Everything and Nothing
November 22nd, 2019
I’ve been thinking about the question for a solid month now. What about building websites has you interested this year? The question pervaded my solitary thoughts and played in the background during my conversations. I’d love to just tell you the answer I’ve come to, but the more interesting part was my thought journey in…
How Building in the Open Can Change Our Industry
November 21st, 2019
I have to admit, I’m a developer who hasn’t built a website. When I first read Chris’s question, I sat in silence for at least a minute. Which technical topic did I want to discuss? A new library, programming language or best practice? Nothing, in particular, came to mind. Is that because I’m a new…
Embrace the Political
November 21st, 2019
The tech industry has long held the belief that technology is apolitical. People are flawed, but the machines? They are neutral. They are pure. This is ridiculous, of course. People make the machines. We write the algorithms that can’t recognize dark skin tones. We decide to downplay or ignore harassment on our platforms. There are…
Embracing the Universal Web
November 21st, 2019
There are constantly new features appearing in browsers—from subgrid to variable fonts to better developer tools. It’s a really great time to be re-thinking everything we know about design on the web. Responsive design has served us well over the years, but it’s still rooted in the limitations of the web from 2010. Ten years…
The future is bright, because the future is static
November 20th, 2019
I’ve been doing this web thing for money for 10 years this year and although I haven’t been around as long as some folks, I feel like I’ve seen a few cycles come and go now, so let’s say that hot new things are often cynically viewed, initially. This milestone of mine has also got…
No, Absolutely Not
November 19th, 2019
I think the difference between a junior and senior front-end developer isn’t in their understanding or familiarity with a particular tech stack, toolchain, or whether they can write flawless code. Instead, it all comes down to this: how they push back against bad ideas. What I’ve learned this year is that web performance will suffer…
The Best Cocktail in Town
November 18th, 2019
I admit I’ve held in a lot of pent-up frustration about the direction web development has taken the past few years. There is the complexity. It requires a steep learning curve. It focuses more on more configuration than it does development. That’s not exactly great news for folks like me who consider themselves to be…
The Trick to Animating the Dot on the Letter “i”
November 4th, 2019
This opens us up to some fun options to style or animate the dot of the letter independently from the stalk. Worried about accessibility? Don’t worry, we’ll cover that the best way we know-how. Let’s look at how to create and style these separate “letters,” and find out when they can be used, and when…
ImageKit.io: Image Optimization That Plugs Into Your Infrastructure
October 24th, 2019
Images are the most efficient means to showcase a product or service on a website. They make up for most of the visual content on our website. But, the more images a webpage has, the more bandwidth it consumes, affecting the page load speed – a raging factor having a significant impact on not just…
Why Are Accessible Websites so Hard to Build?
October 23rd, 2019
I was chatting with some front-end folks the other day about why so many companies struggle at making accessible websites. Why are accessible websites so hard to build? We learn about HTML, we make sure things are semantic and — voila! @— we have an accessible website. During the course of the conversation, someone mentioned…