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Revisiting the Rendering Tier
5.4.2019
Have you ever created a well-intentioned, thoughtful design system only to watch it grow into an ever-increasing and scary codebase? I've been working in sort of the opposite direction, inheriting the scary codebase and trying to create a thoughtful system from it.
Here's Alex Sanders on the topic...
What Are Design Tokens?
3.4.2019
I’ve been hearing a lot about design tokens lately, and although I’ve never had to work on a project that’s needed them, I think they’re super interesting and worth jotting down a few notes about. As I understand it, the general idea is this: design tokens are an agnostic way to store variables...
Powers of Two
28.3.2019
Refactoring is one of those words that evokes fear in the eyes of many folks, from developers to product owners and everyone in between. It may as well be a four-letter word in many ways. It's also something that we talk about quite a bit around here because, like books on the topic, where to start...
Some Notes About Accessibility
20.3.2019
Earlier this month Eric Bailey wrote about the current state of accessibility on the web and why it felt like fighting an uphill battle:
As someone with a good deal of interest in the digital accessibility space, I follow WebAIM’s work closely. Their survey results are priceless insights into...
Little Things That Tickled My Brain from An Event Apart Seattle
14.3.2019
I had so much fun at An Event Apart Seattle! There is something nice about sitting back and basking in the messages from a variety of such super smart people.
I didn't take comprehensive notes of each talk, but I did jot down little moments that flickered my brain. I'll post them here! Blogging...
Getting to Grips with the Airtable API
14.2.2019
The Airtable web app is pretty neat. You can use it like a spreadsheet but it’s useful for all sorts of other things too. The neatest thing about it for me is that it has an API so that you can treat it like a database.
I’ve been thinking about making weekly notes for the different teams I work...
The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript Algorithms: Search and Replace
8.2.2019
The "Search and Replace" functionality is very common within word processing applications used for creating notes, documents and things of that nature. In this challenge, we implem
Multiple Background Clip
30.1.2019
You know how you can have multiple backgrounds?
body {
background-image:
url(image-one.jpg),
url(image-two.jpg);
}
That's just background-image. You can set their position too, as you might expect. We'll shorthand it:
body {
background:
url(image-one.jpg) no-repeat top right,
...
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...
How I’ve Been Using Notion Personally and Professionally
16.1.2019
I use Notion quite a bit, both personally and professionally.
In a sense, it's just an app for keeping documents in one place: little notes, to-do lists, basic spreadsheets, etc. I like the native macOS Notes app just fine. It's quick and easy, it's desktop and mobile, it syncs... but there...
A Quick CSS Audit and General Notes About Design Systems
31.12.2018
I’ve been auditing a ton of CSS lately and thought it would be neat to jot down how I’m going about doing that. I’m sure there are a million different ways to do this depending on the size and scale of your app and how your CSS works under the hood, so please take all this with a grain of salt....
Accessible SVG Icons With Inline Sprites
7.12.2018
This is a great look at accessible SVG markup patterns by Marco Hengstenberg. Here's the ideal example:
<button type="button">
Menu
<svg class="svg-icon"
role="img"
height="10"
width="10"
viewBox="0 0 10 10"
aria-hidden="true"
focusable="false">
...