You have for sure googled “how to create [shape_name] with CSS” at least once in your front-end career if it’s not something you already have bookmarked. And the number of articles and demos you will find out there is endless. Good, right? Copy that code and drop it into the ol’ stylesheet. Ship it! The problem is that you don’t understand how the copied code works. Sure, it got the job done, but many of the most widely used CSS shape snippets are often dated and rely on things like magic numbers to get the shapes just right. So, the next time you go into the code needing to make a change to i ..read more

This article is a sponsored by Sentry.io In this article, we’re going to look deeply at React Server Components (RSCs). They are the latest innovation in React’s ecosystem, leveraging both server-side and client-side rendering as well as streaming HTML to deliver content as fast as possible. We will get really nerdy to get a full understanding of how RFCs fit into the React picture, the level of control they offer over the rendering lifecycle of components, and what page loads look like with RFCs in place. But before we dive into all of that, I think it’s worth looking back at how React has re ..read more

UX research without users isn’t research. We can shape design ideas with bias, assumptions, guesstimates, and even synthetic users, but it’s anything but UX research. Yet some of us might find ourselves in situations where we literally don’t have access to users — because of legal constraints, high costs, or perhaps users just don’t exist yet. What do we do then? Luckily, there are some workarounds that help us better understand pain points and issues that users might have when using our products. This holds true even when stakeholders can’t give us time or resources to run actual research, or ..read more

Mouse data is a subcategory of interaction data, a broad family of data about users generated as the immediate result of human interaction with computers. Its siblings from the same data family include logs of key presses or page visits. Businesses commonly rely on interaction data, including the mouse, to gather insights about their target audience. Unlike data that you could obtain more explicitly, let’s say via a survey, the advantage of interaction data is that it describes the actual behavior of actual people. Collecting interaction data is completely unobtrusive since it can be obtained ..read more

Even though the CSS :has() pseudo-class is relatively new, we already know a lot about it, thanks to many, many articles and tutorials demonstrating its powerful ability to conditionally select elements based on their contents. We’ve all seen the card component and header examples, but the conditional nature of :has() actually makes it adept at working with form controls, which are pretty conditional in nature as well. Let’s look specifically at the <select> element. With it, we can make a choice from a series of <option>s. Combined with :has(), we are capable of manipulating style ..read more

Inspiration lies everywhere, and as a matter of fact, we discovered one of the best ways to spark new ideas: desktop wallpapers. Since more than 13 years already, we challenge you, our dear readers, to put your creative skills to the test and create wallpaper calendars for our monthly wallpapers posts. No matter if you’re into illustration, lettering, or photography, the wallpapers series is the perfect opportunity to get your ideas flowing and create a small artwork to share with people all around the world. Of course, it wasn’t any different this month. In this post, you’ll find desktop wall ..read more

August 2021 marks a milestone for me. That’s when we signed an acquisition agreement to sell Chatra, a profitable live chat platform. I co-founded it after shutting down my first startup after a six-year struggle. Chatra took me and the team six years to finish — that’s six years of learning, experimenting, sometimes failing, and ultimately winning big. Acquisitions happen all the time. But what does it look like to go through one, putting the thing you built and nurtured up for sale and ceding control to someone else to take over? Sometimes, these things are complicated and contain clauses ab ..read more

I love free tiers, and I am not the only one. Everyone loves free things — they’re the best thing in life, after all. But maybe we have grown too accustomed to them, to the extent that a service switching from a “freemium” model to a fully paid plan would probably feel outrageous to you. Nowadays, though, the transition from free to paid services seems inevitable. It’s a matter of when a service drops its free tier rather than if it will. Companies need to make money. As developers, we probably understand the most that a product comes with costs; there are startup funds, resources, and salarie ..read more

Ensuring technology is accessible and inclusive relies heavily on receiving feedback directly from disabled users. You cannot rely solely on checklists, guidelines, and good-faith guesses to get things right. This is often hindered, however, by a lack of accessible prototypes available to use during testing. Rather than wait for the digital landscape to change, researchers should leverage all the available tools they can use to create and replicate the testing environments they need to get this important research completed. Without it, we will continue to have a primarily inaccessible and not ..read more

In 1998, Judy Singer, an Australian sociologist working on biodiversity, coined the term “neurodiversity.” It means every individual is unique, but sometimes this uniqueness is considered a deficit in the eyes of neuro-typicals because it is uncommon. However, neurodiversity is the inclusivity of these unique ways of thinking, behaving, or learning. Humans have an innate ability to classify things and make them simple to understand, so neurodivergence is classified as something different, making it much harder to accept as normal. “Why not propose that just as biodiversity is essential to ecos ..read more