Search
Get File MIME Type from Command Line
28.2.2019
I’ve gotten skilled at shell scripting over the years. I love a good GUI but knowing how to automate makes you a much more powerful engineer. Much of my scripting requires recursing over directories and processing a file if it meets a given criteria, which is often file extension or MIME...
Moving a Self-Hosted WordPress Site to WordPress.com
26.2.2019
I have a habit of getting some hosting when I need a new WordPress site. That is, a self-installed, self-hosted WordPress.org site. That's served me well over the years. I like my control. But along with that control comes a certain level of extra responsibility that sometimes just isn't worth...
Build Mobile-Friendly Web Apps with React Native Web
21.2.2019
Over the years, building web applications that are mobile friendly has become easier with the advent of media queries and the introduction of service workers. Using media queries, we could make web
Welcome to My New Office
19.2.2019
My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first thing I told myself when leaving that first...
A Site for Front-End Development Conferences (Built with 11ty on Netlify)
12.2.2019
I built a new little site! It's a site for listing upcoming conferences in the world of front-end web design and development. In years past (like 2017), Sarah Drasner took up this daunting job. We used a form for new conference submissions, but it was still a rather manual task of basically...
Using Dotfiles for Managing Development and Many Other Magical Things
8.2.2019
Howdy folks! 🎉 I'm Simon Owen, and over the years, I've loved being a part of and learning from the dotfiles community. I spend a lot of time teaching developers and running workshops. In those sessions, demonstrating how I set up my development environment is often one of things that folks...
HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points
7.2.2019
Rachel Andrew:
There is something remarkable about the fact that, with everything we have created in the past 20 years or so, I can still take a complete beginner and teach them to build a simple webpage with HTML and CSS, in a day. We don’t need to talk about tools or frameworks, learn how...
Mac Dark Mode from Command Line
30.1.2019
One of the best professional decisions I ever made was switching to a dark text editor theme. I suffered from horrible headaches for years, partially caused by late night coding sessions with blindingly bright computer screens. Recently Apple implemented a dark OS theme which helps my eyes,...
React indeterminate
22.1.2019
I’ve fallen in love with React.js and JSX over the years; state-based rendering and a logical workflow have made me see the light of this modern framework. That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes get a bit frustrated that the “simple” things seem harder than they should...
Building a RECIPE app using Prisma and React
21.1.2019
In the last couple of years, GraphQL has taken on the scene in terms of frontend development due to the various
How I Built a GPS-Powered Weather Clock With My Old iPhone 4
17.1.2019
My first smartphone was an iPhone 4s. I remember the excitement of exploring its capabilities at a time when it was the coolest thing around. Eventually, of course, I replaced it with a newer model and the old iPhone, still in mint condition, gathered dust for two years. What a waste!
But was...
New ES2018 Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know
9.1.2019
The ninth edition of the ECMAScript standard, officially known as ECMAScript 2018 (or ES2018 for short), was released in June 2018. Starting with ES2016, new versions of ECMAScript specifications are released yearly rather than every several years and add fewer features than major editions used...
Sass Techniques from the Trenches
8.1.2019
Having been in the web development industry for more than 14 years, I’ve seen and written my fair share of good and bad CSS. When I began at Ramsey Solutions five years ago, I was introduced to Sass. It blew my mind how useful it was! I dove right in and wanted to learn everything I could about...
The 10,000 Year Clock Design Principals
8.1.2019
In the new year edition of the Clearleft newsletter, Jeremy Keith linked to the design principals Danny Hillis thought about while considering a clock that would work for 10,000 years.
Here's part of that page, satisfyingly displayed as a <dl>:
Longevity:
Go slow
Avoid sliding friction...
Quicklink
3.1.2019
We're in the future now so, of course, we're working on ways to speed up the web with fancy new tactics above and beyond the typical make-pages-slimmer-and-cached-like-crazy techniques.
One tactic, from years ago, was InstantClick:
Before visitors click on a link, they hover over that link. Between...
WooCommerce
20.12.2018
(This is a sponsored post.)
I just read a nicely put together story about WooCommerce over on the CodeinWP blog. WooCommerce started life as WooThemes, sort of a "premium themes" business started by just a couple of fellas who had never even met in person. Two years and a few employees later they...
Ease-y Breezy: A Primer on Easing Functions
18.12.2018
During the past few months, I’ve been actively teaching myself how to draw and animate SVG shapes. I’ve been using CSS transitions, as well as tools like D3.js, react-motion and GSAP, to create my animations.
One thing about animations in general and the documentation these and other animation...
The Software We Pay For
5.12.2018
We did a Web Developer Economics series a few years ago, where we looked at the various costs of being a web developer:
Web Developer Economics: One-Off Software Costs
Web Developer Economics: Hardware Costs
Web Developer Economics: Monthly Service Costs
Web Developer Economics: The Wrapup
I'm...
Object.fromEntries
9.11.2018
The Object object has been buffed with useful methods over the past few years. Object.keys, Object.values, Object.freeze, and Object.assign all address frequently desired functionality. One of the new Object methods is fromEntries, which accepts a Map or map-like array nesting and converts it...
Create the Google Button Effect with CSS
27.7.2018
I always found Google’s branding simple but grew to realize that was the beauty in their design; there’s something about “just enough” that is the perfect balance between bland and over the top. GMail’s design grew old over the years and Google just got around...