Swipey Image Grids

I hope people think of SVG as a vector format that is good for drawing things. There is plenty more to know, but here’s one more: SVG is good for composition. You draw things at very specific coordinates in SVG and, while they can scale, they tend to stay put. And while SVG is a vector format, you c..

WebPageTest API

I’m willing to bet you know WebPageTest. It is the premier tool in the toolbox of web performance people. Maybe you didn’t know that WebPageTest was a side project of one fella, Patrick Meenan, for most of its lifetime, with literal racks of real devices he maintained himself. An amazing achievement..

Safari 14.1 Adds Support for Flexbox Gaps

Yay, it’s here! Safari 14.1 reportedly adds support for the gap property in flexbox layouts. We’ve had grid-gap support for some time, but true to its name, it’s limited to grid layouts. Now we can use gap in either type of layout: .container { display: flex; flex-flow: row wrap; gap: 1.5rem; } ..

Web Languages as Compile Targets

Jim Nielsen quoting Eric Bailey: He references an example on Twitter where someone noted you can use the
element to “create a native HTML accordion,” to which someone responded: “this works without Bootstrap? 🤯” What’s the problem here? From Eric: the problem that arises from this situa..

Jenny B Kowalski’s A-Z (and a-z) as Variable Letterforms

Jenny B Kowalski has been posting a-letter-a-day on Instagram exploring multi-axis variable/responsive letterforms. They are very clever in that one of the axes controls an uppercase-to-lowercase conversion, literally morphing the shape of the letters from an uppercase version to a lowercase version..

You Can Label a JavaScript `if` Statement

Labels are a feature that have existed since the creation of JavaScript. They aren’t new! I don’t think all that many people know about them and I’d even argue they are a bit confusing. But, as we’ll see, labels can be useful in very specific instances. But first: A JavaScript label should not be c..

Sending Large Files

I’ve got a podcast that will be 10 years old this coming January! Most of those episodes have one or more guests (plus me and Dave). Despite fancy modern options for recording podcasts with guests, like Riverside.fm or Zencastrl where guests don’t have to worry about recording their own audio, we ha..

How to Monitor Core Web Vitals and Take Action with Raygun

Raygun is an error and performance monitoring software for websites and mobile apps. In the case of websites, you install their JavaScript snippet onto your site, which takes 2 seconds, and now you’ve got monitoring in place. Why? Well now you can watch the performance of your site, not just in a si..

List Markers and String Styles

Lists—we’ve all worked with them in one form or another. I’m talking about HTML’s
    and
      . Much of the time, because we desire styling control, we turn off the list’s markers completely with list-style-type: none, and start styling from there. Other times, we choose from a very limited set of ..

Your Team is Not “Them”

This post was written for engineering managers, but anyone is welcome to read it. Let’s talk for a moment about how we talk about our teams. This might not seem like something that needs a whole article dedicated to it, but it’s actually quite crucial. The way that we refer to our teams sends signa..