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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...
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...
Centering: The Newest Coolest Way vs. The Oldest Coolest Way
20.6.2018
This isn't a comprehensive guide to centering things. We have that!
This is just a little observation about old and new. One of the trickier things related to centering in CSS is when you need to center both vertically and horizontally and you don't know the width or height of what you...
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...
Your Brain on Front-End Development
13.6.2018
Part of the job of being a front-end developer is applying different techniques and technologies to pull of the desired UI and UX. Perhaps you work with a design team and implement their designs. I know when I look at a design (heck, even if I know I'm not going to be building it), my front-end...
Collective #422
7.6.2018
G6 * Priority Nav Scroller * CORS * Sketch.systems * 10 Things I Regret About Node.js * Supercraft * The History of Connection
Collective #422 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
Manipulating Pixels Using Canvas
7.6.2018
Modern browsers support playing video via the <video> element. Most browsers also have access to webcams via the MediaDevices.getUserMedia() API. But even with those two things combined, we can’t really access and manipulate those pixels directly.
Fortunately, browsers have a Canvas...
HSL() / HSLa() is great for programmatic color control
1.6.2018
If you ever need to hand-manipulate a color in native CSS, HSL is pretty much the only way. HSL (the hsl() and hsla() functions in CSS) stands for hue, saturation, lightness, and optionally, alpha. We've talked about it before but we can break it down a little more and do some interesting things...
The State of Changing Gradients with CSS Transitions and Animations
1.6.2018
Back in 2012, Internet Explorer 10 came out and, among other things, it finally supported CSS gradients and, in addition to that, the ability to animate them with just CSS! No other browser supported this at the time, but I was hopeful for the future.
Sadly, six years have passed and nothing...
Node.js Cron Jobs By Examples
30.5.2018
Ever wanted to do specific things on your application server at certain times without having to physically run them yourself. You want to spend more of your time worrying about productive tasks ins
Unicode Patterns
18.5.2018
These Unicode patterns by Yuan Chuan are extraordinarily clever. It's a <css-doodle> custom web component that sets up a CSS grid and randomizes what character to drop into a cell and things, like color.
See all their gorgeous work on CodePen and the very cool <css-doodle> website...