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How to Think Like a Front-End Developer
21.10.2020
The topical idea of “how to think like a front-end developer” began for me as a series of podcast interviews on ShopTalk Show. That was in preparation for a talk I was preparing (and gave) of the same name. That talk evolved into my essay The Great Divide, which evolved into the essay...
The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers
7.10.2020
This is an extended version of my essay “When front-end means full-stack” which was published in the wonderful Increment magazine put out by Stripe. It’s also something of an evolution of a couple other of my essays, “The Great Divide” and “Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.”
The post...
Why you should hire a front-end developer
26.8.2020
Matt Hobbs says you should hire a front-end developer because…
“A front-end developer is the best person to champion accessibility best practices in product teams.”
“80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the front end.”
“A front-end developer takes pressure...
Web Engine Diversity and Ecosystem Health
16.6.2020
As front-end developers, our job is working with browsers. Knowing how many we have and the health of them is always of great interest. As far as numbers go, we have fewer recently than we have in the past. It’s only this month that Edge is starting to auto-update browsers to the Chromium...
Let’s Take a Deep Dive Into the CSS Contain Property
8.5.2020
Compared to the past, modern browsers have become really efficient at rendering the tangled web of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code a typical webpage provides. It takes a mere milliseconds to render the code we give it into something people can use.
What could we, as front-end developers, do...
“The title ‘Front-End Developer’ is obsolete.”
24.4.2020
That title is from the opening tweet of a thread from Benjamin De Cock. I wouldn’t go that far, myself. What I like about the term is that ‘Front-End’ literally means the browser, and while the job has been changing quite a lot — and is perhaps fracturing before our eyes — the fact that...
Front-End Challenges
17.4.2020
My favorite way to level up as a front-end developer is to do the work. Literally just build websites. If you can do it for money, great, you should. If the websites you make can help yourself or anyone else you care about, then that’s also great. In lieu of that, you can also make things...
Considerations When Choosing Fonts for a Multilingual Website
10.3.2020
As a front-end developer working for clients all over the world, I've always struggled to deal with multilingual websites — especially cases where both right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR) are used. That said, I’ve learned a few things along the...
Same HTML, Different CSS
19.2.2020
Ahmad Shadeed covers the idea of a card component that has a fixed set of semantic HTML with some BEMy classes on it. There is a title, author, image, and tags. Then he redesigns the card into five totally different designs without touching any of the HTML just the CSS.
If this is an ah-ha moment...
What it means to be a front-end developer in 2020 (and beyond)
29.12.2019
I wrote a piece for Layout, the blog of my hosting sponsor Flywheel.
Stick around in this field for a while, and you'll see these libraries, languages, build processes, and heck, even entire philosophies on how best to build websites come and go like a slow tide.
You might witness some...
Dip Your Toes Into Hardware With WebMIDI
12.12.2019
Did you know there is a well-supported browser API that allows you to interface with interesting and even custom-built hardware using a mature protocol that predates the web? Let me introduce you to MIDI and the WebMIDI API and show you how it presents a unique opportunity for front-end developers...
Having a Little Fun With Custom Focus Styles
2.12.2019
Every front-end developer has dealt or will deal with this scenario: your boss, client or designer thinks the outline applied by browsers on focused elements does not match the UI, and asks you to remove it. Or you might even be looking to remove it yourself.
So you do a little research and find...
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...
Become a Front-End Master in 2020 With These 10 Project Ideas
1.11.2019
This is a little updated cross-post from a quickie article I wrote on DEV. I'm publishing here 'cuz I'm all IndieWeb like that.
I love this post by Simon Holdorf. He's got some ideas for how to level up your skills as a front-end developer next year. Here they are:
Build a movie search app using...
The Best (GraphQL) API is One You Write
30.8.2019
Listen, I am no GraphQL expert but I do enjoy working with it. The way it exposes data to me as a front-end developer is pretty cool. It's like a menu of available data and I can ask for whatever I want. That's a massive improvement over REST and highly empowering for me as a front-end developer...
Multiplayer Tic Tac Toe with GraphQL
23.8.2019
GraphQL is a query language for APIs that is very empowering for front-end developers. As the GraphQL site explains it, you describe your data, ask for what you want, and get predictable results.
If you haven’t worked with it before, GraphQL might be a little confusing to grok at first glance....
Branching Out from the Great Divide
2.8.2019
I like the term Front-End Developer. It's encapsulates the nature of your job if your concerns are:
Building UIs for web browsers
The spectrum of devices and platforms those web browsers run on
The people who use those web browsers and related assistive technology
The breadth of knowledge...
The Power of Serverless v2.0! (Now an Open-Source Gatsby Site Hosted on Netlify)
23.5.2019
I created a website called The Power of Serverless for Front-End Developers over at thepowerofserverless.info a little while back while I was learning about that whole idea. I know a little more now but still have an endless amount to learn. Still, I felt like it was time to revamp that site a bit....
CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXV
10.5.2019
I like to do these little roundups of things going on with myself, this site, and the other sites that are part of the CSS-Tricks family.
I spoke at Smashing Conf San Francisco.
There's a video! I can't embed it here because of privacy settings or something, so here's a link to the Vimeo.
It's...