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My Long Journey to a Decoupled WordPress Gatsby Site
13.7.2020
As a professional research biologist, my playground used to be science laboratories filled with microscopes, petri dishes, and biology tools. Curiosity leads many scientists on their journey to discoveries. Mine led me to web design. I used to try learning HTML on my lab desktop while centrifuging...
How to Make a List Component with Emotion
8.7.2020
I’ve been doing a bit of refactoring this week at Sentry and I noticed that we didn’t have a generic List component that we could use across projects and features. So, I started one, but here’s the rub: we style things at Sentry using Emotion, which I have only passing experience with and...
Building Serverless GraphQL API in Node with Express and Netlify
6.7.2020
I’ve always wanted to build an API, but was scared away by just how complicated things looked. I’d read a lot of tutorials that start with “first, install this library and this library and this library” without explaining why that was important. I’m kind of a Luddite when it comes to these...
Quick Tips for High Contrast Mode
27.6.2020
Sarah Higley has some CSS tricks up her sleeve for dealing with High Contrast Mode on Windows, which I learned is referred to as WHCM.
Here’s the first trick:
[…] if the default CSS outline property doesn’t give you the visual effect you want [in WHCM] for focus states...
Analyzing Notion app performance
8.6.2020
Here’s a fantastic case study where Ivan Akulov looks at the rather popular writing app Notion and how the team might improve the performance in a variety of ways; through code splitting, removing unused vendor code, module concatenation, and deferring JavaScript execution. Not so long ago, we made...
How to Convert a Date String into a Human-Readable Format
25.5.2020
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m writing this article, in part, because it’s something I look up often and want to be able to find it next time. Formatting a date string that you get from an API in JavaScript can take many shapes — anything from loading all of Moment.js to have...
Avoid Heavy Babel Transformations by (Sometimes) Not Writing Modern JavaScript
20.5.2020
It’s hard to imagine writing production-ready JavaScript without a tool like Babel. It’s been an undisputed game-changer in making modern code accessible to a wide range of users. With this challenge largely out of the way, there’s not much holding us back from really leaning into...
How to Build a Chrome Extension
19.5.2020
I made a Chrome extension this weekend because I found I was doing the same task over and over and wanted to automate it. Plus, I’m a nerd during a pandemic, so I spend my weird pent-up energy building things. I’ve made five Chrome extensions with that energy, yet I still find it hard...
Notion-Powered Websites
14.5.2020
I’m a big fan of Notion, as you likely know from previous coverage and recent video. It’s always interesting to see what other people do with Notion, and even how Notion uses Notion.
I’d say most usage of Notion is private and internal, but any page on Notion can be totally...
React Single File Components Are Here
13.5.2020
Shawn Wang is talking about RedwoodJS here:
… it is the first time React components are being expressed in a single file format with explicit conventions.
Which is the RedwoodJS idea of Cells. To me, it feels like a slightly cleaner version of how Apollo wants you to do it with useQuery....
Why does writing matter in remote work?
12.5.2020
Talk to anyone who has an active blog and I bet they’ll tell you it’s been valuable to them. Maybe it’s opened doors. Maybe it’s got them a job. Maybe it’s got them a conference invite. Maybe they just like the thrill of knowing people have read and responded to...
Advice for Writing a Technical Resume
27.4.2020
Marco Rogers asked a very good question on Twitter:
I talk to a lot of people new to tech from non-traditional backgrounds, e.g. bootcamps or self-taught. I'm looking for good information for those people on how to build out a strong resume when they don't have work experience yet. Advice...
Building a Scalable CSS Architecture With BEM and Utility Classes
21.4.2020
Maintaining a large-scale CSS project is hard. Over the years, we’ve witnessed different approaches aimed at easing the process of writing scalable CSS. In the end, we all try to meet the following two goals:
Efficiency: we want to reduce the time spent thinking about how things should...
Creating Color Themes With Custom Properties, HSL, and a Little calc()
16.4.2020
Before the advent of CSS custom properties (we might call them “variables” in this article as that’s the spirit of them), implementing multiple color schemes on the same website usually meant writing separate stylesheets. Definitely not the most maintainable thing in the world. Nowadays, though,...
Collective #602
16.4.2020
Watched Box * Generative Data Visualization * Writing an Emulator in JavaScript * Stacks * Meanderer
Collective #602 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
No-Class CSS Frameworks
13.4.2020
I linked up Water.css not long ago as an interesting sort of CSS framework. No classes. No <h2 class="is-title">. You just use semantic HTML and get styles. Is that going to “scale” very far? Probably not, but it sure is handy for styling things quickly, where — of course...
Tips for Writing Animation Code Efficiently
10.4.2020
I’ve been coding web animations and helping others do the same for years now. However, I have yet to see a concise list of tips focused on how to efficiently build animations, so here you go!
I will be using the GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP). It provides a simple, readable API and solves...
Google’s Technical Writing Guide
3.4.2020
It’s good!
I’ve written up my advice (sprinkled with great advice from others), but this is way more straightforward nuts-and-bolts training on technical writing. It’s structured like an actual course, with exercises along the way.
I’m far from an expert here. But between...
Playing With Particles Using the Web Animations API
18.3.2020
When it comes to motion and animations, there is probably nothing I love more than particles. This is why every time I explore new technologies I always end up creating demos with as many particles as I can.
In this post, we'll make even more particle magic using the Web Animations API to create...
Disney World Economics: How Coronavirus Could Be Used to Justify a Global Financial Reset
13.3.2020
‘What in the world is going on’ has now become a question of real pertinence, instead of just a cliché for common bewilderment. As COVID-19 panic grips the world, ripple effects are crashing markets and effectively canceling economies across the globe, scrawling the writing on...