Top picks — 2017 September
So you need a CSS utility library?
https://css-tricks.com/need-css-utility-library/
Chris Coyier throws a bunch of insights about utility libraries and strategies of using them. Personally I like writing CSS and I always prefer to do it by myself although I can see a need for having one of them at some point. The second part of this article is a long list of the most popular tools of this type. I can’t get the point of mixing one of them with currently existing CSS base. Totally agreed with Chris about it…
I can’t tell you if you’ll love working with an all in utility library approach like this or not, but long-term, I imagine you’ll be happier picking either all-in or not-at-all than a tweener approach.
Authentication Still Sucks
https://www.rdegges.com/2017/authentication-still-sucks/
I learned tons about authentication, authorization, and user management from Randall Degges. In this essay he tells the story behind Stormpath (previous employer) being acquired and lunched as a Okta Identity Platform. With current pricing plan there is no better solution to handle authentication, authorization, and user management in a secure way.
Sketch — Libraries (Beta)
https://sketchapp.com/docs/libraries/
Sketch 47 comes with another revolutionary feature called Libraries. If you are a Sketch user, it won’t take long to master new version. The concept is essentially the same as using symbols — the only difference is the fact that symbols are no longer attached to a single document and become global. If the file is marked as a library you can drop it to your server or local network and use with all team members. It will make projects well synced and consistent. I’m sure the players of big design teams will benefit from this feature. This Medium article by Jon Moore is a great primer to this feature.
Lazy async SVG rasterisation
https://jakearchibald.com/2017/lazy-async-svg/
Jake Archibald wrote a nice primer to bleeding edge createImageBitmap API that now allows to asynchronously render expensive SVG images off the main thread. Short and nice intro (requires Chrome Canary and chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-canvas-features flag enabled).
Using ES modules natively in Node.js
http://2ality.com/2017/09/native-esm-node.html
Native support for ECMAScript modules in Node should be dropped with version 10 LTS. Thanks to Bradley Farias we may play around with a current version of Node by passing a flag --experimental-modules. On this article Dr. Axel Rauschmayer explains technical details and provides an example.
Sublime Text 3.0
https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-point-0
Finally! After years of waiting and lots of people migrating to other tools like an Atom or my favorite Visual Studio Code — Sublime Text just officially hit version 3. The upgrade costs next to noting (in majority of cases it is totally for free) and the brand new license costs just 80$. Made from grounds up, redesigned with brand new website and documentation! Worth dropping money for!
Finally the Promise.prototype.finally() is available
https://hospodarets.com/promise.prototype.finally
Serg Hospodarets explains an always missing bit of Promise API that is going to be merged with the ECMAScript 2017 spec (hopefully) — the finally() method. Thanks for writing it Serg — very helpful!
Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js
https://code.facebook.com/posts/300798627056246/relicensing-react-jest-flow-and-immutable-js/
Yes! React, Jest, Flow and Immutable under MIT license.
Relicensing the GraphQL specification
https://code.facebook.com/posts/121714468491809/relicensing-the-graphql-specification/
And there you go! GraphQL is joining the bag of MIT frameworks!
Web truths: CSS is not real programming
https://christianheilmann.com/2017/09/19/web-truths-css-is-not-real-programming/
A CSS language through the prism of programming language — very subjective opinion and full of good points article by Christian Heilmann. I really like the way how the author highlights the core principle of CSS language and what was the aim of creating it in the first place.
Designing Websites for iPhone X
https://webkit.org/blog/7929/designing-websites-for-iphone-x/
Very specific bump on new iPhoneX makes designers life a little bit more difficult. There needs to be some extra padding accommodated around a sensor housing. Webkit (Safari engine) creators come with some helpful explanation and introduce new constant() CSS function. Dig deeper into the technical aspects and practical use case in this article.
Leverage New Features of React 16
https://egghead.io/courses/leverage-new-features-of-react-16
Nik Graf released a quick 17 minutes long series to explain the new features added to 16 version of Facebooks framework. It comes with lots of great goodies. My favorite one is definitely ability to return multiple objects from single component.
React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces
This month belongs to React! Brand new website design by Brian Vaughn and Joe Critchley is looking sexy and more legible.