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Getting to Grips with the Airtable API
14.2.2019
The Airtable web app is pretty neat. You can use it like a spreadsheet but it’s useful for all sorts of other things too. The neatest thing about it for me is that it has an API so that you can treat it like a database.
I’ve been thinking about making weekly notes for the different teams I work...
The Smart Ways to Correct Mistakes in Git
14.2.2019
The world of software development offers an infinite amount of ways to mess up: deleting the wrong things, coding into dead ends, littering commit messages with typos, are a mere few of the plentitude.
Fortunately, however, we have a wonderful safety net under our feet in the form of Git when...
Avoiding those dang cannot read property of undefined errors
13.2.2019
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'foo' of undefined. The dreaded error we all hit at some point in JavaScript development. Could be an empty state from an API that returns differently than you expected. Could be something else. We don’t know because the error itself is so general...
A Site for Front-End Development Conferences (Built with 11ty on Netlify)
12.2.2019
I built a new little site! It's a site for listing upcoming conferences in the world of front-end web design and development. In years past (like 2017), Sarah Drasner took up this daunting job. We used a form for new conference submissions, but it was still a rather manual task of basically...
Quick! What’s the Difference Between Flexbox and Grid?
12.2.2019
Let's go rapid fire and try to answer this question with quick points rather than long explanations. There are a lot of similarities between flexbox and grid, starting with the fact that they are used for layout and much more powerful than any layout technique that came before them. They...
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the JavaScript
12.2.2019
Around this time last year, I wrote an article about the JavaScript learning landscape. Within that article, you’ll find my grand plans to learn JavaScript — complete with a link to a CodePen Collection I started for tracking my progress, and it even got dozens of comments cheering me on.
Like most...
Where Do You Nest Your Sass Breakpoints?
11.2.2019
I love nesting my @media query breakpoints. It's perhaps the most important feature of Sass to me. Maybe I pick a method and do it like this:
.element {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 100px 1fr;
@include breakpoint(baby-bear) {
display: block;
}
}
That's straightforward enough....
Using Dotfiles for Managing Development and Many Other Magical Things
8.2.2019
Howdy folks! 🎉 I'm Simon Owen, and over the years, I've loved being a part of and learning from the dotfiles community. I spend a lot of time teaching developers and running workshops. In those sessions, demonstrating how I set up my development environment is often one of things that folks...
Come to An Event Apart in 2019
7.2.2019
The 2019 season for An Event Apart (the premiere web and interaction design conference) is about to kick off!
Seattle - March 4–6, 2019
Boston - May 6–8, 2019
Washington DC - July 29–31, 2019
Chicago - August 26–28, 2019
Denver - October 28–30, 2019
San Francisco - December 9–11...
Where Do You Learn HTML & CSS in 2019?
7.2.2019
The topic of how accessible it is for newbies and seasoned developers alike to learn CSS has been gaining steam as the complexity of the tools around it has become skewed more toward traditional programming. Rachel Andrew has much more to say about this in her post, HTML, CSS and our vanishing...
Animate a Blob of Text with SVG and Text Clipping
6.2.2019
I came across this neat little animation in a designer newsletter — unfortunately, I lost track of the source, so please give a shout out if you recognize it! In it, a block of text appears to bleed into view with a swirl of colors, then goes out the same way it came in. It’s a slick effect and...
Using the Little-Known CSS element() Function to Create a Minimap Navigator
5.2.2019
W3C’s CSS Working Group often gives us brilliant CSS features to experiment with. Sometimes we come across something so cool that sticks a grin on our face, but it vanishes right away because we think, “that’s great, but what do I do with it?” The element() function was like that for me. It’s a...
What Hooks Mean for Vue
4.2.2019
Not to be confused with Lifecycle Hooks, Hooks were introduced in React in v16.7.0-alpha, and a proof of concept was released for Vue a few days after. Even though it was proposed by React, it’s actually an important composition mechanism that has benefits across JavaScript framework ecosystems,...
React’s Experimental Suspense API Will Rock for Fallback UI During Data Fetches
2.2.2019
Most web applications built today receive data from an API. When fetching that data, we have to take certain situations into consideration where the data might not have been received. Perhaps it was a lost connection. Maybe it was the endpoint was changed. Who knows. Whatever the issue, it's...
Using Artificial Intelligence to Generate Alt Text on Images
1.2.2019
Web developers and content editors alike often forget or ignore one of the most important parts of making a website accessible and SEO performant: image alt text. You know, that seemingly small image attribute that describes an image:
<img src="/cute/sloth/image.jpg" alt="A brown baby sloth...
The Many Ways to Change an SVG Fill on Hover (and When to Use Them)
31.1.2019
SVG is a great format for icons. Vector formats look crisp and razor sharp, no matter the size or device — and we get tons of design control when using them inline.
SVG also gives us another powerful feature: the ability to manipulate their properties with CSS. As a result, we can make quick...
Forms that Move With You with Wufoo
31.1.2019
I've been into the idea of JAMstack lately. In fact, it was at the inaugural JAMstack_conf that I gave a talked called The All-Powerful Font-End Developer. My overall point there was that there are all these services that we can leverage as front-end developers to build complete websites without...
The Importance of One-on-Ones
30.1.2019
What do we mean by 1:1 (pronounced one-on-one)? This is typically a private conversation between an Engineering Manager/Lead and their Employee. I personally have been a Lead, a Manager, and also an Independent Contributor/Software Engineer, so I’ve sat at each side of the table. I’ve both...
Slide an Image to Reveal Text with CSS Animations
29.1.2019
I want to take a closer look at the CSS animation property and walk through an effect that I used on my own portfolio website: making text appear from behind a moving object. Here’s an isolated example if you’d like to see the final product.
Here’s what we're going to work with:
See the...
The Slow and Steady Refactor
28.1.2019
Over the past week or so, I’ve been reading Refactoring by Martin Fowler and it’s all about how to make sweeping changes to a large codebase in a way that doesn’t cause everything to break. I bring this up because there’s a lot of really good notes in this book that have challenged my recent...