Hey, David Cain has a lot of very good thoughts out there on his blog. When I read the current article »don’t forget to swim now and then«, I wholeheartedly agreed to many aspects in it. We people strive for activities our bodies and brains adapted to over eons, while we struggle a lot with modern and/or activities we are not a adapted to: Politics (too abstract, unpredictable), telecommunication (unreal, missing sensoric information), and others. What I think is interesting about it is that it explains why we relax when going for a swim or run, hiking, sitting in nature around a fireplace, go ..read more

Hey, Spring and the caprioles of April’s weather here in Germany kept me so busy that I couldn’t send out a condensed edition earlier. We had a rainy month, and my split role of being a market gardener and web developer (currently working as a Scrum Master) is already challenging. But with unpredictable weather it gets even trickier. On the other hand, being in the garden calms me down, gives me back a lot of energy and happiness, and is a nice counterpart to sitting in front of a display doing virtual work. If the Internet is to be a place for good, we all need to confront what it’s become. T ..read more

Hey, in my area, spring is arriving and while today we had some snow falling again, I’m regularly in my market garden again, planting vegetables, sowing radish, salads, carrots and more. It’s still such a great balance to my web work that I can only recommend having an outdoors activity to all those sitting in front of screens all day. In my current projects, TypeScript, React and other tools are set as defaults. But I also realize that a lot of the standards I have in my mind are still not a default: responsive image optimization, bundle optimization, code splitting, performance audits and bu ..read more

Hey, … And I’m back in town your inbox with quite a few new reading recommendations for you. It’s quite interesting how the web continues to bring new stuff each week, how developers explore these new things. A lot of the CSS features we currently get make using CSS easier, make a property’s purpose clearer and some reduce selector complexity (always a good goal). Other ones enable complete new product ideas, especially in the JavaScript API field, and others disrupt the current status quo of building web apps (Page Transitions API, SPAs and MPAs). For a short time, I’ll be changing my usual m ..read more

Hey, when I wrote the last summary right before the calm time between years, I thought the next edition will not feature a lot of articles. Since then, so many cool new notes and articles have been published that it’s about time to send this to you. Personally, I’m working on two web projects at the moment with one being built from scratch with modern technologies and the other one being a quite tricky carry-all-components-over job from custom web components back to a theme library due to massive problems with the existing solution. In both projects the code I produce is nearly secondary and i ..read more

Hey, in my last newsletter this year, the 13th, I want to say thank you to all of you: Thanks for being my audience, for reading my emails, and articles, sharing them, and giving me feedback. I really appreciate every single email you write to me. Happy holidays and happy new year! The web is still evolving fast. The one thing I learned pretty early as a frontend-developer is that we need to constantly learn new things, explore and stay curious. At this point a shoutout to Marc: Thanks for everything you do, you and your curated content are such a great inspiration for so many people. This wee ..read more

Hey, Will you recognize what the icons in the following link want to explain? I thought it’s a good quiz to ask my international friends here to find out how well these icons work. Now think about using only icons for an interface again. The idea of building these icons is to reduce friction in the user interface and to clean up endless text options but what is it worth if no one knows what the symbol really means? I myself struggle a lot when apps have text links for everything but the user login / registration or account link is a symbol that’s hard to identify (is it the login, the sign up ..read more

Hey, it’s crazy how much news we get for CSS this year. But along with it, we get tutorials how to use the new things and how to enhance with JavaScript. It’s nice to see how web development evolves, cross-browser support is great for most of the things and we can focus on building great experiences. The result is for example Mastodon, a communication service built on web standard protocols, independent of big tech companies. Or Pixelfed, or PHP, the language that drives most of our server software. Web Components finally get some traction as more and more vendors of widgets build libraries ar ..read more

Hey, when I started this newsletter in 2013, I’d never imagined to writing this for nine years, to have thousands of subscribers via email, and many more via the website, social media, and the RSS feed. With many ups and downs, changes in schedule, and ups and downs in motivation, I’m glad to have this project still alive, to get feedback from my dear readers (you), and seem to have a positive impact on web developers’ work lives. This is what still motivates me today. But what remains open is the question of monetarizing this project. I have always accepted contributions, but they decline eve ..read more

Hey, It’s not been long since the last mail I sent out but I already got so many articles in the queue that it makes sense to send this now. The monthly schedule is a handy reminder for myself but I’m not dogmatic on this. As you know this is a personal, hand-crafted newsletter, so I think it’s okay to alter schedules as it comes. What’s interesting to me is that this edition splits up a bit into new shiny features that we aimed for for years (CSS Container Queries) and basic progressive enhancement, fundamental markup, a RSS based article recommendation, or basic JavaScript things we can do t ..read more