While I don’t think you should publish to Medium (at least not as the only place you publish something, you should write on your own site that you control), I get why other people do. You quickly sign up, write some words, hit publish, and the result is a pretty clean-looking presentation of your writing. Not to mention familiar to the general public. Medium is big and popular enough that people have seen it and are comfortable with it. I mean Barack Obama writes there so goes a long way in terms of endorsement. It’s that clean comfortable design that I think it’s especially notable (when it’s ..read more

Listen I ain’t trying to scare you, but this CSS stuff can get complicated. It doesn’t have to be. CSS is just selectors with key value pairs in the end. The vast majority of CSS I write is pretty darn straightforward, especially once you have a general system (what files go where? how do we generally name things? how do we do variables?). But fair is fair, CSS can get wildly complex. It doesn’t help the complexity situation that anything new added increases that complexity, because, well, everything in CSS affects everything else. Selectors can get confusing and nesting can exacerbate that. V ..read more

Julia Evans has released what she’s saying is one of her most popular zines to date: How Git Works. I don’t think you’d regret reading it. I imagine most of us get by with knowing just enough Git to do our jobs, but are probably using 5% of what it can really do. Being very strong with Git will almost surely benefit you in your career. Imagine helping a superior out of a sticky situation where it might look like code was lost or otherwise screwed up. Being the solution during an emotional time is clutch. Surely this pairs nicely with Oh Shit, Git!, a real classic from Katie-Sylor Miller which ..read more

Dan Mall has my favorite post on picking a typeface. I’m no master typographer, but I know enough that I don’t want to be talked to like an absolute beginner where you teach me what a serif is. Dan gets into more realistic decision making steps, like intentionally not picking something ultra popular, admitting that you have to be around a lot of type to make good type decisions, and that ultimately choosing is akin to improvising in jazz: it’s just gotta feel right. If you are a beginner, or really just like type, you’d do well carving out half an hour to watch the 6 parts of Practicing Typogr ..read more

I’ve done a decent amount of accessibility work in the past few months, largely thanks to a nice fellow who uses JAWS and seems to enjoy our sessions together testing various bits of CodePen, old and new. I use classic tools like the axe and the WebAIM tools to find issues, and still, testing over a video call has found some really embarrassing stuff on CodePen that felt good to clean up. We had a page with four <h1> tags on it, for cripes sake, and I’m not going to tell you which page it was (it was the homepage). There are lots of accessibility failures that are hard or impossible to ..read more

It continues to be a big year for Web Components. I’m noticing it more this week as it’s effecting some of my friends. My long-time ShopTalk co-host Dave Rupert just got a job at Microsoft working on Fluent UI Web Components. Probably didn’t hurt that he wrote the book on them. I’m stoked that big, well-funded, public, freely-usable design systems offer Web Components. They are starting to feel more like first-class citizens. For example Google’s material-web is ready to rock, even on CodePen. And classic examples like Lightning. Also, excellent indie Web Component libraries like Shoelace are ..read more

Late last year Google made this showcase microsite The Web Can Do What!?. It’s nicely done! I like how it talks about various somewhat-recently unlocked use cases, while itself being a showcase for other rather impressive things you can do on a website (cool usage of sticky sections, view transitions, etc). Google invests a lot of money in evolving the web, and part of doing that needs to be marketing to developers just what kinds of things are possible thanks to that evolution. I’d love to live to see a day where the web is clearly the development platform of choice and any advantages the nat ..read more

SVG Short Circuiting SVG is normally a pretty efficient file format. If an image is vector in nature, leaving it as vector is normally a good plan as it will like scale well and look pretty darn crips. But of course, It Depends. Super complex vector graphics can get huge, and a raster (i.e. JPG, PNG, etc) version can actually be smaller. This can happen with little tiny images too where the straight up low amount of pixels is just pretty efficient. This should be the kind of thing computers are good at, right? You’re in luck if you’re using Eleventy. Zach wrote about a thing the Image componen ..read more

Y’all use Figma for design work? I’d be willing to bet a lot of you do at your organization. I’m still wrapping my brain around the fact that Adobe has to write a billion dollar check to not acquire it. It’s no wonder why they wanted it — there is a new household name in design software after Adobe had that on lock for(counts fingers)ever. I have no particular allegiances, except to the web, so I’m pleased that Figma is very web native. I’m also impressed that Photoshop is a website now, too, but Figma entirely embraces webness. Figma has been doing lots of releases focused on web developers ..read more

If you tend to follow React stuff, you might know that React has a new thing called “Server Components”. Mayank has an excellent blog post about them. It starts out with calling out the nice things about them, and then fairly calls out all sorts of not-so-good things about them. Me, I think it’s all weird as hell. Just the fact that React was “just a UI library” for so long now needs a Node.js server behind it to take full advantage is a heck of a leap. And it’s already gone so far that you have to say "use client" when you want a component not to be a server component? (But actually it means ..read more