August 2024
- Why Swiss Trains are the Best in Europe
An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.
But why is it important that the wealthy people take public transportation?
[…] because for better or for worse, these people are likely to have the power and political influence to demand efficient service.
- An idea to power your personal brand’s content game
Karthik Srinivasan discusses how to use curation to build a personal brand and shares some steps to get started.
- An underrated tip for personal branding
Karthik Srinivasan uses his experience with running as an analogy to emphasize the importance of consistently showing up in the context of personal branding.
I found the analogy effective and relatable, as I had a similar experience when I started running.
- How to design an accessible carousel
Omar Benseddik of Tinloof provides a guide to designing a responsive and user-friendly carousel.
- Just Build Websites
Jim Nielsen uses his experience with golf as a metaphor to explain that the key to success in web development comes from actual practice — building websites — rather than obsessing over what tools, frameworks and technologies others are using.
- Personal branding is like your credit score
Personal branding is about bringing focus to your touchpoints with the world (of strangers) so that the right kinds of people can find you and remember you. You make use of the attention when you really need it. But it is good to be in the consideration set.
- Redesigning Piccalilli: the second part of the design process
Andy Bell shows how Set Studio uses an iterative approach to design in the Piccalilli redesign process.
July 2024
- Redesigning Piccalilli: the first part of the design process
As a freelancer, I’m always eager to learn how other folks work. Piccalilli’s behind-the-scenes look at their redesign is extremely useful.
- Crowdstruck (Windows Outage) - Computerphile
Dr. Steve Bagley explains in layman’s terms what an operating system is:
[…] Imagine the difference between a house and a hotel. If you own a house, you can decide how to use the rooms, what color to paint the walls. But if that house becomes a hotel, you might give people the option to change the air conditioning temperature, but you wouldn’t let them fit air conditioning into their room without permission from the building owner. And it’s a bit the same with a computer. The operating system is a bit like the people who run the hotel in that it’s controlling all the resources for the system. So if Microsoft Word crashes, these days it’s not going to take down your computer because the operating system is set up in such a way that it can access resources that have been assigned to it and clean that up, and everything else continues hunky-dory.
And what happens if the operating system crashes and you get the blue screen of death (BSoD):
At that point, the thing that’s in charge of controlling everything has gone wrong, is corrupted, and can no longer run. So there’s pretty much no option at that point other than to halt the machine, say something’s gone wrong, and let the user reboot and restart.
- CSS Grid Areas
I got the opportunity to preview Ahmad Shadeed’s latest article on ‘CSS Grid Areas’ before its release. It inspired me to refactor the code on my site to use
grid-template-areas. - Testing HTML With Modern CSS
Wow! Who knew you could use modern CSS to test HTML? Well, Heydon certainly did!
- Styling Tables the Modern CSS Way
This article by Michelle Barker for Piccalilli is a great read. I learned about a bunch of new CSS properties that I didn’t know existed.
June 2024
- Blinded By the Light DOM
Eric Meyer describes his journey of learning about and implementing fully-Light-DOM web components.
You just take some normal HTML markup, wrap it with a custom element, and then write some JS to add capabilities which you can then style with regular CSS! Everything’s of the Light Side of the Web. No need to pierce the Vale of Shadows or whatever.
- HTML web components
Jeremy Keith discusses what makes a custom element an HTML web component.
If your custom element is empty, it’s not an HTML web component. But if you’re using a custom element to extend existing markup, that’s an HTML web component.
React encouraged a mindset of replacement: “forgot [sic] what browsers can do; do everything in a React component instead, even if you’re reinventing the wheel.”
HTML web components encourage a mindset of augmentation instead.
May 2024
- Embrace the Platform
If there’s one thing you can do to make your websites better, it is to embrace what the web platform gives you: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — in that order. Apply the Rule of Least Power. Build with progressive enhancement in mind. You’ll be a happier developer. Your visitors will be happier, too, as things work as expected.
April 2024
- The Case For Design Engineers, Pt. II
Jim Nielsen makes the case for design engineers as professionals who do design work with code. He also emphasizes the limitations of traditional design tools, which often produce static images that don’t fully capture the dynamic nature of web interactions, and advocates for designing in the browser instead.
You need someone who can do design work with code.
That’s right: design work with code.
Pixels of an interface from a GUI tool are a static representations of a dynamic form. It’s the difference between a picture of me and the living, breathing, moving me.
Design engineers don’t just push pixels around in a GUI tool, they do it in a web browser — the medium of delivery — designing not just the visuals but the interactions that make sense for a living, breathing, moving interface.