Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth

Absolutely fascinating read about the fate of Google’s project to archive the world’s books. It’s a story of ambition and legal jujitsu.

Regardless of how perfectly formed and well-written your code, sometimes things break through no fault of your own, even in modern browsers. If you’re not actively testing your site, bugs are more likely to reach your users, unbeknownst to you. […]

I know that unit testing logic and functional/integration testing DOM manipulation is different. But again, there’s a gulf in my mind between expect(page.title).toBe(‘hello world’) and “Make sure this doesn’t fuck up when resizing Internet Explorer 10 between 720px and 800px.” Source: My […]

Chris and Dave weigh in on some of the hot drama that happened after I tweeted a joke about CSS-in-JS.  Before I did that, I also hastily linked to a podcast where wrote a few quick thoughts about some of […]

Here’s Harry with a great process for identifying third-party scripts that wreak havoc on performance. Note that while he discusses bytes and bits, these problems are mainly political. The attitude in which you approach a process like this makes all […]

I posted about my struggle to learn React, and I talked about how ES6 and React travel together, and it’s hard to untangle things. This post does a good job of dividing what convention belongs to React and what belongs […]

This is a very good read about our collective infatuation with “innovation.” The authors argue that maintenance is just as — if not more — important than innovation. Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were […]

Love this post from Zach, reminding us that websites don’t have to be a gigantic pile of dependencies and complexity.

How to Take Criticism Ask yourself: Is this helpful or not helpful? Translate. Stay curious. Hang in there until you receive actionable feedback. Very good read about how to take criticism in your work.

I recently posted about my struggle to learn React. There are a lot of personal reasons for this, which I explain in the post. But I’ve also found it frustrating that many React tutorials, projects, and boilerplates I’ve encountered are […]

This is the dumbest publishing platform on the web. Write something, hit publish, and it’s live. There’s no tracking, ad-tech, webfonts, analytics, javascript, cookies, databases, user accounts, comments, friending, likes, follower counts or other quantifiers of social capital. The only practical […]

Here’s a great response to my My struggle to learn React post from Andrew Ingram. He addresses each point one by one, which I find to be really helpful. Source: A response “my Struggle to learn react” – andrewingram – […]

I’m going to be honest: I’ve had a hell of a time getting my head around React. More than any other technology I’ve touched over the last 10 years of my career, I just haven’t had it click for me. […]

Here’s Jeremy with some wise words about design systems. The generally-accepted definition of a design system is that it’s the outer circle—it encompasses pattern libraries, style guides, and any other artefacts. But there’s something more. Just because you have a […]

I have yet to dive deep into CSS-in-JS, but I’ll admit I’m skeptical. This podcast by Chris Ferdinandi lays out a lot of the reasons why I’m a bit apprehensive. Three other observations I’ve noticed as I encounter CSS-in-JS in […]

Fantastic talk slides from Trent about third-party scripts’ implications on performance. I wish I could have seen the talk in person.

A few people have gotten in touch with witty comments like “Care to comment?” It’s always fun to see people get caught up in labels and nomenclature, but ultimately I think the mental model continues to be helpful (for me […]

From Una: CSS grid is AMAZING! However, if you need to support users of IE11 and below, or Edge 15 and below, grid won’t really work as you expect (more info here). This site is a solution for you so you […]

I really appreciate Alex Lillo taking the time to write up this review of my workshop I conducted in London last week. We need teams that have enough understanding and empathy for each others’ work, that value working together instead […]

Everything you always wanted to know about implementing scrolling but were afraid to ask. We have scrolled to the bottom of modern web specifications to take you on a whirlwind tour of latest CSS and JavaScript features that make navigating around a single page smooth, beautiful and less resource-hungry. This is a […]