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Use monday.com to Boost Project Organization and Team Collaboration
24.1.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Front-end development relies on organization and solid communication. Whether you're part of a team that builds large-scale sites or you're flying solo with a handful of quality clients, there are many pieces and steps to get a project from start to finish. And that's...
The Secret Weapon to Learning CSS
22.1.2019
For some reason, I’ve lately been thinking a lot about what it takes to break into the web design industry and learn CSS. I reckon it has something to do with Keith Grant’s post earlier this month on a CSS mental model where he talks about a “common core for CSS”:
We need common core tricks like...
The Great Divide
21.1.2019
Let’s say there is a divide happening in front-end development. I feel it, but it's not just in my bones. Based on an awful lot of written developer sentiment, interviews Dave Rupert and I have done on ShopTalk, and in-person discussion, it’s, as they say... a thing.
The divide is between people...
STAR Apps: A New Generation of Front-End Tooling for Development Workflows
18.1.2019
Product teams from AirBnb and New York Times to Shopify and Artsy (among many others) are converging on a new set of best practices and technologies for building the web apps that their businesses depend on. This trend reflects core principles and solve underlying problems that we may share, so...
Does it mutate?
18.1.2019
This little site by Remy Sharp's makes it clear whether or not a JavaScript method changes the original array (aka mutates) or not.
I was actually bitten by this the other day. I needed the last element from an array, so I remembered .pop() and used it.
const arr = ["doe", "ray", "mee"];
const...
How to Use Chrome Dev Tools to Find Performance Bottlenecks
17.1.2019
As one advances through a Software Development career, concerns beyond simply writing code that works arise. In the world of web development, it becomes pertinent to not only build functional softw
CSS doesn’t suck
15.1.2019
I'm not so protective of CSS that I'm above hearing it criticized, but I'm certainly in agreement here. CSS does not suck. I love how the post is framed to hype up current CSS features the way features of other languages and tools are hyped:
Imagine if a tech dude walked on stage at a conference...
Piecing Together Approaches for a CSS Masonry Layout
11.1.2019
Masonry layout, on the web, is when items of an uneven size are laid out such that there aren't uneven gaps. I would guess the term was coined (or at least popularized) for the web by David DeSandro because of his popular Masonry JavaScript library, which has been around since 2010.
JavaScript...
Algorithmic Layouts
10.1.2019
Don't miss this video by Heydon that digs into CSS layouts. It's great how he combines fundamental knowledge, like the way elements flow, wrap, and can have margin with new layout methods like flexbox and grid (with specific examples). Of particular note is the clear demonstration of how flexbox...
Toggling Animations On and Off
9.1.2019
A nicely detailed tutorial by Kirupa that gets into how you might provide a UI with persisted options that control whether animations run or not.
The trick is custom properties that control the movement:
body {
--toggle: 0;
--playState: "paused";
}
Which are used within animations...
Reader Mode: The Button to Beat
7.1.2019
As a young nerd, I loved to immerse myself in digital worlds, learning the ins and outs of the rules someone else had created for me (intentionally or not). But the older and crankier I get, the more I find myself losing patience when navigating these "delightful" experiences.
This fascination...
The Fragmented, But Evolving State of CSS-in-JS
20.12.2018
TLDR: The CSS-in-JS community has converged on a consistent API.
Not so long ago, a Facebook engineer compiled a list of the available CSS-in-JS methodologies. It wasn’t short:
aphrodite, babel-plugin-css-in-js, babel-plugin-pre-style, bloody-react-styled, classy, csjs, css-constructor, css-light...
Google Fonts and font-display
19.12.2018
The font-display descriptor in @font-face blocks is really great. It goes a long way, all by itself, for improving the perceived performance of web font loading. Loading web fonts is tricky stuff and having a tool like this that works as well as it does is a big deal for the web.
It's such a...
Nobody is quite wrong.
17.12.2018
There are two opposing views on using non-polyfillable new web features that I find are both equally common in our industry:
Websites don't need to look the same in every browser. The concept of progressive enhancement helps with that. There are tools, even native language features, that help with...
Keep Math in the CSS
12.12.2018
There is a sentiment that leaving math calculations in your CSS is a good idea that I agree with. This is for math that you could calculate at authoring time, but specifically chose not to. For instance, if you needed a 7-column float-based grid (don't ask), it's cleaner and more intuitive:
.col...
Web Designs That Feel Like Ancient History, but Are More Recent Than You Think
12.12.2018
Flickr announced not long ago that they are limiting free accounts to 1,000 photos. I don't particularly mind that (because it seems like sound business sense), although it is a bit sad that a ton of photos will be nuked from the internet. I imagine the Internet Archive will swoop in and get most...
Why isn’t it <style src=””>?
10.12.2018
The way JavaScript works is we can do scripts as an inline block:
<script>
let foo = "bar";
</script>
Or, if the script should be fetched from the network...
<script src="/js/global.js"></script>
With CSS, we can do an inline block of styles:
<style>
.foo...
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">
...
It’s not about the device.
4.12.2018
Ever have that, "Ugighgk, another device to support?!" feeling? Like, perhaps when you heard that wrist devices have browsers? Ethan's latest post is about that.
Personally, the Apple Watch is interesting to me not because it’s a watch. Rather, it’s interesting to me because it’s...
Bridging the Gap Between CSS and JavaScript: CSS Modules, PostCSS and the Future of CSS
4.12.2018
In the previous post in this two-part series, we explored the CSS-in-JS landscape and, we realized not only that CSS-in-JS can produce critical styles, but also that some libraries don’t even have a runtime. We saw that user experience can significantly improve by adding clever optimizations, which...