Articles

Yonatan Doron wrote a post on Medium not long ago called "Art of Code — Why you should write more Pseudo Code." Love that title, as a fan of pseudo code myself. That is, writing "code" that describes something you want to do or communicate, but that isn't of any particular language and doesn't use any correct APIs or anything.

Taking this time to write commented pseudo code helps organize our thoughts and our motivation and plan the

… Read article

It's sorta sad by funny that that big Zoom vulnerability thing was ultimately related to web technology and not really the app itself.

There is this idea of custom protocols or "URL schemes." So, like gittower:// or dropbox:// or whatever. A native app can register them, then URLs that hit them get passed to the native app. iOS has "universal links" which are coming to the web apparently. (Atishay Jain has an excellent write-up on them.) But … Read article

Say you want to select an element when it doesn't have a certain class. That's what the :not() selector is for.

body:not(.home) {
  
}

But what if there are multiple classes you want to avoid?… Read article

In September 2018, I was just a few months into my journey of learning web development. As I'm sure is the case with many new developers, it was a big task for me to learn not only the basic skills required, but also keeping current with the fast-moving industry. Just as I was getting to the level where it felt as though I could build a simple website, I started to realize that it was only the first step.

Opening … Read article

There are an awful lot of libraries that want to help you animate things on the web. These aren't really libraries that help you with the syntax or the technology of animations, but rather are grab-and-use as-is libraries. Want to apply a class like "animate-flip-up" and watch an element, uhhh, flip up? These are the kind of libraries to look at.

I wholeheartedly think you should both 1) learn how to animate things in CSS by learning the syntax yourself … Read article

I recently drew up a wireframe for a code beautifier. The next day, I decided to turn it into a real tool. The whole project took less than two days to complete.

I'd been thinking about building a new code beautifier for a while. The idea isn't unique, but every time I use someone else's tool, I find myself reapplying the same settings and dodging advertisements every single time. 🤦🏻‍… Read article

I recently had the pleasure of joining Dave Rupert, Chris Coyier, and Chris Ferdinandi on the Shop Talk Show to talk about the upcoming ARTIFACT Conference (Austin, TX on Sept. 30 – Oct. 1, 2019). ARTIFACT is an intimate gathering of web designers and developers where we discuss ways to build web sites that work for everyone.

This isn’t our first rodeo! I started ARTIFACT back in 2013 with Christopher Schmitt and Ari Stiles (the team behind the legendary In … Read article

In this week's roundup: datepickers are giving keyboard users headaches, a new web component compiler that helps fight FOUC, we finally get our hands on styling list item markers, and four steps to getting webmentions on your site.

I’m assuming most of you have already heard about Gatsby, and at least loosely know that it’s basically a static site generator for React sites. It generally runs like this:

1. Data Sources → Pull data from anywhere.
2. Build → Generate your website with React and GraphQL.
3. Deploy → Send the site to any static site host.

What this typically means is that you can get your data from any recognizable data source — CMS, markdown, file systems and … Read article