Web Design: Looks Like You're Trying to Improve UX - Would You Like Some Help With That?

Friday, January 12, 2018

Lighten the Load

Front-end

First up, small things you can do to improve your site’s accessibility [css-tricks].

How to create a living style guide [webdesignerdepot].

The latest ways to deal with cascade, inheritance and specificity [css-tricks].

A CSS cheat sheet [adam-marsden].

A front-end wishlist for 2018 [blog.logrocket].

And a thorough examination of link[rel=preload] [filamentgroup].

This Just Got Real

Mobile/back-end/programming

NectarJS compiles JavaScript into native binaries for every platform [codeburst]. JavaScript already ran quite a lot of the world, now it can colonize the rest.

hooks:data [data.hooks] offers real-world data in a real-time API. For real.

How to import data in Amazon Redshift using the COPY command [sitepoint].

How to liberate tabular data from scanned PDFs using Python library pdftabextract [datascience]. One step closer to a paperless world. Apart from in Rock–paper–scissors, of course.

A guide operating Kubernetes reliably [stripe].

A Tribe Called Quest

Jobs, positions, engagements, duties and assignments (mainly jobs)

Senior WordPress front-end developer [Modern Tribe], remote.
Front-end developer [Jibble], remote.

Want your next open position here? You should! 47,000+ very qualified readers will see it and a slightly smaller number of those will apply! Go here and place your ad [sitepoint].

Looks Like You’re Trying to Improve User Experience - Would You Like Some Help With That?

Design/UX/product

How building a design system can empower your team to focus on people [medium/hubspot-product].

New web design trend: bright colors [designmodo].

FAQs produce a bad user experience: purposeful information is better [alistapart]. Also good? Clippy.

The Mind Boggles

News/business

Facebook’s changed up how the Newsfeed works: you’ll now see more posts from friends, and fewer from media organisations and brands [buzzfeed]. It’s only Jan 12th, and Mark Z is already “fixing” his company.

Speaking of tech companies trying to fix things: YouTube’s added a new super safe tier of video producers, perfect for advertisers nervous about running ads against awful, inappropriate stuff [recode].

Uber uses a special tool - Ripley - to remotely lock up data on company devices, useful for when their overseas offices get raided by the cops [bloomberg]. You know, like what a crime syndicate would do?

And! Dropbox is finally going public [recode]. I maybe could’ve segued better there, but here we are.

An overview on how the Spectre/Meltdown patches will affect performance [arstechnica].

WiFi is now more secure: check out WPA3! [motherboard.vice]

Weekend read: A look at a fascinating new breed of online retailers, who operate via Shopify and Facebook ads and “pick suppliers (they’ll) never know to ship products (they’ll) never touch.” [theatlantic].

Mighty Morph-in

Everything else (apps, fun tools, gaming, culture, funny stuff)

A curated selection of blockchain and cryptocurrency links [github/coinpride].

Finally, I’m looking forward to when robot racing is an event at the Olympics [thenextweb].

There you have it, a final Versioning for the week.

Now I'll use this little spot here to give you a little heads-up: we've got some exciting stuff planned for Versioning this year. I'll give you a full run-down soon - likely next week - but the three high-level points are:

- Things are happening!

- Those things will make Versioning waaaaay better.

- You'll be in on the ground floor, because you're awesome.

I'm not really in the marketing biz, but I feel like that's a pretty good "teaser trailer". More on this really soon!