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Using Your Own Design System with KendoReact Components
30.10.2020
Maybe you’ve already heard of (or even worked with!) KendoReact. It’s popped up in some of my day-to-day conversations, especially those about working with design systems and React. You could think of it as a component library like Bootstrap or Material Design, except the components...
Let’s Create Our Own Authentication API with Nodejs and GraphQL
13.10.2020
Authentication is one of the most challenging tasks for developers just starting with GraphQL. There are a lot of technical considerations, including what ORM would be easy to set up, how to generate secure tokens and hash passwords, and even what HTTP library to use and how to use it. 
In...
Shoelace 2.0: A Forward-thinking Library of Web Components
29.9.2020
A few years ago, I released a lightweight alternative to Bootstrap affectionately named Shoelace. Shoelace was small and fast because of its minimal design and pure CSS approach to styling. It used CSS custom properties extensively to enable customizations, even when loaded via CDN — something...
Changing Emoji Skin Tones Programmatically
17.9.2020
So, you know how many emoji have different skin tones? Emoji skin tones are extremely popular, especially over text and on social media. The raised black fist emoji (✊🏿) was voted “The Most 2020 Emoji” by Emojipedia’s World Emoji Awards.
Each tone is a modifier and many emoji...
All the Ways to Make a Web Component
7.9.2020
This is a neat page that compares a ton of different libraries with web components. One of the things I learned after posting “A Bit on Web Components Libraries” is that the web platform APIs were designed for libraries to be built around them. Interesting, right?
This page makes...
Import Non-ESM libraries in ES Modules, with Client-Side Vanilla JS
7.9.2020
We’re living through a weird era where there are tons of JavaScript libraries that were meant to be used as <script> tags that expose available globals. AND there are tons of JavaScript libraries that are meant to be used through module loaders. AND there are tons of JavaScript...
Doom Damage Flash on Scroll
26.8.2020
The video game Doom famously would flash the screen red when you were hit. Chris Johnson not only took that idea, but incorporated a bunch of the UI from Doom into this tounge-in-cheek JavaScript library called Doom Scroller. Get it? Like, doom scrolling, but like, Doom scrolling. It’s funny...
Collective #618
13.8.2020
Elder.js * Serverless: I'm a big kid now * The Endless Doomscroller * Building a Design System Library
The post Collective #618 appeared first on Codrops
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...
style9: build-time CSS-in-JS
29.7.2020
In April of last year, Facebook revealed its big new redesign. An ambitious project, it was a rebuild of a large site with a massive amount of users. To accomplish this, they used several technologies they have created and open-sourced, such as React, GraphQL, Relay, and a new CSS-in-JS library...
A Bit on Web Component Libraries
29.7.2020
A run of Web Components news crossed my desk recently so I thought I’d group it up here.
To my mind, one of the best use cases for Web Components is pattern libraries. Instead of doing, say, <ul class="nav nav-tabs"> like you would do in Bootstrap or <div class="tabs"> like...
Exclusive: Liquid Network Gets Its First General-Purpose Javascript Library
9.7.2020
A new Javascript library for Liquid could allow external developers to build a complete ecosystem around the heavily upgraded Bitcoin sidechain
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...
Some Performance Links
3.7.2020
Just had a couple of good performance links burning a hole in my pocket, so blogging them like a good little blogger.
Web Performance Recipes With Puppeteer
Puppeteer is an Node library for spinning up a copy of Chrome “headlessly” (i.e. no UI) and controlling it. People use it...
Rough Notation
22.6.2020
This is a neat little library. It uses SVG to insert hand-drawn looking annotations to elements (probably text), like underlines and box highlights (there are 6 design options, all configurable). Super clever.
Here’s a little demo:
CodePen Embed Fallback
Aside from it just being cool,...
Core Web Vitals
29.5.2020
Core Web Vitals is what Google is calling a a new collection of three web performance metrics:
LCP: Largest Contentful Paint
FID: First Input Delay
CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift
These are all measurable. They aren’t in Lighthouse (e.g. the Audits tab in Chrome DevTools) just yet, but sounds...
Get Programmatic Control of your Builds with Netlify Build Plugins
27.5.2020
Today at Jamstack_Conf, Netlify announced Build Plugins. What it does is allow you to have particular hooks for events within your build, like when the build starts or ends. What’s nice about them is that they’re just a plain ‘ol JavaScript object, so you can insert some logic...
How I Put the Scroll Percentage in the Browser Title Bar
12.5.2020
Some nice trickery from Knut Melvær.
Ultimately the trick boils down to figuring out how far you’ve scrolled on the page and changing the title to show it, like:
document.title = `${percent}% ${post.title}`
Knut’s trick assumes React and installing an additional library. I’m sure...
Turning a Fixed-Size Object into a Responsive Element
11.5.2020
I was in a situation recently where I wanted to show an iPhone on a website. I wanted users to be able to interact with an application demo on this “mock” phone, so it had to be rendered in CSS, not an image. I found a great library called marvelapp/devices.css. The library implemented the device...