Top picks — 2015 November
Internet is full of interesting, useful or funny things. I would like to share with you my top picks from this month.
Project Comet: Designing with Real Data
https://medium.com/@anirudhs/project-comet-designing-with-real-data-959beccb5c1a#.w64g992vb
This is really stunning showcase of Comet’s amazing feature that helps to work with real data. No more “Lorem Ipsum…”! As a Sketch user, repeated grid isn’t anything amazing for me, but the feature to use real data from real website is amazing!
Visualize Sketch 3.4 New Features
http://kwangyik.com/2015/10/28/visualize-sketch-3-4-new-features/
Sketch app got a next huge update to version 3.4 recently. Kwang Yik presents majority of big updated on animated gifs. It’s handy to understand all fresh features. My fav is definitely Local sharing and built in plugin management. Nice post, nice blog.
Why Static Website Generators Are The Next Big Thing
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-website-generators-next-big-thing/
I run my blog on one of the most popular static site generators — Jekyll. It’s not the only player in this territory. Number of tools like that is growing up day by day. Why is it worth to pay attention to static site generator, what are the pros, the cons? Well written Mathias Biilmann summary on Smashing Magazine.
React for Beginners
https://reactforbeginners.com/
New series of videos made by Wes Bos. I’m huge fan of all things that this guy is doing. I bought it immediately after I saw a friendly reminder on my inbox and as I expected, I spent this money well. Can’t recommend resources by Wes enough. It is fantastic opportunity to learn one of the best MVC frameworks. Check it out.
From Pages to Patterns: An Exercise for Everyone
http://alistapart.com/article/from-pages-to-patterns-an-exercise-for-everyone
Forgot about university level designing skills for a moment and move back to times of playground, when you enjoyed yourself with piece of paper, coloured pencils and scissors. Lego blocks, do you remember? Now combine this fun and basic principles learned ages ago with knowledge of industry and graphic editor skills and look at your designs from different perspective. Think about reusable patterns instead of thinking about entire pages. You first learned how to stick two lego blocks together, then you mastered it to build a castle, yeah?
Module loaders
http://toolsday.io/episodes/module-loaders.html
All about available options to manage your JavaScript environment. By the way, it is a new podcast defiantly worth to follow. I’m big fan of Una’s singing:)
The State of Front-End Dev
http://alistapart.com/event/front-end-dev
Nice, 62 minutes debate about state of front end development in 2015. Cleaver dudes and full of good sense of humour. Interesting watch, but you can take it as a podcast in the background.
Windows Insider Preview Build 10586
https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/changelog/desktop/10586/?compareWith=10240
And finally we have a Microsoft Edge with support of <use> in Microsoft’s browser!
Tips for Creating and Exporting Better SVGs for the Web
http://sarasoueidan.com/blog/svg-tips-for-designers/
I can’t think of better author of article about SVG than Sara. Collection of tips about well optimised SVG output. So many times I saw SVG with millions paths inside simple logo or even bitmap inside SVG (and only bitmap). Must read for everyone who works with scalable vector graphics.
How Our CSS Framework Helps Enforce Accessibility
http://www.ebaytechblog.com/2015/11/04/how-our-css-framework-helps-enforce-accessibility/
Collection of practical use cases of enforcing correctly applied accessible markup on some eBay components. Accessibility is a big thing and we (developers) should pay more attention to it. This article can be a good starting point.
Rachel Andrew - Embracing New CSS When Your Users Are Stuck in the Past
Rachel Andrew in this 30min talk walk us through all future techniques of layout in CSS. She show many practical examples of using Flexbox and Layout Gird module. Her complex knowledge about this subject is very impressive. Recently I played around a little bit with CSS Grid Layout and I’m really looking forward to have a wider browser support for this module.
You should use [insert library/framework], it’s the bestestest! / Paul Lewis
Paul Lewis gave amazing talk about frameworks vs vanilla JavaScript. If you are into JS, if you use any or these cool modern MVC frameworks, this is a talk for you. TLTR / TLTW: As always, it depends. This talk triggered a discussion in the community. Have a look at good responses by Tom Dale, Zach Learherman, Soledad Penadés from Mozilla and Dave Rupert as well. Chris Coyier from CSS Tricks summed it up as well.
Wes Bos - Modern Workflow + Tooling for Front-end Developers
A lot about modern tooling for a 45min presentation! A lot! If you feel a little bit lost in nowadays fronted tooling, watch it. This presentation will give you a summary of all this tools that people use on the market now. I’m huge fan of most of these tools presented by Wes.
DOM Tips and Techniques: Parent, Child, and Siblings
http://www.sitepoint.com/dom-tips-techniques-parent-child-siblings/
Very useful collection of tips about DOM manipulations. Sometimes we don’t need jQuery to append a class or move two divs around, really :)
With Silver, your design is your prototype
When Adobe announced their new project Comet something that I liked the most was ability of building a live prototypes. It is something that doesn’t exist in Sketch. SilverFlow fills this missing feature. It is looking fantastic! Check detailed guide on Medium as well.
Foundation 6 Is Here!
http://zurb.com/article/1416/foundation-6-is-here
After Bootstrap 4, it’s time for Foundation 6. The list of improvements is long. I’m really excited about it. I don’t use it personally, but I browse the codebase carefully and apply best bits to my projects.
The Importance of Learning JavaScript with Kyle Simpson
Conference talk with Kyle Simpson, author of the best (in my opinion) books for beginners in JavaScript world. Tons of good advices for programmers in any level from Kyle.
Zoe M. Gillenwater: Enhancing Responsiveness With Flexbox
Flex box is the future. Browsers support is really good now and we are ready to use it now! Fantastic talk, show how we can implement progressive enhancements into out CSS modules.
Jake Archibald - Modern Progressive Enhancement
Jake about performance. Two good case studies, clearly presented results and huge list of possible solutions ready to implement on our projects. Very good talk!
Anna Debenham - Front-end Style Guides
Amazing talk about importance of building consistency in the big scale project by creating and maintaining style guide. I think it is very important even on smaller projects. On this 35min talk Anna mentioned so many fantastic examples that can work as an inspiration to start building own one.
Animated SVG vs GIF [CAGEMATCH]
http://sarasoueidan.com/blog/svg-vs-gif/
Next superb article by Sara this month. This time about using SVG format as a replacement of easy GIF animations. Long read as always, but tons of info comes with it.