Category: Article

Balancing on a Pivot with Flexbox

Let me show you a way I recently discovered to center a bunch of elements around what I call the pivot. I promise you that funky HTML is out of the question and you won’t need to know any bleeding-edge CSS to get the job done. I’m big on word games, so I recently re-imagined […]
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The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers

This is an extended version of my essay “When front-end means full-stack” which was published in the wonderful Increment magazine put out by Stripe. It’s also something of an evolution of a couple other of my essays, “The Great Divide” and “Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.” The moment I fell in love with […]
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A Complete Guide to CSS Media Queries

Media queries are a way to target browser by certain characteristics, features, and user preferences, then apply styles or run other code based on those things. Perhaps the most common media queries in the world are those that target particular viewport ranges and apply custom styles, which birthed the whole idea of responsive design. /* […]
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Achieving Vertical Alignment (Thanks, Subgrid!)

Our tools for vertical alignment have gotten a lot better as of late. My early days as a website designer involved laying out 960px wide homepage designs and aligning things horizontally across a page using a 12-column grid. Media queries came along which required a serious mental shift. It solved some big problems, of course, […]
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Enforcing performance budgets with webpack

As you probably know, a single monolithic JavaScript bundle — once a best practice — is no longer the way to go for modern web applications. Research has shown that larger bundles increase memory usage and CPU costs, especially on mid-range and low-end mobile devices. webpack has a lot of features to help you achieve […]
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the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance

Improve initial load time by skipping the rendering of offscreen content. Aug 5, 2020 The content-visibility property, launching in Chromium 85, might be one of the most impactful new CSS properties for improving page load performance. content-visibility enables the user agent to skip an element’s rendering work, including layout and painting, until it is needed. […]
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One Action, Multiple Terminal Windows Running Stuff

Many development environments require running things in a terminal window. npm run start, or whatever. I know my biggest project requires me to be running a big fancy Docker-based thing in one terminal, Ruby on Rails in another, and webpack in another. I’ve worked on other projects that require multiple terminal windows as well, and […]
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Beyond Media Queries: Using Newer HTML & CSS Features for Responsive Designs

Beyond using media queries and modern CSS layouts, like flexbox and grid, to create responsive websites, there are certain overlooked things we can do well to make responsive sites. In this article, we’ll dig into a number tools (revolving around HTML and CSS) we have at the ready, from responsive images to relatively new CSS […]
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Copy the Browser’s Native Focus Styles

Remy documented this the other day. Firefox supports a Highlight keyword and both Chrome and Safari support a -webkit-focus-ring-color keyword. So if you, for example, have removed focus from something and want to put it back in the same style as the browser default, or want to apply a focus style to an element when […]
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Where Does Logic Go on Jamstack Sites?

Here’s something I had to get my head wrapped around when I started building Jamstack sites. There are these different stages your site goes through where you can put logic. Let’s look at a special example so you can see what I mean. Say you’re making a website for a music venue. The most important […]
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