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Building products for users is a balance between your vision of what your product can do for them, and refining that vision based on their feedback. If you’re really a customer-focused company, you’re listening. And more, you’re making it easy for customers to talk to you. A good user feedback pipeline takes software — but …

When I wrote the “book” The Greatest CSS Tricks Vol. I, I put “book” in quotes because there wasn’t anything terribly book-like about it. The only way you could read it was online, logged into this website, with an MVP supporter membership. No printed version, not even digital copies you might expect from a digital …

The past year has seen a healthy debate around the term ‘Jamstack’ as the definition gets stretched to include new use cases. I recently posted my take on a Jamstack definition in “Static vs. Dynamic vs. Jamstack: Where’s The Line?” In this article, I want to look at the evolution of Jamstack and what that …

A single-serving website from Alexander Vishnyakov for testing if it’s valid to put any particular HTML element within another type of HTML element. Kinda neat to have a quick reference for this. Some combinations feel fairly obvious: can you put a <video> inside an <input>? Uh, no. Some are trickier: can you put a <div> …

Adding borders to complex shapes is a pain, but rounding the corner of complex shapes is a nightmare! Luckily, the CSS Paint API is here to the rescue! That’s what we’re going to look at as part of this “Exploring the CSS Paint API” series.

It’s not uncommon for my front-end workflow to go something like this: Work on thing. See that thing in an automatically refreshed browser. See something wrong with that thing. Inspect and correct the thing in DevTools. Apply the correct code in my code editor. See that correct code automatically refreshed in the browser. I know, …

I only half-jokingly refer to the CSS-in-JS world as CSS-in-React. Many of the libraries listed below theoretically work in non-React situations — they generally call that “framework-agnostic”) — but I’d guess the vast majority of their usage is on React projects. That’s because React, despite being a UI-focused library, has no particular blessed styling solution. …

We’re going to create a contact form with Next.js and Netlify that displays a confirmation screen and features enhanced spam detection. Next.js is a powerful React framework for developing performant React applications that scale. By integrating a Next.js site with Netlify’s technology, we can quickly get a working contact form up and running without having …

Do you know what to use the @ sign for something other than email addresses and Twitter handles? I do! —  Pawel Grzybek notes how some old physical typewriters had an “Arroba” on them which was represented with the @ sign. Atkinson Hyperlegible Font — The Braille Institute is giving away this font that “focuses …

No matter what stage you’re at as a developer, the tasks we complete—whether big or small—make a huge impact in our personal and professional growth. Unfortunately, those tasks aren’t always recognized because they can easily get lost in the sea of other things that need to get done. The unnoticed tasks we do fall under …

I didn’t realize the support for @supports determining selector support was so good! I usually think of @supports as a way to test for property: value pair support. But with the selector() function, we can test for selector support as well. It looks like this:

Hey folks! Elad reached out to me to show me his new CSS reset project called the-new-css-reset. It’s quite interesting! I thought a neat way to share it with you is not only to point you toward it, but to ask Elad some questions about it for your reading pleasure.

We aren’t supposed to be doing any sort of decision-making based on browser User-Agent Strings. But, ya know, collectively, we do. Karl Dubost notes that there is a significant change coming to them, notably moving the version integer past two digits: According to the Firefox release calendar, during the first quarter of 2022 (probably March), Firefox …

I believe that a traditional WordPress theme should be able to work as effectively as a static site or a headless web app. The overwhelming majority of WordPress websites are built with a good ol’ fashioned WordPress theme. Most of them even have good caching layers, and dependency optimizations that make these sites run reasonably …

I love CSS Grid. I love how, with just a few lines of code, we can achieve fully responsive grid layouts, often without any media queries at all. I’m quite comfortable wrangling CSS Grid to produce interesting layouts, while keeping the HTML markup clean and simple. But recently, I was presented with a unique UI …

One way to work with Custom Properties is to think of them as design tokens. Colors, spacings, fonts, and whatnot. You set them at the root of the page and use them throughout your CSS. Very useful, and the classic use case for not only Custom Properties but for preprocessor variables for the last one …

Browse through SaaS communities on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Discord, you name it and you’ll see a common theme appear in many of them. That theme can go by many names: BI, analytics, insights and so on. It’s natural, we do business, collect data, we succeed or fail. We want to look into all of that, …

Web-browser for research that helps programmers think clearly. With Bonsai, rather than being like, I’m going to go use my web browser now, you hit Option + Space and it brings up a browser. It’s either full-screen or a very minimal float-over-everything window. You can visually organize things into Workspaces. I can see it being …

As someone just sittin’ back watching CSS evolve, it feels like we’re at one of the hottest moments of innovation in CSS history. It was really something when we got flexbox across all browsers, and not terribly long after, grid. They changed the game from CSS feeling like an awkward collection of tricks to something …

Ahmad Shadeed blogs the sentiment that we might not need to lean on position: absolute as much as we might have in the past. For one thing: stacking elements. For example, if you have a stack of elements that should all go on top of each other…

Which new framework should I learn this year? Is it time to ditch my CMS? What tools should I pick up if I want to scale my site to an audience of millions? The 2021 Jamstack Community Survey is here with answers to those questions and more.  For the past two years, Netlify has conducted …

Google Analytics is powerful analytics software. A common way to use it is to just slap the JavaScript snippet on every page template you have and let it collect basic data about unique visitors and pageviews and such. That’s useful, but it’s also the bare minimum. Say there is an important button on your site. …

Why would a company promote a native app over their perfectly usable website? We’d have to ask them, I suppose. But it’s hard not to see this push to native as a matter of priorities: that these companies consider native applications worthy of their limited time, resources, and money. They’re a worthy investment, to hear these banners …

The README for Cash is straightforward: Cash is an absurdly small jQuery alternative for modern browsers (IE11+) that provides jQuery-style syntax for manipulating the DOM. Utilizing modern browser features to minimize the codebase, developers can use the familiar chainable methods at a fraction of the file size. 100% feature parity with jQuery isn’t a goal, …

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 the next articles! In this third installment of our “Advanced Git” series, we’ll look at pull requests — a great feature which helps both small and larger teams of developers. …

A good essay from Jean Yang. What I mean by developer experience is the sum total of how developers interface with their tools, end-to-end, day-in and day-out. Sure, there’s more focus than ever on how developers use and adopt tools, and there are entire talks and panels devoted to the topic of so-called “DX” — yet large parts …

I like the pushback from Katie Kodes here. I’ve said in the past that I don’t think server-side languages haven’t quite nailed “building in components” as well as JavaScript has, but hey, this is a good point:

Today we will be learning how to build a tennis trivia app using Next.js and Netlify. This technology stack has become my go-to on many projects. It allows for rapid development and easy deployment. Without further ado let’s jump in!

I saw this blog post the other day: 58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics. That’s an enticing title to me. I’ve had Google Analytics on this site literally from the day I launched it. While we tend to see some small growth each year, I’m also aware that the ad-blocking …

There comes a time on a project when it’s worth investing in tooling to protect the codebase. I’m not sure how to articulate when, but it’s somewhere after the project has proven to be something long-term and rough edges are starting to show, and before things feel like a complete mess. Avoid premature optimization but …