Web Development + Follow

There is a huge and ever-widening gap between the devices we use to make the web and the devices most people use to consume it. It’s also no secret that the average size of a website is huge, and it’s only going to get larger. What can you do about this? Get your hands on a craptop and …

I’ve always like Jeremy’s categorization of developer tools: I’ve mentioned two categories of tools for web development. I still don’t know quite what to call these categories. Internal and external? Developer-facing and user-facing? The first category covers things like build tools, version control, transpilers, pre-processers, and linters. These are tools that live on your machine—or …

I’ve built WordPress websites for I don’t know how long now, but suffice to say I’ve relied on it for a bulk of the work I do as a freelance front-ender. And in that time, I’ve used Jetpack on a good number of them for things like site backups, real-time monitoring, and security scans, among …

I recently started university and, before buying a MacBook Air (the M1 chips are amazing by the way), I had to use an iPad Pro for class. However, being a Computer Science student meant I had to find a way to use it for programming. Therefore, I started my quest to find the best way …

Perhaps the most basic and obvious use of CSS custom properties is design tokens. Colors, fonts, spacings, timings, and other atomic bits of design that you can pull from as you design a site. If you pretty much only pull values from design tokens, you’ll be headed toward clean design and that consistent professional look …

I was just going on about how many awesome little helper sites there are out there, and now I’ve ran across another wonderful little hive of them. Sébastien Noël, under the name fffuel, has created a whole bunch of great ones like: ssshape: an SVG blob generator nnnoise: a background noise texture generator cccolor: a …

As I write this, world leaders are gathering in Glasgow for COP26, the international climate change conference, in the attempt to halt (or at least slow down) catastrophic climate change by pledging to end their countries’ dependence on fossil fuels. Only time will tell whether they will succeed (spoiler: it’s not looking good), but one …

Šta je Vue.js? Vue.js se izgovara /vjuː/, slično kao engleska reč view, a u oficijelnoj dokumentaciji kažu za njega da je progresivni JavaScript framework za izradu korisničkog interfejsa. “Progressive framework for building user interfaces”. Dokumentacija Vue.js Vue.js se smatra da je jedan od najjednostavnijih JavaScript framework-a, koji je veoma brz, ima malu veličinu i veoma …

John James Jacoby: I recently noticed that animations in Safari were stuttering pretty badly on my M1 powered 2020 MacBook Air, and dove in to figure out why. The why: This wasn’t a bug. This was a feature. By default, macOS Monterey enables “Low power mode” on Battery power and disables it when using a Power …

I’d like to tell you something not to do to make your website better. Don’t add any third-party scripts to your site. That may sound extreme, but at one time it would’ve been common sense. On today’s modern web it sounds like advice from a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nut. But just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get …

I saw Bartosz Ciechanowski’s “Curves and Surfaces” going around the other day and was like, oh hey, this is the same fella that did that other amazingly interactive blog post on the Internal Combustion Engine the other day. I feel like I pretty much get how engines work now because of that blog post. Then …

A few years ago, there was this French book publisher. They specialize in technical books and published an author who wrote a book about CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery. The final version, however, a glaring typo on the cover where “HTML5” was displayed as “HTLM5.” Read that twice. Yes. “HTLM5.” (Note that it was also missing …

Websites change. Healthy codebases are constantly being updated. Legacy code dies when it eventually goes down with the ship. Recognizing that my code is transient allows me to be more practical about my code and what guides my decision-making as I author it.

Some ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ star rating systems aren’t always exactly even stars. Say you want to support rating something 2.25 stars. To do that you could “fill” the shape of the stars partially. I like this idea by Samuel Kraft. The tricky part is: The final step is making the overlay div only affect the star SVGs …

Videos appeal to humans in a way no other form of the content does. A video includes motion, music, still images, text, speech, and a few other elements, all of which combine to deliver engagement like never before. According to research, users spend 88% more time on a website with videos, and video content receives …

I think if you’re a DevOps person in any capacity, the utility of Docker is very clear. Your things run in containers that are identical everywhere. Assuming Docker is working/running, the code will execute in a reliably consistent way whether that is Docker running on some developer’s computer, or a sky computer. The (massive) appeal …

In nature, no two things are ever the same. Life is imperfect, unpredictable, and beautiful. We can walk through the same forest every day and see differently colored leaves. We can look up at the clouds every minute and watch a whole new formation. The physical world is transient and ever-changing. What if our designs …

What is one thing people can do to make their website better? Exactly what you want to build! Ask yourself: What drew you to development in the beginning? Is there an experimental API that you’ve been wanting to try out? What could you spend all night hacking away at, just for the fun of it? …

I was playing this game on Apple Arcade the other day called wurdweb. It’s a fun little game! Little touches like the little shape dudes that walk around the screen (but otherwise don’t do anything) give it a lot of character. I kinda want little shape dudes that walk around on websites. But another UI …

This article is part of our “Advanced Git” series. Be sure to follow us on Twitter or sign up for our newsletter to hear about future articles! The “Reflog” is one of Git’s lesser-known features—but one that can be extremely helpful. Some people refer to it as a “safety net,” while I like to think …

Cloudinary (the media hosting and optimization service) has a brand new version (v3) of its WordPress plugin that has really nailed it. First, a high-level look at the biggest things this plugin does: It takes over your media handling. Images and video are served by Cloudinary instead of your own server, which is good for …

Apple Music has this “Spatial Audio” feature where the direction of the music in your headphones is based on the location of the device. It’s tough to explain just how neat it is. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I opened up the Apple Music app and saw a featured playlist of …

This is a neat idea for a research project. The big map is fun, but the research had some tidbits in it worth looking at. The average favicon network request takes 130ms, at least from our speedy cloud instance. Fast, but not that fast, particularly for a file that nearly every website in the world …

I’ve got some blind spots in CSS-related performance things. One example is the will-change property. It’s a good name. You’re telling the browser some particular property (or the scroll-position or content) uh, will, change: But is that important to do? I don’t know. The point, as I understand it, is that it will kick .el …

I love little touches that make a website feel like more than just a static document. What if web content wouldn’t just “appear” when a page loaded, but instead popped, slid, faded, or spun into place? It might be a stretch to say that movements like this are always useful, though in some cases they …

The browser has long been a medium for art and design. From Lynn Fisher’s joyful A Single Div creations to Diana Smith’s staggeringly detailed CSS paintings, wildly creative, highly skilled developers have — over the years — continuously pushed web technologies to their limits and crafted innovative, inspiring visuals. CSS, however, has never really had …

Tyler Sticka digs in here in the best possible way: by making a test page and literally measuring performance. Maybe 1,000 icons is a little bit of an edge case, but hey, 250 rows of data with four icons in each gets you there. Tyler covers the nuances carefully in the post. The different techniques …

Many business websites need a multilingual setup. As with anything development-related, implementing one in an easy, efficient, and maintainable way is desirable. Designing and developing to be ready for multiple languages, whether it happens right at launch or is expected to happen at any point in the future, is smart. Changing the language and content …

Inspired by Eva PenzeyMoog’s new book, Jeremy highlights the widespread user tracking situation in this industry: There was a line that really stood out to me: The idea that it’s alright to do whatever unethical thing is currently the industry norm is widespread in tech, and dangerous. It stood out to me because I had been thinking …

A reader wrote to me the other day asking about this bit of CSS they came across in Wikipedia’s Common.css: What’s that @noflip business? That’s what they are calling a “CSS decorator” and I think that’s a fine term for it. Really they are just CSS comments, but clearly there is more going on here as …