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How I’ve Improved as a Web Developer (and a Person) in 2019
We’re sliding into the roaring twenties of the twenty-first century (cue Jazz music 🎷). It’s important that you and I, as responsible people, follow the tradition of looking back on the past year and reflect on the things that went right and wrong in the hopes of becoming the best version of ourselves in the year ahead.
I never do New Year’s resolutions, except for when I was ten years old and wanted to open a local self-run detective agency … Read article
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Techniques for Rendering Text with WebGL
As is the rule in WebGL, anything that seems like it should be simple is actually quite complicated. Drawing lines, debugging shaders, text rendering… they are all damn hard to do well in WebGL.
Isn’t that weird? WebGL doesn't have a built-in function for rendering text. Although text seems like the most basic of functionalities. When it comes down to actually rendering it, things get complicated. How do you account for the immense amount of glyphs for every … Read article
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The Rising Complexity of JAMstack Sites and How to Manage Them
When you add anything with user-generated content or dynamic data to a static site, the complexity of the build process can become comparable to launching a monolithic CMS. How can we add rich content to static sites without stitching together multiple third-party services?… Read article
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Filtering Lists Dynamically With Vue on the Server Side is Easier Than You’d Think
I recently attended the ARTIFACT conference in Austin, TX, and was inspired by a few talks about accessibility through the lens of site performance. It became clear to me that there is this tendency to rely on big JavaScript frameworks to handle the work — like React, Vue, and Angular — but that can be overkill in some cases. That is, negatively affecting site performance, and thus accessibility. At the same time, these frameworks can make development easier and more … Read article
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The New Good Ol’ Days
Eighteen years into this game, I love to reminisce back to the good ol’ days of the early to mid-2000s when there was an explosion of creativity on the web. It felt fresh and unbridled, with boundaries expected to be pushed at every turn, and they were. This was mainly down to one thing, the thing of nightmares to some, Flash! It, of course, had some big inherent flaws, but love it or hate it, certainly helped pave the way… Read article
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Everything and Nothing
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 getting there.
I jumped at the opportunity to write up my thoughts on this because in general, I am delighted to dive into a conversation … Read article
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Smarter Design Systems Tools
What has me really excited about building websites is largely around design systems and the design tools we use to build them. Though, design systems are certainly not limited to websites.… Read article
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The future is bright, because the future is static
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 me in a retrospective mood, too, and the question “What about building websites has you interested this year?“ has only encouraged that.
When I first … Read article
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The Typed Object Model
I help write technical documentation and one feature I've been writing about this year that has really stood out is the Typed Object Model (or Typed OM). If you haven't come across it yet you would be forgiven as it's pretty new. It falls under the CSS Houdini suite of API's and on the surface seems the least exciting. However, it underpins all of them and will eventually change how we view CSS as a language.
It allows for typing… Read article
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No, Absolutely Not
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 if you don't say no to the marketing department because you'll suddenly find yourself with eighteen different analytics scripts on your website. If you don't … Read article