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Weekly Platform News: Apple Deploys Web Components, Progressive HTML Rendering, Self-Hosting Critical Resources
13.9.2019
In this week's roundup, Apple gets into web components, how Instagram is insta-loading scripts, and some food for thought for self-hosting critical resources.
Apple deploys web components built using Stencil
The new Apple Music web app (beta) uses a JavaScript framework (Ember.js) but also...
This is How the USD 10M per BTC 'Thought Experiment' Would Look Now
26.8.2019
Source: iStock/pixel_dreams
Ten years ago, Harold Thomas Finney, cryptographer and crypto pioneer who worked closely with Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto (or some say he's Satoshi himself), did a thought experiment and found out that one bitcoin (BTC) would be worth a whopping USD 10 million...
Advice for Technical Writing
22.8.2019
In advance of a recent podcast with the incredible technical writer and Smashing Magazine editor-in-chief Rachel Andrew, I gathered up a bunch of thoughts and references on the subject of technical writing. So many smart people have said a lot of smart things over the years that I thought I'd round...
Electric Geek Transportation Systems
20.8.2019
I've never thought of myself as a "car person". The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT. Since then we bought a VW station wagon in 2011
Indian Finance Minister Addresses Crypto Proposal – Industry Responds
31.7.2019
India’s finance minister has broken silence and talked about the crypto draft bill and report her department is examining which propose to ban cryptocurrencies. While she views the report as “very futuristic and well-thought-out,” the crypto industry sees it as flawed...
How much specificity do @rules have, like @keyframes and @media?
31.7.2019
I got this question the other day. My first thought is: weird question! Specificity is about selectors, and at-rules are not selectors, so... irrelevant?
To prove that, we can use the same selector inside and outside of an at-rule and see if it seems to affect specificity.
body {
background:...
Ignore Crypto Twitter – Life as a Nocoiner Isn’t That Bad
18.7.2019
Crypto Twitter (CT) is filled with half-witted commentary and price predictions by so-called luminaries, maximalists, and influencers. As the price of BTC has dropped to four figures, the usual tweets from CT thought leaders has insisted that this is the last chance to buy bitcoin for under...
Finally… A Post on Finally in Promises
16.7.2019
“When does finally fire in a JavaScript promise?” This is a question I was asked in a recent workshop and I thought I’d write up a little post to clear up any confusion.
The answer is, to quote Snape:
...always.
The basic structure is like this:
try {
// I’ll try to execute some code...
Why Bitcoiners Are Turning to Unschooling for Decentralized Education
29.6.2019
Unschooling is an alternative education movement quickly gaining popularity and currency worldwide. Like Bitcoin, it is an individualist approach to an area of human action long thought to be established beyond question―education. Both cryptoeconomics and unschooling seek to provide autonomy...
Reduced Motion Picture Technique, Take Two
21.6.2019
Did you see that neat technique for using the <picture> element with <source media=""> to serve an animated image (or not) based on a prefers-reduced-motion media query?
After we shared that in our newsletter, we got an interesting reply from Michael Gale:
What about folks who love...
Report Insists ‘Bitcoin Was Not Purpose-Built to First Be a Store of Value’
7.6.2019
There’s been furious debate over the last few years on whether or not Satoshi created Bitcoin to be a peer-to-peer cash system or a purpose-built store of value. Lately, a few BTC proponents claim that Satoshi deliberately built Bitcoin to be a store of value (SoV). Despite the SoV narrative...
10 Web Performance Audit Tips for Your Next Billion Users in 2018: Bundle Splitting, Deferred Loading and Prefetching
29.5.2019
Since the advent of module bundling, we thought all our asset request got solved because the bundler hands us a single bundle that represents everything. We just shove this bundle right into our ap
Iterating a React Design with Styled Components
16.5.2019
In a perfect world, our projects would have unlimited resources and time. Our teams would begin coding with well thought out and highly refined UX designs. There would be consensus among developers about the best way to approach styling. There’d be one or more CSS gurus on the team who could ensure...
Evergreen Googlebot
16.5.2019
I've heard people say that the #1 most exciting and important thing that came out of Google I/O this year was the evergreen Googlebot:
Today, we are happy to announce that Googlebot now runs the latest Chromium rendering engine (74 at the time of this post) when rendering pages for Search. Moving...
Crypto Heresy: Question Blockstream on Twitter and You’ll Be Blocked
10.5.2019
Crypto Twitter (CT) is a grueling battleground between digital currency enthusiasts, company executives, maximalists, journalists, lawyers, and so-called thought leaders and luminaries. For instance, on May 8, reporter Larry Cermak posted data concerning Blockstream and its sidechain project...
Making the Move from jQuery to Vue
3.5.2019
As someone who has used jQuery for many. years and has recently become a Vue convert, I thought it would be an interesting topic to discuss the migration process of working with one to the other.
Before I begin though, I want to ensure one thing is crystal clear. I am not, in any way whatsoever...
It’s pretty cool how Netlify CMS works with any flat file site generator
21.3.2019
Little confession here: when I first saw Netlify CMS at a glance, I thought: cool, maybe I'll try that someday when I'm exploring CMSs for a new project. Then as I looked at it with fresh eyes: I can already use this! It's a true CMS in that it adds a content management UI on top of any static site...
Stackbit
12.3.2019
This is not a sponsored post. I requested a beta access for this site called Stackbit a while back, got my invite the other day, and thought it was a darn fine idea that's relevant to us web nerds — particularly those of us who spin up a lot of JAMstack sites.
I'm a big fan of the whole idea...
Did you know that CSS Custom Properties can handle images too?
27.2.2019
So you might be aware of CSS Custom Properties that let you set a variable, such as a theme color, and then apply it to multiple classes like this:
:root {
--theme: #777;
}
.alert {
background: var(—-theme);
}
.button {
background: var(—-theme);
}
Well, I had seen this pattern so often...
Putting the Flexbox Albatross to Real Use
24.1.2019
If you hadn't seen it, Heydon posted a rather clever flexbox layout pattern that, in a sense, mimics what you could do with a container query by forcing an element to stack at a certain container width. I was particularly interested, as I was fighting a little layout situation at the time I...