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Using Artificial Intelligence to Generate Alt Text on Images
1.2.2019
Web developers and content editors alike often forget or ignore one of the most important parts of making a website accessible and SEO performant: image alt text. You know, that seemingly small image attribute that describes an image:
<img src="/cute/sloth/image.jpg" alt="A brown baby sloth...
The Many Ways to Change an SVG Fill on Hover (and When to Use Them)
31.1.2019
SVG is a great format for icons. Vector formats look crisp and razor sharp, no matter the size or device — and we get tons of design control when using them inline.
SVG also gives us another powerful feature: the ability to manipulate their properties with CSS. As a result, we can make quick...
Forms that Move With You with Wufoo
31.1.2019
I've been into the idea of JAMstack lately. In fact, it was at the inaugural JAMstack_conf that I gave a talked called The All-Powerful Font-End Developer. My overall point there was that there are all these services that we can leverage as front-end developers to build complete websites without...
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 Importance of One-on-Ones
30.1.2019
What do we mean by 1:1 (pronounced one-on-one)? This is typically a private conversation between an Engineering Manager/Lead and their Employee. I personally have been a Lead, a Manager, and also an Independent Contributor/Software Engineer, so I’ve sat at each side of the table. I’ve both...
Slide an Image to Reveal Text with CSS Animations
29.1.2019
I want to take a closer look at the CSS animation property and walk through an effect that I used on my own portfolio website: making text appear from behind a moving object. Here’s an isolated example if you’d like to see the final product.
Here’s what we're going to work with:
See the...
Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS
29.1.2019
David Heinemeier Hansson has written an interesting post about the current state of web design and how designers ought to be able to still work on the code side of things:
We build using server-side rendering, Turbolinks, and Stimulus. All tools that are approachable and realistic for designers...
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...
Table design patterns on the web
28.1.2019
Chen Hui Jing has tackled a ton of design patterns for tables that might come in handy when creating tables that are easy to read and responsive for the web:
There are a myriad of table design patterns out there, and which approach you pick depends heavily on the type of data you have and...
Visual Studio Code Starter: MetaGo
26.1.2019
I'm a big believer in spending time to learn tools to make us more efficient in our code editors. VS Code is amazing because of all the productivity fea
Visual Studio Code Starter: MetaGo
26.1.2019
I'm a big believer in spending time to learn tools to make us more efficient in our code editors. VS Code is amazing because of all the productivity fea
Visual Studio Code Starter: MetaGo
26.1.2019
I'm a big believer in spending time to learn tools to make us more efficient in our code editors. VS Code is amazing because of all the productivity fea
Need to Test API Endpoints? Two Quick Ways to Do It.
25.1.2019
Here's a possibility! Perhaps you are testing your JavaScript with a framework like Jasmine. That's nice because you can write lots of tests to cover your application, get a nice little UI to see the output, and even integrate it with build and deploy tools to make your ongoing development work...
Creating Your Own Gravity and Space Simulator
25.1.2019
Space is vast. Space is awesome. Space is difficult to understand — or so people tend to think. But in this tutorial I am going to show you that this is not the case. Quite the contrary; the laws that govern the motion of the stars, planets, asteroids and even entire galaxies are incredibly simple....
Putting the Flexbox Albatross to Real Use
24.1.2019
If you hadn't seen it, Heydon posted a rather clever flexbox layout pattern that, in a sense, mimics what you could do with a container query by forcing an element to stack at a certain container width. I was particularly interested, as I was fighting a little layout situation at the time I...
Using React and XState to Build a Sign In Form
24.1.2019
To make a sign in form with good UX requires UI state management, meaning we’d like to minimize the cognitive load to complete it and reduce the number of required user actions while making an intuitive experience. Think about it: even a relatively simple email and password sign in form needs...
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...
Successful WordPress Freelancing
23.1.2019
Andy Adams released a book for aspiring WordPress freelancers. It's meant to take a lot of the guesswork and the roadblocks that many folks often hit when making the decision to fly solo and rely on WordPress development for a stable source of work and income.
Aside from being included in it (and...
React 16.6.0 Goodies
23.1.2019
React 16.6.0 was released October 2018 and with it came goodies that spice up the way we can develop with React. We’re going to cover what I consider the best of those new goodies with examples of how we can put them to use in our work.
React.memo() avoids unnecessary re-rendering
There...
Would You Watch a Documentary Walking Through Codebases?
22.1.2019
This resonated pretty strongly with people:
I’d watch a documentary series of developers giving a tour of their codebases.
— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) January 6, 2019
I think I was watching some random Netflix documentary and daydreaming that the subject was actually something I was super...