Hey,
first of all: This will be the last letter for the upcoming 3 weeks. I’m going on vacation and therefore will not be able to collect links and send them out in the usual digest format. A personal note to my donators: I’m happy to receive your support but GratiPay is still on hold and not charging / paying out anything so if you want to support me, please use the PayPal button on the web view (sorry, it’s not possible to include in email) for now.
News
- Firefox DevTools (Nightly and DevEdition) now have a integrated popover on properties showing MDN content. Now that is really useful. Also, inspector search now includes content from iframes, there is a filter tooltip editor, and the network panel is now always active when DevTools are open.
- Microsoft Edge is shaping up each week and this week they added performance improvements by optimising the engine for UglifyJS.
Concepts & Design
- Finding the right font for Code is hard. Now Nikita Prokopov created FiraCode including ligatures for code like
<= === := >> <==>and so on. - “Beauty is the first message we give the people for whom we are designing”: they are our equals, and we care deeply about their experience. — Unexpected Learnings from a Refugee Camp.
- It’s not the goal to make design Don’t make me think. It should be the goal to make it Don’t Make Me Think Needlessly.
- It’s not easy to ask for feedback so here’s some advice how to ask for design feedback to get good results. -Designing for disappearing interfaces will be a task we will see more often in the near future as the internet shifts more and more to the background and disappears to be with you all the time—seamlessly integrated and invisible.
DNS
- EasyDNS shares why they regret to have renewed their ICANN accreditation and what you need to know about the Whois Accuracy Program (WAP). Interesting read and right after the CEO of the ICANN has taken down his job I wonder if things will get better again or even worse.
Tooling
- Do you also find it annoying that Github and Jira don’t accept the same text formatting? Here’s an online translator for it so you can stick to one way of formatting.
- This article explains how to deploy with private npm modules.
Web Performance / Security
- There seems to be a wide-spread mis-assumption of how
robots.txtworks. It only prevents good bots from indexing resources. But this research shows that people try to hide non-public material from being accessed by people. - Tools like Instapaper, Readability or FB Instant Articles are built on our fault of not building a good experience.
- And this is a result of it. People saying “The web doesn’t suck. Your websites suck. All of your websites suck.”
- We need to change our culture. But it’s open how we can achieve that. Think about that for some minutes.
HTML / SVG
- Sara Soueidan published another good article in which she explains how to manage art direction in SVGs using the
viewBoxattribute. And she’s very true when she says you bring your skills to the next level when you understand this attribute. It’s so useful.
JavaScript
- You know, Promises are great. But most of us don’t understand them properly, and heck, reading this article was incredibly useful for me to understand them better.
- A short but declarative post on what the Battery Status API is for and how it can be used.
- Opera wants to fix a
scrollTopbug in order to avoid that IE has to copy it but they need your help for it. Please test and report if you are usingscrollTopand can confirm it does affect you.
CSS / Sass
- Do you use the
:visitedstate? Because it’s so helpful and undervalued by developers here’s some inspiration to provide a really outstanding experience when people have visited a link already.
Work life
- When you buy a car, you need to say what your budget is so the vendor can recommend you one. When you want a website, it is basically the same.
- Last week I included a report on poverty in the world’s biggest tech area. This week Twitter announced that they will open tech skill centre for San Francisco’s poor and homeless people. While still this won’t be enough and the invested sum is peanuts for VC funded companies this is a good start and I hope others will follow along.
- “The social cost of burnout culture is too high; it’s a dirty unspoken truth that we keep perpetuating”. An important read on developer culture, 10x engineers, working on weekends powered by energy drinks and changing jobs faster than most can imagine.
Go beyond…
- How to use energy of data centers in a clever way and what companies are doing this.
- Vitaly Friedman on the importance of staying personal in your communication and why he believes in sharing his personal thoughts and opinions on a company’s twitter account. And sometimes it can help people to think about who’s behind a company.