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The Bottleneck of the Web
5.3.2019
Steve Souders, "JavaScript Dominates Browser CPU":
Ten years ago the network was the main bottleneck. Today, the main bottleneck is JavaScript. The amount of JavaScript on pages is growing rapidly (nearly 5x in the last 7 years). In order to keep pages rendering and feeling fast, we need to focus...
Why I Write CSS in JavaScript
5.3.2019
I'm never going to tell you that writing your CSS in CSS (or some syntactic preprocessor) is a bad idea. I think you can be perfectly productive and performant without any tooling at all. But, I also think writing CSS in JavaScript is a good idea for component-based styles in codebases that build...
CSS Triangles, Multiple Ways
5.3.2019
I like Adam Laki's Quick Tip: CSS Triangles because it covers that ubiquitous fact about front-end techniques: there are always many ways to do the same thing. In this case, drawing a triangle can be done:
with border and a collapsed element
with clip-path: polygon()
with transform: rotate()...
Learning to Learn
4.3.2019
There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether or not you need a degree to be in tech (spoiler: you don’t). But please don’t take this to mean you don’t need any kind of education to be in tech, because by not getting a degree, you’re opting to replace the imposed learning structure of...
CSS Remedy
4.3.2019
There is a 15-year history of CSS resets. In fact, a "reset" isn't really the right word. Tantek Çelik's take in 2004 was called "undohtml.css" and it wasn't until a few years later when Eric Meyer called his version a reset, that the word became the default term. When Normalize came around,...
Mask Compositing: The Crash Course
2.3.2019
At the start of 2018, as I was starting to go a bit deeper into CSS gradient masking in order to create interesting visuals one would think are impossible otherwise with just a single element and a tiny bit of CSS, I learned about a property that had previously been completely unknown to...
Do CSS Custom Properties Beat Sass Loops?
2.3.2019
I reckon that a lot of our uses of Sass maps can be replaced with CSS Custom properties – but hear me out for a sec.
When designing components we often need to use the same structure of a component but change its background or text color based on a theme. For example, in an alert, we might need...
Should I Use Source Maps in Production?
1.3.2019
It's a valid question. A "source map" is a special file that connects a minified/uglified version of an asset (CSS or JavaScript) to the original authored version. Say you've got a filed called _header.scss that gets imported into global.scss which is compiled to global.css. That final CSS file...
Writing Tests for React Applications Using Jest and Enzyme
1.3.2019
While it is important to have a well-tested API, solid test coverage is a must for any React application. Tests increase confidence in the code and helps prevent shipping bugs to users.
That’s why we’re going to focus on testing in this post, specifically for React applications. By the end, you’ll...
Why CSS Needs its Own Survey
1.3.2019
2016 was only three years ago, but that’s almost a whole other era in web development terms. The JavaScript landscape was in turmoil, with up-and-comer React — as well as a little-known framework called Vue — fighting to dethrone Angular.
Like many other developers, I felt lost. I needed some...
Recreating the Facebook Messenger Gradient Effect with CSS
1.3.2019
One Sunday morning, I woke up a little earlier than I would’ve liked to, thanks to the persistent buzzing of my phone. I reached out, tapped into Facebook Messenger, and joined the conversation. Pretty soon my attention went from the actual conversations to the funky gradient effect of the message...
I Spun up a Scalable WordPress Server Environment with Trellis, and You Can, Too
28.2.2019
A few years back, my fledgling website design agency was starting to take shape; however, we had one problem: managing clients' web servers and code deployments. We were unable to build a streamlined process of provisioning servers and maintaining operating system security patches. We had...
Keen makes it a breeze to build and ship customer-facing metrics
28.2.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Keen is an analytics tool that makes it wonderfully easy to collect data. But Keen is unique in that it is designed not just to help you look at that data, but to share that data with your own customers! Customer-facing metrics, as it were.
Keen works just the way...
A Bit of Performance
28.2.2019
Here’s a great post by Roman Komarov on what he learned by improving the performance of his personal website. There’s a couple of neat things he does to tackle font loading in particular, such as adding the <link rel="preload"> tags for fonts. This will encourage those font files...
WorldWideWeb
27.2.2019
For the 30th anniversary of the web, CERN brought nine web nerds together to recreate the very first web browser — Or a working replication of it anyway, as you use it from your web browser, inception style.
Well done, Mark Boulton, John Allsopp, Kimberly Blessing, Jeremy Keith, Remy Sharp...
Did you know that CSS Custom Properties can handle images too?
27.2.2019
So you might be aware of CSS Custom Properties that let you set a variable, such as a theme color, and then apply it to multiple classes like this:
:root {
--theme: #777;
}
.alert {
background: var(—-theme);
}
.button {
background: var(—-theme);
}
Well, I had seen this pattern so often...
Text Wrapping & Inline Pseudo Elements
27.2.2019
I love posts like this. It's just about adding a little icon to the end of certain links, but it ends up touching on a million things along the way. I think this is an example of why some people find front-end fun and some people rather dislike it.
Things involved:
Cool [attribute] selectors that...
Control Icons with Font Size
27.2.2019
Here’s a nifty trick from Andy Bell that now seems a little obvious in hindsight: if you set an SVG to have a width and height of 1em then you can change the size of it with the font-size property.
Try and change the font-size on the body element below to see the icon scale with the text:
...
Six tips for better web typography
27.2.2019
How do we avoid the most common mistakes when it comes to setting type on the web? That’s the question that’s been stuck in my head lately as I’ve noticed a lot of typography that’s lackluster, frustrating, and difficult to read. So, how can we improve interfaces so that our content is easy to read...
Typography for Developers
27.2.2019
This is intended as a practical guide for developers to learn web typography. We’ll cover a range of practical and useful topics, like how to choose and use custom fonts on the web, but more importantly, how to lay text out to create a pleasant user experience. We’ll go over the principles...