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Don’t Wait! Mock the API
10.8.2020
Today we have a loose coupling between the front end and the back end of web applications. They are usually developed by separate teams, and keeping those teams and the technology in sync is not easy. To solve part of this problem, we can “fake” the API server that the back end tech...
zerodivs.com
10.8.2020
Pretty neat little website from Joan Perals, inspired by stuff like Lynn’s A Single Div. With multiple hard-stop background-image gradients, you don’t need extra HTML elements to draw shapes — you can draw as many shapes as you want on a single element. There is even a stacking order...
Nailing the Perfect Contrast Between Light Text and a Background Image
7.8.2020
Have you ever come across a site where light text is sitting on a light background image? If you have, you’ll know how difficult that is to read. A popular way to avoid that is to use a transparent overlay. But this leads to an important question: Just how transparent should that overlay...
More Control Over CSS Borders With background-image
7.8.2020
You can make a typical CSS border dashed or dotted. For example:
.box {
border: 1px dashed black;
border: 3px dotted red;
}
You don’t have all that much control over how big or long the dashes or gaps are. And you certainly can’t give the dashes slants, fading, or animation!...
What does 100% mean in CSS?
7.8.2020
When using percentage values in CSS like this…
.element {
margin-top: 40%;
}
…what does that % value mean here? What is it a percentage of? There’ve been so many times when I’ll be using percentages and something weird happens. I typically shrug, change the value to something else...
Every Website is an Essay
7.8.2020
Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color...
font-weight: 300 considered harmful
7.8.2020
Tomáš Janoušek:
Many web pages these days set font-weight: 300 in their stylesheet. With DejaVu Sans as my preferred font, this results in very thin and light text that is hard to read, because for some reason the “DejaVu Sans ExtraLight” variant (weight 200) is being used...
HTML for Subheadings and Headings
6.8.2020
Let’s say you have a double heading situation going on. A little one on top of a big one. It comes up, I dunno, a billion times a day, I’d say. What HTML do you go for? Dare I say, it depends? But have you considered all the options? And how those options play out semantically...
JavaScript Fatigue
6.8.2020
From Nicholas Zakas’ newsletter, on how he avoids JavaScript fatigue:
 I don’t try to learn about every new thing that comes out. There’s a limited number of hours in the day and a limited amount of energy you can devote to any topic, so I choose not to learn about anything...
TypeScript, Minus TypeScript
6.8.2020
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last several years (and let’s face it, hiding under a rock sometimes feels like the right thing to do), you’ve probably heard of and likely used TypeScript. TypeScript is a syntactical superset of JavaScript that adds — as its name suggests — typing to...
Building Custom Data Importers: What Engineers Need to Know
6.8.2020
Importing data is a common pain-point for engineering teams. Whether its importing CRM data, inventory SKUs, or customer details, importing data into various applications and building a solution for this is a frustrating experience nearly every engineer can relate to. Data import, as a critical...
Warp SVG Online
6.8.2020
The warping is certainly the cool part here. Some fancy math literally transforms the path data to do the warping. But the UX detail work here is just as nice. Scrolling the page zooms in and out via a transform: scale() on the SVG wrapper (clever!). Likewise, holding the spacebar lets you...
Chapter 1: Birth
5.8.2020
Tim Berners-Lee is fascinated with information. It has been his life’s work. For over four decades, he has sought to understand how it is mapped and stored and transmitted. How it passes from person to person. How the seeds of information become the roots of dramatic change. It is so fundamental...
Computed Values: More Than Meets the Eye
5.8.2020
Browser DevTools are indispensable for us front end developers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the Computed tab, a small corner of the DevTools panel that shows us big things, like how relative CSS values are resolved. We’ll also see how inheritance fits into the browser’s...
Orchid: Bringing Decentralization to VPNs
5.8.2020
Whenever we browse the web, read news online, or purchase a new pair of glasses from an e-commerce store, we leave traces. These traces sometimes show us content that actually provides us with value, but more often the information we leave is used in concerning ways with scandals like Cambridge...
The Cicada Principle, revisited with CSS variables
5.8.2020
Lea Verou digging up the CSS trickery classic and applying it to clip the backgrounds of some code blocks:
The main idea is simple: You write your main rule using CSS variables, and then use :nth-of-*() rules to set these variables to something different every N items. If you use enough...
Making Sense of react-spring
4.8.2020
Animation is one of the trickier things to get right with React. In this post, I’ll try to provide the introduction to react-spring I wish I had when I first started out, then dive into some interesting use cases. While react-spring isn’t the only animation library for React, it’s one of the more...
Jetpack CRM
4.8.2020
About a year ago, Automattic bought up Zero BS CRM. The thinking at the time was that it could be rebranded into the Jetpack suite and, well, that happened.
CRM meaning “Customer Relationship Management” if you’re like me and this is a little outside your sphere of everyday...
Friction Logs
4.8.2020
I first heard the term “Friction Log” from Suz Hinton back in April on ShopTalk. The idea makes an extreme amount of sense: Use a thing, and write down moments where you felt friction.
Did some installation step bug out? Did you see something that the docs didn’t mention? Did...
The Making of: Netlify’s Million Devs SVG Animation Site
3.8.2020
The following article captures the process of building the Million Developers microsite for Netlify. This project was built by a few folks and we’ve captured some parts of the process of building it here- focusing mainly on the animation aspects, in case any are helpful to others building...