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CSS: A New Kind of JavaScript
19.7.2018
In this wacky and satirical post, Heydon Pickering describes a wild new technology called Cascading Style Sheets that solves a lot of the problems you might bump into when styling things with JavaScript:
A good sign that a technology is not fit for purpose is how much we have to rely on workarounds...
Design Systems at GitHub
12.7.2018
Here’s a nifty post by Diana Mounter all about the design systems team at GitHub that details how the team was formed, the problems they've faced and how they've adapted along the way:
When I started working at GitHub in late 2015, I noticed that there were many undocumented patterns, I had...
Prototyping in the Browser
5.7.2018
Prototyping animations and interactions is vital for a number of reasons: they can make your interface feel deceptively fast, they can help focus the user on a specific task, and they can provide a better sense of the current state of your application. Is data being loaded? Is something...
Clearfix: A Lesson in Web Development Evolution
3.7.2018
The web community has, for the most part, been a spectacularly open place. As such, a lot of the best development techniques happen right out in the open, on blogs and in forums, evolving as they’re passed around and improved. I thought it might be fun (and fascinating) to actually follow this...
Drawing Images with CSS Gradients
25.6.2018
What I mean by "CSS images" is images that are created using only HTML elements and CSS. They look as if they were SVGs drawn in Adobe Illustrator but they were made right in the browser. Some techniques I’ve seen used are tinkering with border radii, box shadows, and sometimes clip-path. You...
Balancing Time
22.6.2018
I first wrote this post four years ago. I put it on a blog that no longer exists. Funnily enough, I still refer to it myself, so I figured it might be best served in a place where other people can see it. I've made only a few minor tweaks to the original content. A lot about how I work has changed...
An Almost Ideal React Image Component
21.6.2018
Yes, this is a React component, but regardless if you care about that part or not, the "ideal image component" part could be of interest. There is a lot to consider with how we put images on web pages these days. This deals with:
Placeholder space (and then flexible responsive styles after...
What is SVG good for?
21.6.2018
Y'all probably wouldn't be surprised if I told you it's pretty awesome for icons, and icon systems. SVG icon systems can, and perhaps should be quite easy. I'm a fan of just inlining those suckers, particularly when they are pretty simple.
But what else?
Logos is a classic example! A lot...
Here’s the thing about “unused CSS” tools
18.6.2018
There are a lot of tools that aim to help you remove "unused CSS" from your project. Never a week goes by that I don't see a tool for this being shared or promoted. It must strike some kind of perfect chord for some developers. I care about performance, and I know that reducing file sizes is good...
Getting Started with Yoga and Prisma for Building GraphQL Servers
7.6.2018
By now, you have probably heard a lot of buzz about GraphQL going around and how it’s going to replace REST but you don’t even know where to begin. You hear a lot of buzzwords about mutations and
The web can be anything we want it to be
6.6.2018
I really enjoyed this chat between Bruce Lawson and Mustafa Kurtuldu where they talked about browser support and the health of the web. Bruce expands upon a lot of the thoughts in a post he wrote last year called World Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web where he writes:
...across the world...
Animate Images and Videos with curtains.js
6.6.2018
While browsing the latest award-winning websites, you may notice a lot of fancy image distortion animations or neat 3D effects. Most of them are created with WebGL, an API allowing GPU-accelerated image processing effects and animations. They also tend to use libraries built on top of WebGL such...
Learning Gutenberg: React 101
23.5.2018
Although Gutenberg is put together with React, the code we’re writing to make custom blocks isn’t. It certainly resembles a React component though, so I think it’s useful to have a little play to get familiar with this sort of approach. There’s been a lot of reading in this series so far, so let’s...
Web Scraping Scotch: The Node Way
14.5.2018
A lot of new web technologies and design paradigms have emerged in the last couple of years. Some programming languages are beginning to gain increasing popularity. It's very likely to have heard a
Microsites for Case Studies
7.5.2018
A lot of y'all have personal sites. Personal sites with portfolios. Or you work for or own an agency where showing off the work you do is arguably even more important. Often the portfolio area of a site is the most fretted and hard to pull off. Do you link to the live projects? Screenshots?...
Solved With CSS! Dropdown Menus
1.5.2018
A common UI pattern that we see on the web are dropdown menus. They’re used to display related information in pieces, without overwhelming the user with buttons, text, and options. Somewhere that we see these a lot is inside of headers or navigation areas on websites.
Let’s see if we can make...
VuePress Static Site Generator
18.4.2018
VuePress is a new tool from Vue creator Evan You that spins up Vue projects that are more on the side of websites based on content and markup than progressive web applications and does it with a few strokes of the command line.
We talk a lot about Vue around here, from a five-part series on getting...
React Video Player
14.3.2018
Streaming entertainment is a massive interest of mine as both a consumer and web developer. My love for streaming entertainment dates back to the early days of RealPlayer and the misery of a million codecs. Fast forward to today and I’m working a lot with ReactJS, as well as the dozens...
Freebie: 2 Beautiful Checkout Forms with Bootstrap 4
20.2.2018
We present you two free Bootstrap 4 checkout forms that are easy to set up and use, and will save you a lot of time
They Have To Be Monsters
29.4.2016
Since I started working on Discourse, I spend a lot of time thinking about how software can encourage and nudge people to be more empathetic online. That's why it's troubling to read articles like this one:
My brother’s 32nd birthday is today. It’s an especially emotional day for