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The Elements of UI Engineering
4.1.2019
I really enjoyed this post by Dan Abramov. He defines his work as a UI engineer and I especially like what he writes about his learning experience:
My biggest learning breakthroughs weren’t about a particular technology. Rather, I learned the most when I struggled to solve a particular UI problem....
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...
Three Questions to Ask of Every Bug You Encounter
19.11.2018
Bugs. Errors. Exceptions. Problems. Issues. Whatever you call them in the moment, bugs are deeply associated with failure. Specifically, our own failure to write perfect code. These “failures” can
Teaching Your Clients How to Use The Website You Built Them
27.7.2018
I share my own thoughts on how you might go about educating someone you just built a site for. But it turns out I had a lot of fun putting together a ton of other people's thoughts as well. I tweeted about it and got a flood of responses, so this article is an amalgamation of all that.
Direct...
What bit of advice would you share with someone new to your field?
18.7.2018
The most FA of all the FAQs.
Here's Laura Kalbag:
Find what you love. Don’t worry about needing to learn every language, technique or tool. Start with what interests you, and carve your own niche. And then use your powers for good!
And my own:
Buy a domain name. Figure out how to put an HTML file...
Create your own Serverless API
16.7.2018
If you don’t already know of it, Todd Motto has this great list of public APIs. It’s awesome if you’re trying out a new framework or new layout pattern and want to hit the ground running without fussing with the content.
But what if you want or need to make your own API? Serverless can help create...
Scrolling Gradient
13.7.2018
If you want a gradient that changes as you scroll down a very long page, you can create a gradient with a bunch of color stops, apply it to the body and it will do just that.
But, what if you don't want a perfectly vertical gradient? Like you want just the top left corner to change color? Mike...
Building a Complex UI Animation in React, Simply
12.7.2018
Let’s use React, styled-components, and react-flip-toolkit to make our own version of the animated navigation menu on the Stripe homepage. It's an impressive menu with some slick animation effects and the combination of these three tools can make it relatively easy to recreate.
This is...
itty.bitty
9.7.2018
Mark this down as one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a good long while. Nicholas Jitkoff has made a tool called itty.bitty that creates websites with all of the assets being contained within their own link. You can create a website without any HTML or CSS resources at all because it’s...
How to create a logo that responds to its own aspect ratio
28.6.2018
One of the cool things about <svg> is that it's literally its own document, so @media queries in CSS inside the SVG are based on its viewport rather than the HTML document that likely contains it.
This unique feature has let people play around for years. Tim Kadlec experimented with...
Advanced Document Conversions with Filestack
22.6.2018
You might know Filestack from being an incredible service to add file uploading, storage, and management to your own web apps.
There is another thing Filestack can do for you: convert documents into different formats.
For one thing, it can manipulate documents. Take images. Perhaps you would...
The Four Big Ways Jetpack Helps with Image Performance
19.6.2018
We've been working with Jetpack around here as a sponsor. It's a great match because as someone with a bunch of self-hosted WordPress sites, Jetpack is one of those no-brainer plugins for me. Jetpack can do a ton of good things for any site in a variety of very different ways. Here's one way...
Building a RSS Viewer With Vue: Part 1
18.6.2018
As I explore, learn, and most importantly, play with Vue.js, I've been building different types of apps as a way to get practice with and improve my use of it. A few weeks ago, I was reading about the shut down of Digg's RSS Reader and while great alternatives exist, I thought it would be fun...
Creating your own meme generator
15.6.2018
Almost every time a new meme pops up in my Twitter feed, I think of a witty version to create. I'm not alone in this. Memes are often a way to acknowledge a shared experience or idea. In a variation of the "Is this a pigeon" meme that has been making the rounds online, a designer Daryl Ginn joked...
Creating a VS Code Theme
8.6.2018
Everyone has special and perhaps, particular, tastes when it comes to their code editor. There are literally thousands of themes out there, and for good reason: a thing of beauty and enhancement to productivity for one can be a hindrance to another.
It’s been an item on my bucket list to create...
OpenRates Currency API (Sponsored)
30.5.2018
Creating your own APIs can be a total nightmare: worrying about uptime, load balancing, data accuracy, caching, and all of the other risks would keep me up at night. And if your API relates to money in any way? If you get that wrong you could be costing yourself, your employer, or your client...
Just a Couple’a Fun Typography Links
22.5.2018
Marcin Wichary made an incredible demo exploring "segmented type" as in, the kind you might see on a display like a microwave, but scaling up in complexity from there.
"Datalegreya is a typeface which can interweave data curves with text."
Airbnb commissions their own new font, Cereal (complete...
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?...
Container-Adapting Tabs With “More” Button
2.5.2018
Or the priority navigation pattern, or progressively collapsing navigation menu. We can name it in at least three ways.
There are multiple UX solutions for tabs and menus and each of them have their own advantages over another, you just need to pick the best for the case you are trying to solve....
Exchange Rates and Currency Conversion with fixer.io (Sponsored)
22.3.2018
My most stressful tasks as a coder have always revolved around money. Whether you’re coding a site for a client, your own business, or your employer, you want to be damn sure that any handling of currency is accurate, secure, and localized. We always want our code to work but when...