Articles Tagged style guides

You can have the best open source project in the world but, if it doesn’t have good documentation, chances are it’ll never take off. In the office, good documentation could save you having to repeatedly answer the same questions. Documentation ensures that people can figure out how things work if key employees decide to leave the company or change roles. Well documented coding guidelines help bring consistency to a codebase.

If you’re writing long-form text, Markdown is clearly a great … Read article “Front-End Documentation, Style Guides and the Rise of MDX”

I’ve been having the time of my life with React lately. But on my journey, I’ve had a hard time finding good code style guidelines to keep the mix of JSX and JS clean and readable. I’ve been coming up with my own style guides that I’d love to share. Maybe these will be useful to you and, of course, feel free to share similar guidelines in the comment thread below.… Read article “React Code Style Guide”

I strongly believe that the documentation should be kept as close to the code as possible. Based on my experience, that’s the only option that works well in the long term. External documents, notes, and wikis all eventually get outdated, forgotten, and lost.

Documentation is a topic that always bugs me. Working on poorly documented codebase is a ticking bomb. It makes the onboarding process a tedious experience. Another way to think of bad documentation is that it helps foster … Read article “The Options for Programmatically Documenting CSS”

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.… Read article “Build a Style Guide Straight from Sass”

The following is a guest post by Nick Berens, a senior front-end developer at wisnet.com. Nick and his team have been building websites through custom style guides for years. Over those years, Nick has been building and evolving a tool to help with this process. I’ll let Nick explain both the philosophy and the tool.… Read article “Style Guide Driven Development with Atomic Docs”

You write CSS. Probably a lot of CSS. And you make mistakes. Probably a lot of mistakes. Somebody needs to stop you from making mistakes in your CSS.

Sometimes your mistake is a real bug. Sometimes it’s just sloppy, inconsistent, or unclear coding style. Some of them may seem trivial at first (depending on your temperament), but they become patently important as the codebase grows and ages, as more people stick their hands in it and do ugly things. Things … Read article “Lint your CSS with stylelint”