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Edge Everything
22.12.2020
The series is a wrap my friends! Thanks for reading and a big special thanks to all the authors this year who shared something they have learned. Many authors really swung wide with thoughts about how we can be better and do better, which of course I really love.
Adam showed us logical properties...
Recognizing Constraints
22.12.2020
There’s a “C” word in web development that we don’t give enough attention to. No, I’m not talking about “continuous integration”, or even “CSS”. The “C” word I’m talking about is “constraints”. Understanding constraints is a vital part of building software that works the best it can in its targeted...
Deploying a Serverless Jamstack Site with RedwoodJS, Fauna, and Vercel
22.12.2020
This article is for anyone interested in the emerging ecosystem of tools and technologies related to Jamstack and serverless. We’re going to use Fauna’s GraphQL API as a serverless back-end for a Jamstack front-end built with the Redwood framework and deployed with a one-click deploy on Vercel.
In...
Bitmain's 'hard fork' to end in $600M settlement in favor of Micree Zhan
22.12.2020
The year-long dispute between Bitmain co-founders appears to be at an end with a $600 million compensation on the table
How The Web is Really Built
22.12.2020
My 2020 was colored by the considerable amount of time I spent analyzing data about CSS usage in the wild, for the CSS chapter of the Web Almanac, by the HTTP Archive. The results were eye-opening to me. A wake-up call of sorts. We spend so much time in the bubble of bleeding-edge tech that we lose...
2020 Roundup of Web Research
22.12.2020
It’s December! Lots of things are published this time of year, like developer advent calendars and organizations reflecting on the past year. We have even our own end-of-year series where we asked folks what they learned in 2020. But we also see lots of research come out around this time....
Converting and Optimizing Images From the Command Line
21.12.2020
Images take up to 50% of the total size of an average web page. And if images are not optimized, users end up downloading extra bytes. And if they’re downloading extra bytes, the site not only takes that much more time to load, but users are using more data, both of which can be resolved, at least...
“I Don’t Know”
21.12.2020
I’ve learned to be more comfortable not knowing. “I don’t know”, comes easier now. “I don’t know anything about that.” It’s okay. It feels good to say.
Whether it’s service workers, Houdini, shadow DOM, web components, HTTP2, CSS grid, “micro-front ends”, AVIF… there are many paths before...
Change vs. Inertia
18.12.2020
Recently, I’ve become more deeply aware of the inherent tension between change and inertia, as it applies to the evolution and use of web technologies. These forces have always been present and opposed to each other, but it seems to me that the side effects of these collisions are impacting...
Optimizing Image Depth
18.12.2020
Something I learned (or, I guess, re-learned) this year is how important it is to pay close attention to the bit depth of images. Way back in the day, we used to obsessively choose between 2-, 4-, or 8-bit color depth on our GIFs, because when lots of users were using dialup modems to surf the...
CoinEx Celebrates Third Anniversary With Overall System and Product Upgrade
18.12.2020
PRESS RELEASE. CoinEx, a global and professional cryptocurrency exchange service provider, celebrates its third anniversary and announces that it has upgraded and optimized the underlying system as well as the front-end. After months of hard work by the R&D department, CoinEx has completed...
What’s Old is New
18.12.2020
This year, I learned a lot about how “old” tricks can solve a lot of modern problems if you use the right tools. Following the growth of Jamstack-style development has been both a learning experience, while also a nostalgic one. It’s been amazing to see how you can power plain...
I learned to love the Same-Origin Policy
17.12.2020
I spent a good chunk of my work life this year trying (in collaboration with the amazing Noam Rosenthal) to standardize a new web platform feature: a way to modify the intrinsic size and resolution of images. And hey! We did it! But boy, was it ever a learning experience.
This wasn’t my first...
Three Ways to Distinguish a Site From the Norm
16.12.2020
In an age where so much web design is already neat, clean, and simple, I can think of three ways to distinguish your site from the norm:
Stunning visuals that cannot be created in UI vector editors, like Figma and Sketch
Beautifully-animated interactions that cannot be dreamt in the language...
Learning to Simplify
16.12.2020
When I first got this writing prompt, my mind immediately started thinking stuff like, “What tech have I learned this year?” But this post isn’t really about tech, because I think what I’ve learned the most about building websites this past year is simplification.
This year, I’ve learned that...
Brand New Protocol, DIGITALAX, Brings NFT Adoption Into the Real World
16.12.2020
DIGITALAX, a digital fashion focused NFT protocol on Ethereum, launched less than 2 months ago at the end of October and is already making headlines. It is the first NFT protocol to have its digital fashion wearable NFTs recognized by a non-blockchain gaming company— the leading silicon...
Slow Movement
16.12.2020
There was a time when I felt overwhelmed by how fast the web developed. It seemed like not a single day passed without a new plugin, framework, technique, or language feature being released. I believed that in order to survive as a freelancer and to compete with others I had to learn everything...
It’s Always Year Zero
16.12.2020
In the short term, opinions about technology often follow a compressed form of Laver’s Law:
Everything just before me was completely broken.
Everything that comes after me is completely unnecessary.
Everything I use right now is perfectly fine; stop changing things.
We tend to judge things based...
Old is Solid; New Gets Talked About
15.12.2020
When Chris asked me to write about “one thing I learned about building websites this year” I admit my brain immediately went through a list of techniques and CSS properties I started using this year. But then I paused. Other people can write about that much better than I can....
Representation Matters
15.12.2020
This year I had the pleasure of re-launching The Accessibility Project. I spend a lot of time researching and writing about accessibility and inclusive design, so this felt like the cumulation of a lot of that effort. The site now uses all sorts of cool web features like CSS Grid, @supports,...