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Gray Burst
3.11.2020
I made this neat little gray burst thing. It’s nothing particularly special, especially compared to the amazing creativity on CodePen, but I figured I could document some of the things happening in it for learning reasons.
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How to Automate Project Versioning and Releases with Continuous Deployment
2.11.2020
Having a semantically versioned software will help you easily maintain and communicate changes in your software. Doing this is not easy. Even after manually merging the PR, tagging the commit, and pushing the release, you still have to write release notes. There are a lot of different steps,...
compute cuter
30.10.2020
Get that desk more cuter, fam. Amy (@sailorhg) has this perfectly cute minisite with assorted desktop backgrounds, fonts, editor themes, keyboard stuff, and other accessories. These rainbow cables are great.
And speaking of fonts, we’re still plucking away at this microsite for coding fonts...
Little Things on My Personal Site
30.10.2020
I updated my personal website the other day. Always a fun project since it’s one of the few where it’s 100% just me. It’s my own personal playground with no other goal than making the site represent me to have a little fun. It’s not a complete re-write, just some new paint....
In Defense of Tables and Floats in Modern Day Development
30.10.2020
Twenty-plus years ago, tables were the main way web pages were created in HTML. It gave web builders consistent control of constructing pages with some “design.” No longer did sites only have to be top-to-bottom in a linear manner — they could be set up with columns that align left-to-right...
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...
The CSS Custom Property Toggle Trick
29.10.2020
Back in July 2020, I got an email from James0x57 (I always try to refer to people by their name, but I think I get the sense they prefer to go by screen name) that says:
The entire world of branching conditional logic and bulk feature toggling for custom CSS properties is possible and only exists...
More on content-visibility
28.10.2020
Back in August 2020, when the content-visiblity property in CSS trickled its way into Chrome browsers, Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin wrote about it and we covered it. The weirdest part is that to get the performance value out of it, you pair it with contain-intrinsic-size on these big chunks...
Comparing Static Site Generator Build Times
28.10.2020
There are so many static site generators (SSGs). It’s overwhelming trying to decide where to start. While an abundance of helpful articles may help wade through the (popular) options, they don’t magically make the decision easy.
I’ve been on a quest to help make that decision easier. A colleague...
Comparing Various Ways to Hide Things in CSS
27.10.2020
You would think that hiding content with CSS is a straightforward and solved problem, but there are multiple solutions, each one being unique.
Developers most commonly use display: none to hide the content on the page. Unfortunately, this way of hiding content isn’t bulletproof because now that...
Anima 4.0: Go Straight From Design to React in the Design Handoff
27.10.2020
Imagine this scenario: You get an email from the design team. It contains a link to a high-fidelity prototype of a React app they want you to build. You click the link and get ready to inspect the work only to find… the components have already been built.
Huh?
It might sound like a dream...
Core Web Vital Tooling
26.10.2020
I still think the Google-devised Core Web Vitals are smart. When I first got into caring about performance, it was all: reduce requests! cache things! Make stuff smaller! And while those are all very related to web performance, they are abstractly related. Actual web performance to users are things...
WordPress and Jamstack
26.10.2020
I recently moderated a panel at Netlify’s virtual Jamstack Conf that included Netlify CEO Matt Biilman and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. The whole thing was built up — at least to some — as a “Jamstack vs. WordPress” showdown.
I have lots of thoughts of my own on this...
Creating CSS Shapes with Emoji
24.10.2020
CSS Shapes is a standard that lets us create geometric shapes over floated elements that cause the inline contents — usually text — around those elements to wrap along the specified shapes.
Such a shaped flow of text looks good in editorial designs or designs that work with text-heavy contents...
CSS in 3D: Learning to Think in Cubes Instead of Boxes
23.10.2020
My path to learning CSS was a little unorthodox. I didn’t start as a front-end developer. I was a Java developer. In fact, my earliest recollections of CSS were picking colors for things in Visual Studio.
It wasn’t until later that I got to tackle and find my love for the front end....
Create an FAQ Slack app with Netlify functions and FaunaDB
22.10.2020
Sometimes, when you’re looking for a quick answer, it’s really useful to have an FAQ system in place, rather than waiting for someone to respond to a question. Wouldn’t it be great if Slack could just answer these FAQs for us? In this tutorial, we’re going to be making just that: a slash command...
A Primer on the Different Types of Browser Storage
21.10.2020
In back-end development, storage is a common part of the job. Application data is stored in databases, files in object storage, transient data in caches… there are seemingly endless possibilities for storing any sort of data. But data storage isn’t limited only to the back end. The front end (the...
xm
21.10.2020
This is a neat little HTML preprocessor from Giuseppe Gurgone. It has very few features, but one of them is HTML includes, which is something I continue to be baffled that HTML doesn’t support natively. There are loads of ways to handle it. I think it’s silly that it’s been...
How to Think Like a Front-End Developer
21.10.2020
The topical idea of “how to think like a front-end developer” began for me as a series of podcast interviews on ShopTalk Show. That was in preparation for a talk I was preparing (and gave) of the same name. That talk evolved into my essay The Great Divide, which evolved into the essay...
Smarter Ways to Generate a Deep Nested HTML Structure
21.10.2020
Let’s say we want to have the following HTML structure:
<div class='boo'<div class='boo'<div class='boo'<div class='boo'<div class='boo'</div</div</div</div</div
That’s real a pain to write manually. And the reason why this post was born was being...