Top picks — 2017 April
Build Complex Layouts with CSS Grid Layout
https://egghead.io/courses/build-complex-layouts-with-css-grid-layout
We ware waiting for a real layout system since the born of the web. Recent version of Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari (yep, we are waiting for you Edge) finally brought it to us! CSS Grid Layout is here and it is more powerful that we expected. It can be as simple or as complex as you want. In this 40 minutes egghead course Rory Smith goes through numbers of techniques of using it. Fantastic resource to get yourself familiar with basic concept as with complex techniques.
A Dao of Web Design
https://alistapart.com/article/dao
Living in 2017 and working as software developer makes me feel that something that I embraced today is going to be outdated tomorrow. This article shows the opposite. Published in 2000 (epic article by John Allsopp precisely points out a key principles of web that many web professionals don’t understand even 17 years later. This article is timeless! I cannot event quote here my favorite part — I would must copy the whole article here. It is just a must read for all web professionals.
Welcome to Mastodon
https://medium.com/@Gargron/welcome-to-mastodon-111d9227e56a
I really don’t know what is going on but on the beginning of an April so many people across all social media channels started exchanging their links to profile on totally new social media channel — Mastodon. Of course I have my own account by now! Author of Mastodon published a nice primer and pointed out the differences between micro-blogging platforms that we tend to use. The growing pace looks very promising for this platform. The most important benefits for me are — open source, free and decentralized. I’m very curious what will future bring to the Mastodon!
Grid garden
Do you remember Flexbox Froggy? It was a big thing when flexbox arrived to browsers. It has been a while since we got a solid layout update spec across all vendors. CSS Grid Module landed just month ago and Thomas Park again made our life much easier to grasp the basic concept of it. Grow your carrots and enjoy 24 levels of interactive game that will teach you a basic grid syntax. Such a good fun!
Microsoft Edge Developer - CSS Variables
https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-developer/suggestions/6261292-css-variables
Yeah boy, we have a CSS custom properties in all major browsers now. The future is now! In my opinion the most powerful feature ever added to Cascade Style Sheets. I already saw so many amazing examples that take an advantage of this and I’m looking forward to see more of them.
The Post JavaScript Apocalypse - Douglas Crockford
Douglas Crockford is speculating about future language that will come after JavaScript. A nice presentation full of good conclusions about design of current set of languages. Of course you will find here a a little bit of Douglas’ crankiness.
An Overview of JavaScript Testing in 2017
https://medium.com/powtoon-engineering/a-complete-guide-to-testing-javascript-in-2017-a217b4cd5a2a
Vitalik Zaidman wrote a very helpful article to understand testing in JavaScript world. It is a really comprehensive article that covers basics like test types and presents a number of helpful frameworks that we may use with brief summary of each of them. I’m not very experience “tester” and this post definitely helped me a lot to understand it.