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JavaScript Labels
15.1.2019
No matter how long you’ve been a JavaScript developer, there will always be language features that you didn’t know about until you saw them in a fringe piece of code. Your reaction generally is a bit like: One of those features I see developers quizically trying to figure out...
An Initial Implementation of clip-path: path();
24.12.2018
One thing that has long surprised (and saddened) me is that the clip-path property, as awesome as it is, only takes a few values. The circle() and ellipse() functions are nice, but hiding overflows and rounding with border-radius generally helps there already. Perhaps the most useful value...
Force Download with JavaScript
24.12.2018
Force download scripts have been an important part of internet usability for a long time.  I can attest to that by the number of times I’ve implemented this feature on the server side and the popularity of my PHP Force Download post, even to this day.  With the web world having...
The Fragmented, But Evolving State of CSS-in-JS
20.12.2018
TLDR: The CSS-in-JS community has converged on a consistent API.
Not so long ago, a Facebook engineer compiled a list of the available CSS-in-JS methodologies. It wasn’t short:
aphrodite, babel-plugin-css-in-js, babel-plugin-pre-style, bloody-react-styled, classy, csjs, css-constructor, css-light...
Google Fonts and font-display
19.12.2018
The font-display descriptor in @font-face blocks is really great. It goes a long way, all by itself, for improving the perceived performance of web font loading. Loading web fonts is tricky stuff and having a tool like this that works as well as it does is a big deal for the web.
It's such a...
Build a Secure Node.js Application with JavaScript Async Await Using Hapi
18.12.2018
At the core of the JavaScript language is its asynchronous programming model. Unfortunately, dealing with callback functions has long been a source of frustration for many developers. JavaScript Pr
Rendering Lists Using React Virtualized
13.12.2018
Working with data in React is relatively easy because React is designed to handle data as state. The hassle begins when the amount of data you need to consume becomes massive. For example, say you have to handle a dataset which is between 500-1,000 records. This can result in massive loads and lead...
Web Designs That Feel Like Ancient History, but Are More Recent Than You Think
12.12.2018
Flickr announced not long ago that they are limiting free accounts to 1,000 photos. I don't particularly mind that (because it seems like sound business sense), although it is a bit sad that a ton of photos will be nuked from the internet. I imagine the Internet Archive will swoop in and get most...
Build a To-Do application Using Django and React
6.12.2018
Web development has grown rapidly over the last decade, and there's a long list of frameworks to choose from when building your projects. A developer’s decision on what framework(s) to use for a p
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...
Get Viewport Lines and Columns in CodeMirror
27.11.2018
CodeMirror is an amazing utility for presenting code in a browser environment. Syntax highlighting, widgets, and a number of advanced functions make it a unique, useful tool. When using CodeMirror inside the Firefox DevTools debugger, I found that adding hundreds of column breakpoint widgets...
Replace Last Command in Shell
26.11.2018
Whether I fat-finger a command or my MacBook Pro keyboard’s keys don’t want to respond like they should, I’m frequently misspelling commands. What’s more frustrating is that many of these commands are long, taking making fixing theme time-consuming. Luckily a Twitter...
Scrolling Gradient
13.7.2018
If you want a gradient that changes as you scroll down a very long page, you can create a gradient with a bunch of color stops, apply it to the body and it will do just that.
But, what if you don't want a perfectly vertical gradient? Like you want just the top left corner to change color? Mike...
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...
Prototyping in the Browser
5.7.2018
Prototyping animations and interactions is vital for a number of reasons: they can make your interface feel deceptively fast, they can help focus the user on a specific task, and they can provide a better sense of the current state of your application. Is data being loaded? Is something...
Frustration
31.5.2018
Jeremy Keith talks about a couple of recent frustrating moments in his life. One regarding a musical instrument, one involving a build process:
That feeling of frustration I get from having wiring issues with a musical instrument is the same feeling I get whenever something goes awry with my...
Learning Gutenberg: Series Introduction
21.5.2018
Hey CSS-Tricksters! 👋 We have a special long-form series we’re kicking off here totally dedicated to Gutenberg, a major change to the WordPress editor. I’ve invited a dynamic duo of authors to bring you this series, which will bring you up to speed on what Gutenberg is, what it can do...
How React Reconciliation Works
17.5.2018
React is fast! Some of that speed comes from updating only the parts of the DOM that need it. Less for you to worry about and a speed gain to boot. As long as you understand the workings of setState(), you should be good to go. However, it’s also important to familiarize yourself with how this...
Personalize Your UX By Location Using IPstack's Geolocation
15.5.2018
Which site is better? This is the age-long question that many website owners are still trying to answer so they can dominate their niche.
Take a look at Google Search — there's no denying th
Where Lines Break is Complicated. Here’s all the Related CSS and HTML.
9.5.2018
Say you have a really long word within some text inside an element that isn't wide enough to hold it. A common cause of that is a long URL finding it's way into copy. What happens? It depends on the CSS. How that CSS is controlling the layout and what the CSS is telling the text to do.
This...