Web Development + Follow

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 …

Blog posts that get into the whole “how to think like a front-end developer” vibe are my favorite. Michelle Barker nails that in this post, and does it without sharing a line of code! We simply can no longer design and develop only for “optimal” content or browsing conditions. Instead, we must embrace the inherent …

vanilla-extract is a new framework-agnostic CSS-in-TypeScript library. It’s a lightweight, robust, and intuitive way to write your styles. vanilla-extract isn’t a prescriptive CSS framework, but a flexible piece of developer tooling. CSS tooling has been a relatively stable space over the last few years with PostCSS, Sass, CSS Modules, and styled-components all coming out before …

KendoReact can save you boatloads of time because it offers pre-built componentry you can use in your app right away. They look nice, but more importantly, they are easily themeable, so they look however you need them to look. And I’d say the looks aren’t even the important part. There are lots of component libraries …

Here’s a beautiful website: it’s a type specimen for Mass-Driver’s ever-so-lovely type family MD Nichrome. There’s a ton of nifty animations and graphics explaining all the features inside…

Baldur Bjarnason brings some baby bear porridge to the discussion of Single Page App (SPA) vs. Multi Page App (MPA). Single-Page-Apps can be fantastic. Most teams will mess them up because most teams operate in dysfunctional organisations. Multi-Page-Apps can also be fantastic, both in highly functional organisations that can apply them when and where they …

If you run or have recently switched to a static site generator, you might find yourself writing a lot of Markdown. And the more you write it, the more you want the tooling experience to disappear so that the content takes focus. I’m going to give you some options (including my favorite), but more importantly, …

In HTML, there is a very clear input type for dealing with passwords: If you use that, you get the obfuscated bullet-points when you type into it, like: •••••••• That’s the web trying to help with security. If it didn’t do that, the classic problem is that someone could be peering over your shoulder, spying …

Scroll shadows are when you can see a little inset shadow on elements if (and only if) you can scroll in that direction. It’s just good UX. You can actually pull it off in CSS, which I think is amazing and one of the great CSS tricks. Except… it just doesn’t work on iOS Safari. …

Ahmad Shadeed documents a bonafide CSS trick from the Facebook CSS codebase. The idea is that when an element is the full width of the viewport, it doesn’t have any border-radius. But otherwise, it has 8px of border-radius. Here’s the code:

In this article I’m going to talk about branching strategies and different types of Git branches. I’m also going to introduce you to two common branching workflows: Git Flow and GitHub Flow.

This is some bonafide CSS trickery from Harry that gives you some generic performance advice based on what it sees in your <head> element. First, it’s possible to make a <style> block visible like any other element by changing the display away from the default of none. It’s a nice little trick. You can even …

Dumb trick alert! Not all browsers support all features. Say you want to write a fallback for browsers that doesn’t support CSS Grid. Not very common these days, but it’s just to illustrate a point.

Animating elements with CSS can either be quite easy or quite difficult depending on what you are trying to do. Changing the background color of a button when you hover over it? Easy. Animating the position and size of an element in a performant way that also affects the position of other elements? Tricky! That’s …

Dave and I slapped up a little videos section of the ShopTalk website. Twelve so far! They are short-ish, between 10-20 minutes, each focused on one fairly specific thing. We’re kinda just dipping our toes here — we don’t even have a real proper name for them yet! The place to subscribe to them is …

How To Use The Vite Build Tool with React — Vite is hot, in part, because it’s based on esbuild and wickedly fast. It’s from Evan You of Vue fame, but it’s not a Vue-specific tool. Here, NARUHODO covers how to configure it to work with React. React Architecture: How to Structure and Organize a …

I’m certainly not dogmatic about it, but I think if you can pull of a project with literally zero build process, it feels good while working on it and feels very good when you come back to it months/years later and can just pick up and go.

Directives are one of GraphQL’s best — and most unspoken — features. Let’s explore working with GraphQL’s built-in schema and operation directives that all GraphQL spec compliant APIs must implement. They are extremely useful if you are working with a dynamic front-end because you have the control to reduce the response payload depending on what …

A commit can be something that helps us stay on top of things. It can be a container for related changes that belong to one and only one topic, and thereby make it easier for us to understand what happened.
In this post, we’re talking about what it takes to produce the “perfect” commit.

Of the languages that browsers speak, I’d wager that the very first one that developers decided needed some additional processing was HTML. Every single CMS in the world (aside from intentionally headless-only CMSs) is essentially an elaborate HTML processor: they take content and squoosh it together with HTML templates. There are dozens of other dedicated …

Chrome developer advocate Jake Archibald called 2016 “the year of web streams.” Clearly, his prediction was somewhat premature. The Streams Standard was announced back in 2014. It’s taken a while, but there’s now a consistent streaming API implemented in modern browsers (still waiting on Firefox…) and in Node (and Deno).

I was pretty stoked when Chris shared a way to “View Source” on mobile. Sure, it’s not the same as a built-in feature but it allows iOS users like myself a way to peek at a site’s code the same way folks on Android can by prepending view-source: to a URL. I was curious what …