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The All Powerful Front-End Developer
5.12.2018
I posted a video of this talk some months back, but it was nearly an hour and a half long. Here's an updated version that I gave at JAMstack_conf that's only 30 minutes:
The gist is that the front-end stack is wildly powerful these days. Our front-end skillset can be expanded to give us power...
Nesting Components in Figma
30.11.2018
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been building our UI Kit at Gusto, where I work, and this is a Figma document that contains all of our design patterns and components so that designers on our team can hop in, go shopping for a component that they need, and then get back to working on the problem...
Script & Style Show: Episode 28: “Get Off My Lawn”, and Other Software Stories with Eric Brandes
18.11.2018
In this episode: Todd and David kick things off bantering about cell phones, Android rot, and the good old days of Windows XP and piracy. Todd’s colleague Eric Brandes gets us back on track with a discussion about trusting proven technologies, not chasing the latest fads, how TrackJS...
Find and Change Default App for File Type from Command Line
23.10.2018
There are few things more frustrating to any computer user than files opening in an unwanted application. Sure you can use the Open menu item in the desired application but we all just want to double-click a file and see it open in the application we expect. I recently got to thinking about this...
Change System Volume from Command Line on Mac OS
15.10.2018
Oftentimes the awesome GUI applications we love are simply gloss over a command line functionality. While I do love a visual app, it’s always good to know how to do things from command line, if only for the sake of automation. I’ve covered loads of command line secrets, most notably...
Team Management with monday.com
25.9.2018
Experimenting with monday.com was an eye-opening experience; I always knew that team management was difficult but it always seemed like you’d need half a dozen pieces of software to bring it all together; think HR, team management, task management, CRM, billing…organization of all...
There is no longer any such thing as Computer Security
21.9.2018
Remember "cybersecurity"?
Mysterious hooded computer guys doing mysterious hooded computer guy .. things! Who knows what kind of naughty digital mischief they might be up to?
Unfortunately, we now live in a world where this kind of digital mischief is literally rewriting the world's...
Collective #436
26.7.2018
Page Lifecycle API * Keyframes * Rockstar * Terminalizer * Malvid * Callback Exercises * DOM-wait * Pure CSS Stack * Weird things variable fonts can do
Collective #436 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
Weird things variable fonts can do
20.7.2018
I tend to think of variable fonts as a font format in which a single font file is capable of displaying type at near-infinite variations of things like boldness, width, and slantyness. In my experience, that's a common use case. Just check out many of the interactive demos over...
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...
Accessibility for Teams
19.7.2018
Maya Benari:
Accessibility is a crucial part of government product design. First, it’s the law. Federal agencies face legal consequences when they don’t meet accessibility requirements. Second, it affects us all. Whether you have a motor disability, you sprained your wrist playing dodgeball,...
PSA: Yes, Serverless Still Involves Servers.
16.7.2018
You clever dog. You've rooted it out! It turns out when you build things with serverless technology you're still using servers. Pardon the patronizing tone there, I've seen one-too-many hot takes at this point where someone points this fact out and trots away triumphantly.
And yes, because...
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...
Unused
11.7.2018
I recently wrote Here’s the thing about "unused CSS" tools, where I tried to enumerate all the challenges any tool would have in finding truly "unused" CSS. The overarching idea is that CSS selectors match elements in the DOM, and those elements in the DOM come from all sorts of places: your static...
Random Day in the Life of a Developer
11.7.2018
Yesterday, I started going through my email as soon as I got to work. I always start my day with email. I kinda like email. I read some interesting things in keeping up with the industry. I deal with some business things. I handle with some personal things. I make a note of the most important stuff...
Build and Understand a Simple Node.js Website with User Authentication
10.7.2018
Building websites with user authentication and management (login, registration, password reset, etc.), can be a huge pain. As a developer there are a million little things you need to worry about:
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...
Handling Errors with Error Boundary
26.6.2018
Thinking and building in React involves approaching application design in chunks, or components. Each part of your application that performs an action can and should be treated as a component. In fact, React is component-based and, as Tomas Eglinkas recently wrote, we should leverage that concept...
Resilient, Declarative, Contextual
25.6.2018
Keith J. Grant:
I want to look at three key characteristics of CSS that set it apart from conventional programming languages: it’s resilient; it’s declarative; and it’s contextual. Understanding these aspects of the language, I think, is key to becoming proficient in CSS.
Like HTML, unknown...