accessibility

Mac VoiceOver Testing the Simple Way

Learning VoiceOver can feel overwhelming, so I’m here to give you a simple, repeatable process you can follow to make testing with VoiceOver as easy as possible.

books

Books I Loved in 2021

I read 30 books in 2021, and 13 of those were reading to my youngest, John. In 2020, our habit of me reading to him at bedtime faltered a bit, as he was getting a bit older. But he was absolutely in love with Breath of the Wild, the open-world

javascript

Defensive API Handling

On a recent client project, we built a form that submitted to a third-party registration service. Easy-peasy, right? What followed was a comical series of incidents that served as an excellent lesson in defensive API handling.

css

Resetting Inherited CSS with “Revert”

For a recent project, we needed to take a small web application and embed it inside a client’s existing site. Typically, this means inheriting the site’s styles. However, in this case, the client wanted this app to follow a new design system that hadn’t been applied to

css

Modern CSS in a Nutshell

A friend recently shared his frustration with CSS development. I responded to him with a high-level overview of the current state of CSS. If you’re feeling a bit out of touch with modern CSS development, I hope this helps. You’d be surprised how much you can do with vanilla CSS nowadays!

images

How to Resize Cloudinary Images in WordPress Timber Templates

Timber’s resize filters don’t play nicely with the Cloudinary WordPress plugin. We added our own custom image optimizer function that check if an image is served from Cloudinary or WordPress and use the appropriate resize method.

frontend

Code Linting for Web Designers

You may have heard that you should be “linting” your code. What does that mean? Why would you want to do it?

process

What's the Point of Standup Meetings?

If your daily standup meeting has turned into “justify your salary” time, something’s gone wrong.

books

Books I Loved in 2020

Once a year, I review the books I read and write a brief post recommending my favorites. 2020 was a brutal, horrible year, and I had almost no mental bandwidth for reading, but I did read three books that I absolutely loved. Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir This was

television

TV Shows I Loved in 2020

2020 sucked, but at least there were some good shows to distract us, from the Mandalorian, to Letterkenny, to What We Do In The Shadows

pandemic

A Typical Day in Early 2021

I thought it’d be interesting to show people what it’s like to work from home with kids who are also doing school from home.

git

Quick Tip: How to Hide Whitespace Changes in Git Diffs

If you’ve ever had to review a PR where the only code change is adding a wrapper element, you’ll be familiar with the pain of reviewing what appears to be a massive change but is actually trivial.

responsive

Responsive Images the Simple Way

The responsive images spec is fantastic and covers a lot of use cases, but most of the time you’ll only need one: resolution switching using the `srcset` and `sizes` attributes.

television

What to Watch while Social Distancing

A friend of mine recently asked "What's good on Netflix right now? What are y'all watching?"

npm

How to Publish an Updated Version of an npm Package

What’s typically involved in an npm version release? How can you determine the release process for an existing project? Can project maintainers do anything to make it easier for new contributors?

npm

How to Automatically Update Your JavaScript Dependencies

One frustrating aspect of the modern JavaScript ecosystem is keeping all your dependencies up to date. Thankfully, there are automated tools that can handle this thankless task for you.

books

Books I Loved in 2019

Once a year, I like to look back over my reading history and write a brief recommendation of my favorites. Partly I do this for anyone who might trust my judgement on what to read, but mostly it's because I have a terrible memory. I have books on my shelves

productivity

22 Panels That Always Work: Wally Wood’s Legendary Productivity Hack

Comic book artist Wally Wood’s “22 Panels That Always Work” is a legendary bit of productivity hacking. How can you reduce “noodling” in your work?

git

Squashing Your Pull Requests

Most pull requests should squash down to a single commit with a well-written message explaining why a change is happening.

job hunting

React-ing to Change

Exactly one year ago today, I was laid off. At the time I was working for Say Media, a small media company that was acquired by Maven, “a relatively unknown start-up run by two notorious media fuck boys [http://bigwnews.com/sport/sports-illustrateds-media-operations-pawne].” I was caught in the first round

npm

How to Distribute a Pattern Library as an npm Package from a Private Git Repo

So you’ve got a pattern library: Congratulations! The next step is making it possible for other people to use those patterns. You could simply provide download links for the CSS and other assets, but then your users can’t easily get any updates to the pattern library. Instead, you

frontend

Friday Front-End’s Top Links in 2018

In 2018, Friday Front-End shared a curated list of five articles and one video every week. Here are the links that were most popular.

books

Books I Loved in 2018

I read 25 books this year [https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/10213246]. Many were good, but the following three series stood heads and tails above everything else. I devoured them all and enjoyed every word. It’s not often I find series that I’m happy to recommend without

books

Books I Love: The Kingkiller Chronicle Series

It’s no exaggeration to say that Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind might be my favorite book of all time. It’s in competition with heavy hitters like Hitchhiker’s Guide, The Lord of the Rings, and Ringworld. Books I come back to time and again, re-reading compulsively,

css Featured

What is Modular CSS?

Modular CSS is a collection of principles for writing code that is performant and maintainable at scale.

books

Books I Love: The Culture Series

The Culture is a post-scarcity socialist utopia. Banks described them as “hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.”

design

Do Siegel’s Seven Deadly Sins Hold Up?

In 1996, David Siegel’s book Creating Killer Web Sites was at the top of the charts on Amazon, and it quickly became the gold standard of web design books. Siegel may not have been the first to write about spacer gifs, slicing images, and table-based layouts, but he certainly

quotes

Great Programming Quotes

“If you put in the wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” …I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

books

Books I Loved in 2017

I read 28 books in 2017 [https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/8351170]. These are the ones I would happily recommend. Not a ton of new books to recommend this year, because I also was finishing reading the Harry Potter series with my daughter, and re-reading The Lies of Locke

movies

How to Export Movie Ratings from Netflix and Import into IMDb

When Netflix switched from a 5-star rating scheme to a thumbs up/down [https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/16/14952434/netflix-five-star-ratings-going-away-thumbs-up-down] model, I realized I was sitting on more than a decade of ratings, and worried they would disappear. I started rating movies on Netflix because back then, ratings

frontend

Front-End Newsletters

A friend recently asked me how I keep up-to-date on what's happening in the front-end community. It's a great question. It used to be that RSS feeds were the way to go. I'd subscribe to the feeds from my favorite developers, and get their updates. Sadly, many people don't post

satire

Pointing and Shouting Your Way to Better Code

Time and again we turn to the Japanese for inspiration to improve process and efficiency. Toyota's lean manufacturing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing] processes gave us the concept of kaizen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen] (continuous improvement), as well as the kanban [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

mobile

What’s the Mobile Use Case?

I recently worked on a project to dramatically improve mobile access for an app. At least twice during the proposal process, I was asked “What’s the mobile use case?” I was caught a bit flat-footed by this question, because the answer has been clear in our analytics for some

css

How to Define CSS Standards for a Team

> “We’re going through a major redesign of our app and every page is given to one person on the team to complete from end-to-end, including creating the HTML structure and styling, and everyone is doing everything their own way. Do you have tips/tricks/blog posts/books that you’

books

Books I Loved in 2016

Growing up, my dad was a voracious reader. Our house was always filled with piles of dog-eared science fiction and fantasy novels. Even before I was old enough to start reading them myself, I found them fascinating. I remember vividly being on time-out once and studying the designs on the

job hunting

Looking for Work SUCKS

Looking for work is an intensely stressful experience. It’s also insidious, because it doesn’t feel like it should be stressful. During a job hunt, I often find myself overwhelmed by the whole process. Part of me wants to give up and go back to bed. Another part questions

editors

My Sublime Text Setup

I've put a bit of work into customizing my Sublime Text setup. It's mostly based on a set of tips [http://wesbos.github.io/Sublime-Text-Power-User-Talk/] from Wes Bos, who literally wrote the book [https://sublimetextbook.com/] on becoming a Sublime Text power user. Material Theme [https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Material%

css

Code Verbosity

Recently I was refactoring some CSS, and I found something like this code snippet: body { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.4; } h1 { font-family: serif; font-size: 36px; font-weight: bold; } Ugh, I thought, why so many lines? Let's use the shorthand syntax! So I refactored many instances of this code through

books

Books I Loved in 2015

I have a terrible memory about books I’ve read. Often, all I can tell you is that I’m a fan of an author or a particular book, but not any details about it, or why I liked it. In 2015 I switched to reading entirely on the Kindle.

programming

Falsehoods Programmers Believe

I'm in love with these lists of "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About X." In case you haven't had pleasure, I've collected all the ones I know of here. If I missed any, let me know! Falsehoods programmers believe about names [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/] * People's names do

css

What IS Flexbox?

An elegant layout method for a more civilized age. Flexbox is a new layout mode in CSS3. The previous version of CSS defined four layout modes: * block layout for laying out documents * inline layout for laying out text * table layout for laying 2D tabular data * positioned layout for explicit positioning

job hunting

What I value in a job

The three main things I look for in a company are: * Competitive pay * Work/Life balance * Understand the value of specialists Location I only consider work in downtown Portland, Oregon, or with a fully-distributed company. I'm not interested in working at a company with only a handful of remote workers

job hunting

Finding Your Door

“Hey! I heard you got a new door. How is it?” “Oh, it’s pretty good. When my last door broke unexpectedly, I had to find a new door pretty quick, and I worried I may have made the decision too quickly. I like the color and the doorknob, but

css

The Many Exciting CSS Limits of Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer has a number of limits in the way it loads CSS, which can cause some of your styles not to be applied if you unknowingly exceed them. IE9 and lower: * A stylesheet may contain up to 4095 selectors [http://codepen.io/spaceninja/full/gbyMLv/] * A document may load

design

Trust Your Designer, But Review Their Code

It can be awkward when your designer says they want to work directly in code. You want to protect the high quality of your front-end layer, but you don’t want to seem territorial or untrusting. You fear saying yes, at the risk of watching your carefully organized files fill

ghost

How to use Ghost Pro with a custom domain and keep your email

When I switched my blog to a hosted Ghost Pro plan, I ran into some difficulty getting the proper DNS configuration. I'm not a networking guru, so I figured there might be others who could benefit from what I learned.

writing

Cleaning House

When I started blogging 15 years ago, one of the things that drew me to it was the idea of speaking to an audience. The concept of “democratizing” publishing so that anyone could put their writing in front of the world was very appealing. > “I used to always think I

css

How to use @font-face to avoid faux-italic and bold browser styles

Did you know that if you declare a custom font using @font-face, the browser will try to fake the bold and italic styles if it can't find them? This is a clever little feature that avoids a scenario where a designer specifies a font and is then confused that bold

css

How to avoid paragraph gaps when using superscript and subscript

Frequently, when I see a webpage with superscript or subscript text, I see associated gaps in the paragraph. This is caused because the default way browsers render super and subscript text is to add enough vertical space in the paragraph to show them. The result is ugly, but as you