Friday Frontend: State of the Ecosystem Edition

Hey there,

Welcome to February. This week’s episode has a couple good “state of the ecosystem” type resources, as well as your normal set of resources and tutorials. I’d also definitely recommend reading and thinking about the article on losing faith in UX - as developers and designers we have tremendous power, and we need to hold the line on not using it for bad purposes.

Best,

KBall from ZenDev

P.S. Come work with me! My company, Humu, is hiring developers! We’re a startup that is using behavioral science and engineering to help make work better for everyone. Super interesting problem domain, diverse team, and a great work environment. 

CSS & SCSS

No-Jank CSS Stripes

Useful trick for rendering diagonal stripes using only CSS. For deeper information about why the technique is needed, check out the first comment on the article.

Animating a CSS Gradient Border

Wow, these examples are wild. And while I doubt there are many cases where the rotating animated rainbow gradient border is the right solution, having this tool in your toolbox will let you do some super cool things.

Things You Can Do With CSS Today

A great overview of a number of modern CSS features. 

BAREBONES CSS FOR FLUID IMAGES

Interesting look at images that scale fluidly up and down with the size of their container, and how different approaches interact with srcset.

The Minimum Content Size In CSS Grid

Good writeup of a gotcha that could cost you a bunch of time and frustration working with CSS grid. Worth a look through so you recognize it when you see it and know how to address.

JavaScript

Dynamic Programming: Memoization vs Tabulation

These techniques are not specific to JavaScript, but they are so useful I want to include them anyway. They are bread and butter techniques for scaling a system. I use them extremely regularly - in fact, just this week I dealt with a scaling problem where an algorithm was going up quadratically and past a certain scale of customer would run for many hours. Using tabulation turned it into a linear problem that would finish in minutes.

State of the React Ecosystem in 2021

A useful look at the most common techniques and libraries in use in the React ecosystem today. Especially good if you’re coming back to React after having been away, but also worth a glance through if you’ve been working in React throughout. If you’re not familiar with one of the items mentioned, it will be a good place to dig in and learn.

Breaking down the State of CSS/JS [audio w/transcript]

(Bias alert - I was on this podcast). Last week’s JSParty episode broke down the results of the State of JS and State of CSS surveys, looking for interesting trends and inspiration on what to learn about

Why do I like Svelte

Nice overview of some of the super developer friendly parts of Svelte that are making it one of the most exciting developments in the web world right now.

Other Awesomeness

Why I'm losing faith in UX

Super interesting and important look at the ways at which design and an understanding of how to influence human behavior have been used increasingly to manipulate folks. This problem goes far beyond design - look at the way recommendation algorithms at Youtube and Facebook have been shown to lead folks down the path to radicalization. We need a serious accounting in our industry about what type of work we are willing to rationalize away as “good for the business”, and we need individuals who are willing to stand up and speak out against the pure profit-seeking that provokes this. I am not an anti-capitalist, but we cannot let capitalism and the search of profit overrule everything else that matters.

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

This is an incredible story, and a reminder of how valuable it is to represent things in the simplest form possible for the aim you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to share information, the more complex and heavy weight the wrapper you put around it the more devices and situations you exclude.