When I first got this writing prompt, my mind immediately started thinking stuff like, “What tech have I learned this year?” But this post isn’t really about tech, because I think what I’ve learned the most about building websites this past year is simplification. This year, I’ve learned that keeping it simple is almost always the best approach. Heck, I’ve been banging that drum for a while, but this year has really solidified those sort of thoughts. I’m trying to … Read article “Le
There was a time when I felt overwhelmed by how fast the web developed. It seemed like not a single day passed without a new plugin, framework, technique, or language feature being released. I believed that in order to survive as a freelancer and to compete with others I had to learn everything everyone else was so good at: webpack, React, Angular, SVGs, Houdini, CSS Grid Layout, ES6, you name it. Being active on Twitter and going to conferences didn’t … Read article “Slow Movement&
I enjoyed this blog post from Shawn. Lampshading is apparently the idea of a TV show calling attention to some weakness (like an implausible plot point) so that the show can move on. By calling it out, it avoids criticism by demonstrating the self-awareness. For developers, Shawn notes, it’s like admitting to your teammates/boss that you don’t know some particular technology so the team can move on. Not only is this useful, it’s powerful. Higher-ups need to call out anything &
I was recently looking for a way to perform scrolling effects on a project and I stumbled on the Locomotive Scroll library. It lets you perform a variety of scrolling effects, like parallax and triggering/controlling animations at scroll points. You might also call it a “smooth scrolling” library, but it doesn’t leverage native smooth scrolling — it does just the opposite by virtualizing scrolling and ensuring it’s always smooth. You could probably consider this “scrolljacking” so if you …
In the short term, opinions about technology often follow a compressed form of Laver’s Law:
Everything just before me was completely broken. Everything that comes after me is completely unnecessary. Everything I use right now is perfectly fine; stop changing things.
We tend to judge things based on where we started, our personal “Year Zeros.” But what’s “Year Zero” for us isn’t “Year Zero” for others. And in the fullness of time, the good ideas win out and hindsight … Read article ̶
When Chris asked me to write about “one thing I learned about building websites this year” I admit my brain immediately went through a list of techniques and CSS properties I started using this year. But then I paused. Other people can write about that much better than I can. What’s something that I specifically have learned? Then I realized that I’ve been “learning” the same lesson for the last five years, yet I keep falling into the same trap … Read ar
Speaking of cool CSS stuff you can buy, Julia Evans’ zine Hell Yes! CSS! is hot off the presses. A “zine” being 28 pages of “short, informative, and fun comics which will quickly teach you something useful.” Some parts of it are like cheat sheets. Some parts of it are like concepts made digestible through the relaxed format. Some parts of it are like mini-tutorials. There is definitely some uhmmmm wow weird moments in there that might stump … Read article 
WCAG 2.1 Recommendations rolled out in 2018. It’s been a couple years now and there are some new Success Criterion. In this article, I will discuss Label in Name, which is how we visually label components. We’ll take a look at what some failure states look like, how to fix them, and examples of how to do them correctly. You lost me at Success Criterion… Success Criterion are testable statements that aren’t technology-specific. They’re the baseline from which we … Read article “What’
This year I had the pleasure of re-launching The Accessibility Project. I spend a lot of time researching and writing about accessibility and inclusive design, so this felt like the cumulation of a lot of that effort. The site now uses all sorts of cool web features like CSS Grid, @supports, and media features, aria-current, Service Workers, and Eleventy. But that’s really not the important bit. The important bit I learned this year … Read article “Representation Matters”
The
Cassidy Williams has been doing a Blogvent (blogging every day for a month) over on the Netlify Blog. A lot of the blog posts are about Next.js. There is a lot to like about Next.js. I just pulled one of Cassidy’s starters for fun. It’s very nice that it has React Fast-Refresh built-in. I like how on any given “Page” you can import and use a https://css-tricks.com/netlify-next-js/