Emcee Tips for a Conference or Meetup
November 21st, 2019
There are some great resources out there to help conference speakers give better talks, but fewer for people who are preparing to take on the role of emcee at meetup or conference. I’ve been fortunate enough to emcee conferences more than 20 times now, most recently JAMstack_conf which I help organize. I also enjoy hosting…
Build your own React
November 20th, 2019
Wowza! Rodrigo Pombo’s article about how to build React from scratch is fantastic, not only because it’s well written, but because of the outstanding interaction design: each line in the code examples be highlighted and explored in further detail as you scroll down the page. This makes it super easy to walk through each process…
Oh, the Places JavaScript Will Go
November 19th, 2019
I tend to be pretty vocal about the problems client-side JavaScript cause from a performance perspective. We’re shipping more JavaScript than ever to our user’s devices and the result is increasingly brittle and resource-intensive experiences. It’s… not great. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like JavaScript. On the contrary, I enjoy working in JavaScript quite…
The Communal Cycle of Sharing
November 18th, 2019
What I’m interested in this year is how we’re continuing to expand on tools, services, and shared side projects to collectively guide where we take the web next, and the way we’re sharing that. So many other mediums—mostly analog ones—have been around for ages and have a deeper history. In the grand scheme of things,…
The Kind of Development I Like
November 18th, 2019
I’m turning 40 next year (yikes!) and even though I’ve been making websites for over 25 years, I feel like I’m finally beginning to understand the kind of development I like. Expectedly, these are not new revelations and my views can be summed up by two older Computer Science adages that pre-date my career. Composition…
Ways to Organize and Prepare Images for a Blur-Up Effect Using Gatsby
November 18th, 2019
Gatsby does a great job processing and handling images. For example, it helps you save time with image optimization because you don’t have to manually optimize each image on your own. With plugins and some configuration, you can even set up image preloading and a technique called blur-up for your images using Gatsby. This helps…
An Early Look at the Vue 3 Composition API in the Wild
November 13th, 2019
I recently had an opportunity to try the new Vue Composition API in a real project to check where it might be useful and how we could use it in the future. Until now, when we were creating a new component we were using Options API. That API forced us to separate the component’s code…
Making an Audio Waveform Visualizer with Vanilla JavaScript
November 12th, 2019
As a UI designer, I’m constantly reminded of the value of knowing how to code. I pride myself on thinking of the developers on my team while designing user interfaces. But sometimes, I step on a technical landmine. A few years ago, as the design director of wsj.com, I was helping to re-design the Wall…
When to Use SVG vs. When to Use Canvas
November 12th, 2019
SVG and canvas are both technologies that can draw stuff in web browsers, so they are worth comparing and understanding when one is more suitable than the other. Even a light understanding of them makes the choice of choosing one over the other pretty clear. A little flat-color icon? That’s clearly SVG territory. An interactive…
scrapestack: An API for Scraping Sites
November 12th, 2019
Not every site has an API to access data from it. Most don’t, in fact. If you need to pull that data, one approach is to “scrape” it. That is, load the page in the web browser (that you automate), find what you are looking for in the DOM, and take it. You can do…