ZenDev - Friday Frontend: November 20th Edition

Hey there,

I am totally slammed with work right now - new project starting up, some new direct reports, and roadmapping for next year. Consequently this week’s newsletter is super short. Some neat articles, but minimal commentary from me this week, sorry! Stay safe!

Best,

KBall from ZenDev

CSS & SCSS

How to Detect When a Sticky Element Gets Pinned

Seems like something the platform will absorb sometime soon, but in the meanwhile this is a useful technique.

Understanding flex-grow, flex-shrink, and flex-basis

Comprehensive dive into the key flex-box sizing properties.

Mixing Colors in Pure CSS

Neat exploration of mixing and animating between different colors.

A Complete Guide to CSS Gradients

CSS Gradients are one of the most incredibly powerful tools in CSS from a visual perspective, and this is the most complete guide to them that I’ve ever seen.

JavaScript

JavaScript Operator Lookup

This looks like a useful tool, either for browsing or for looking up if you encounter an operator you haven’t seen before in someone else’s code.

Use CSS Variables instead of React Context

I appreciate looks at how modern CSS helps you even when you’re using CSS-in-JS.

JavaScript Decorators From Scratch

Don’t use decorators in production JavaScript code. They’re still just in stage 2 in the TC39 process. But *do* learn about decorators, try them out in test projects, and go give feedback on the specification so we can help this move along and become a part of the JavaScript language for real.

Other Awesomeness

How to Build HTML Forms Right: User Experience

Comprehensive look at a number of UX factors that go into making HTML forms that work well for users.

Thinking Contextually

The example described is design, but I’ve found this approach to be extremely important in engineering as well.

5 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting a Design System at Spotify

Always useful to have articles like this sharing real-world battle experiences.