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🔗 Notes from around the web

Responsive tables are a tricky thing to get right, but Bradley Taunt shows a few quick ways to make tables responsive with minimal CSS. Bradley shows how we can let folks scroll around the table with overflows, or how we can use CSS to make each table row into a card like this:

It’s a nifty trick similar to the one that Chris shared back in 2011… Read article

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👁 The Fates of Design Systems

[Robin]: I learned a very important lesson this week when it comes to design systems. It all began several months ago when I was pairing with a designer from a separate team, helping them work on a project, and trying to figure out which components from our React library can be used for their project and which would have to be entirely built from scratch.

The design … Read article

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🔗 Links from around the web

Here’s a neat CSS trick by Tobias Ahlin where he shows us how to make boxes with smoother box-shadows:

On the left is the box with a regular box-shadow, and on the right is the one that Tobias prefers which is made with multiple box-shadows stacked on top of one another. Pretty nifty stuff.

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Visual regression testing in design systems digs into a ton of great best … Read article

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🔗 Links from around the web

Amelia Wattenberger has written this wonderfully interactive piece about React Hooks and how they can clean up our code and remove all those troubling lifecycle events:

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Here’s a great post by Karolina Szczur on how to automatically compress images on pull requests. This is all possible with a GitHub action called image-actions where it will run through every image in your repo and optimize them as you … Read article

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🔗 Links from around the web

• Here’s a great post from Bastian Allgeier all about simplicity in web development. He writes about how things are getting more complicated and it might not be helpful for us all in the long run:

You want to build a JS file? Please update Webpack first. Oh, that new version of Webpack is no longer compatible with your Node version. Oh, your new Node version is no

… Read article

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🔗 Links around the web

• Firefox now blocks tracking third-party cookies and cryptomining by default.
• Ben Frain sets out to explain how to build a Progressive Web App from scratch.
• This animation right here is…a font? Weird!
• Here’s a fun CSS hack that shows the outline of every element on the page which makes things easier for designing layouts.
• Adam Silver details his beef with tooltips and some suggestions about how we might

… Read article

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[Robin]: There’s a part of any front-end codebase that’s like the core of a reactor—all the features in an application are dependent on this tiny amount of code; fragments and snippets that are the load-bearing posters of your codebase. That sounds obvious but in practice, it’s hard to see what’s load-bearing and what’s trash. Maybe the trash is load-bearing!

(That’s when you have some real design systems issues.)

The reason why I mention this … Read article

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📝 A Note on Note-Taking

(Robin) When a codebase is still new and unfamiliar (and scary!) one of the best ways to learn about it is by taking copious notes. At Gusto, we take extensive notes of what features we’d like to ship next, what problems we might come across, and how we should tackle refactoring a component.

Note taking for our team is important because up until pretty recently the difficulties of our … Read article

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📝 From the Blog The Differing Perspectives on CSS-in-JS

Drama! Feelings! Muuuuurder! Okay, that last one not so much. But folks tend to have BIG opinions when it comes to styling things with JavaScript—whether that’s with CSS Modules, emotion or any other system that lets you write CSS within a JavaScript file.

So in this post, Chris thankfully breaks down the who, what, and why of CSS-in-JS and tries to rid it of all … Read article

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[Chris]: I did a little reflection thread the other day where I went into some of the variety of sites I've worked on in my career. I've worked on some eCommerce sites. I've worked on brochure sites. I've worked on sites that were about as "big web app" as you get. I've worked on blogs and content-focused sites.

The tech behind the sites varied too, and it doesn't always match up how you think … Read article