Filters are an interesting way to deal with data rendering in Vue but are only useful in a small amount of cases. The first thing to understand about filters is that they aren't replacements for methods, computed values, or watchers, because filters don't transform the data, just the output that the user sees. As of Vue 2.0, there are no built-in filters, we need to construct them ourselves.

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Let's take a look at building something using Firebase and React. We'll be building something called Fun Food Friends, a web application for planning your next potluck, which hopefully feels like something rather "real world", in that you can imagine using these technologies in your own production projects. The big idea in this app is that you and your friends will be able to log in and be able to see and post information about what you're planning to bring to the potlock.

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I'm sure most of you understand how you work with a framework like Bootstrap, Foundation, or Materialize. You use their CSS and JavaScript. You also use their chunks of HTML, piecing together and applying classes as needed to do what you need to do.

You're on your own piecing the HTML together. That's good, because it's flexible. People use frameworks like this in all kinds of CMS's and backend systems. But what if you want to apply some structure to this, making actual components out of the components given to you in the framework?

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Last fall, our dev team wanted to get started with style guides. We had added a new member to the team, and as he was getting up to speed, we realized how lacking our project documentation was. If you've ever been a new developer on a team with weak documentation, you know how confusing it can be to try to familiarize yourself with a dozen projects without documentation.

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One thing that single div pieces rarely do is animate. If you can transform your div or one of its pseudo elements, that's fair (as Lynn Fisher does with her fantastic BB-8). But you cannot directly change the opacity or transform of the individual "elements" you create inside your div, since they are not actual DOM elements.

I am a big believer of trying something a little different and interesting to learn tools you otherwise might never learn. Working with the constraints of a single div might not be great for production work, but it can be a great exercise (and challenge) to stretch your skills in a fun way. In that spirit, we'll use this technique to explore how Custom Properties (CSS Variables) work and even provide us a path to animation inside our div.

Here's a question I got the other day?

Would you suggest icon fonts or inline SVGs for a complex single page application? And are there specific accessibility concerns for either? Accessibility is especially important for us because schools use our products. I ask because we are currently in the process of unifying and setting up an icon system.

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As front-end developers, we're well aware that different browsers (and versions) support different web platform features. We make choices based on the support of those features balanced with what analytics tell us about what browsers our users use. For example, if our Google Analytics tell us only 0.01% of users are left on IE 9, perhaps we'll decide it's OK to start using Flexbox and .classList.

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In my previous article, which shall now retroactively be known as Managing State in CSS with Reusable JavaScript Functions - Part 1, we created a powerful reusable function which allows us to quickly add, remove and toggle stateful classes via click.

One of the reasons I wanted to share this approach was to see what kind of response it would generate. Since then I've received some interesting feedback from other developers, with some raising valid shortcomings about this approach that would have never otherwise occurred to me.

In this article, I'll be providing some solutions to these shortcomings, as well as baking in more features and general improvements to make our reusable function even more powerful.

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Last month Chris Coyier wrote a post investigating the question, "When Does a Project Need React?" In other words, when do the benefits of using React (acting as a stand-in for data-driven web frameworks in general), rather than server-side templates and jQuery, outweigh the added complexity of setting up the requisite tooling, build process, dependencies, etc.? A week later, Sacha Greif wrote a counterpoint post arguing why you should always use such a framework for every type of web project. His points included future-proofing, simplified workflow from project to project (a single architecture; no need to keep up with multiple types of project structures), and improved user experience because of client-side re-rendering, even when the content doesn't change very often.

In this pair of posts, I delve into a middle ground: writing reactive-style UI's in plain old JavaScript - no frameworks, no preprocessors.

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This last week at Google I/O, Addy Osmani announced some amazing developer resources for creating Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) that prioritize performance with JavaScript Frameworks.

This was truly a team effort- a lot of people worked on these projects to get them going, and it's a really valuable contribution to the community. A lot of people want better performance for their framework of choice but can't get buy-in for time and resources to devote to this kind of endeavor. The ability to start with a baseline of high performance and good lighthouse scores is incredibly valuable, allowing developers to enjoy both the productivity and ergonomics of exciting frameworks, without sacrificing speed and user experience.

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There are many ways to make icons for a website. Inline SVG is scalable, easy to modify with CSS, and can even be animated. If you're interested in learning more about the merits of using inline SVG, I recommend reading Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts. With ever increasing browser support, there's never been a better time to start working with SVGs. Snap Animation States is a JavaScript plugin built around Snap.svg to help create and extend icon libraries with scaleable, editable SVG icons. Snap Animation States makes it easy to load and animate those SVGs with a simple schema.

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I was asked to do a little session on this the other day. I'd say I'm underqualified to answer the question, as is any single person. If you really needed hard answers to this question, you'd probably look to aggregate data of survey results from lots of developers.

I am a little qualified though. Aside from running this site which requires me to think about front end development every day and exposes me to lots of conversations about front end development, I am an active developer myself. I work on CodePen, which is quite a hive of front end developers. I also talk about it every week on ShopTalk Show with a wide variety of guests, and I get to travel all around going to conferences largely focused on front end development.

So let me take a stab at it.

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