
Aside from being included in it (and...
React 16.6.0 Goodies
23.1.2019
React 16.6.0 was released October 2018 and with it came goodies that spice up the way we can develop with React. We’re going to cover what I consider the best of those new goodies with examples of how we can put them to use in our work.
React.memo() avoids unnecessary re-rendering
There...
Would You Watch a Documentary Walking Through Codebases?
22.1.2019
This resonated pretty strongly with people:
I’d watch a documentary series of developers giving a tour of their codebases.
— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) January 6, 2019
I think I was watching some random Netflix documentary and daydreaming that the subject was actually something I was super...
Netlify Makes Deployments a Cinch
22.1.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Let's say you were going to design the easiest way to deploy a static site you can possibly imagine. If I was tasked with that, I'd say, well, it would deploy whenever I push to my master branch, and I'd tell it what command to run to build my site. Or maybe it has...
The Secret Weapon to Learning CSS
22.1.2019
For some reason, I’ve lately been thinking a lot about what it takes to break into the web design industry and learn CSS. I reckon it has something to do with Keith Grant’s post earlier this month on a CSS mental model where he talks about a “common core for CSS”:
We need common core tricks like...
Who is @horse_js?
22.1.2019
Many of us follow @horse_js on Twitter. Twenty-one thousand of us, to be exact. That horse loves stirring up mischief by taking people's statements out of context. It happened to me a few times and almost got me in trouble.
I wonder how many people hate CSS because their experience with...
The Great Divide
21.1.2019
Let’s say there is a divide happening in front-end development. I feel it, but it's not just in my bones. Based on an awful lot of written developer sentiment, interviews Dave Rupert and I have done on ShopTalk, and in-person discussion, it’s, as they say... a thing.
The divide is between people...
New CodePen Feature: Prefill Embeds
21.1.2019
I've very excited to have this feature released for CodePen. It's very progressive enhancement friendly in the sense that you can take any <pre> block of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (or any combination of them) and enhance it into an embed, meaning you can see the rendered output. It also...
Firefox DevTools WebConsole 2018 retrospective
21.1.2019
Here’s a wonderful post by Nicolas Chevobbe on what the Firefox DevTools team was up to last year. What strikes me is how many improvements they shipped — from big visual design improvements to tiny usability fixes that help us make sure our code works as we expect it to in the console....
STAR Apps: A New Generation of Front-End Tooling for Development Workflows
18.1.2019
Product teams from AirBnb and New York Times to Shopify and Artsy (among many others) are converging on a new set of best practices and technologies for building the web apps that their businesses depend on. This trend reflects core principles and solve underlying problems that we may share, so...
Intro to React Hooks
18.1.2019
Hooks make it possible to organize logic in components, making them tiny and reusable without writing a class. In a sense, they’re React’s way of leaning into functions because, before them, we’d have to write them in a component and, while components have proven to be powerful and functional...