Web Design: Pack It Up, Pack It In, Let Me Begin

Full Speed Ahead

Front-end

First up, our main man Wes Bos released a new - completely free - course: CSS Grid [cssgrid]. Mozilla sponsored Wes’ time to create the course, hence this being an🚨 actual good deal alert 🚨

Speaking of 🚨 AGDA 🚨 - a reminder that Wes has plenty of other awesome courses, Learn Node [learnnode] and ES6 for Everyone [es6.io] being just two of them. If you gravitate towards those and want a discount, enter the coupon SITEPOINT for 25% off. That'll also support SitePoint!

Back to CSS for one more link: a guide to finding dead CSS [csswizardry]. Nothing about undead CSS though. Must be coming in a follow-up.

Sacha Grief details the top JavaScript projects of 2017, based on GitHub activity [medium.freecodecamp].

FYI: Google’s now using page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches [webmasters.googleblog]. Seems kind of overdue, doesn’t it?

A guide to structuring a React app for a CMS [x-team].

An overview of display: contents; resources [css-tricks].

You should read the ECMAScript spec this weekend - here’s how [timothygu].

Pack It Up, Pack It In, Let Me Begin

Mobile/back-end/programming

An intro to Firefox’s upcoming two-tiered compiler, which promises to make WebAssembly even assemblier![hacks.mozilla]. Faster, I mean.

Slack’s field guide for keeping Webpack fast [slack.engineering].

webshot-factory [github/ashubham] is a tool to take web screenshots at scale, using headless Chrome.

npm’s proposal for supporting ES modules in Node [gist.github].

Now AWS Lambda supports Go, performance benchmarking Go v Node.js code [hackernoon].

A guide to open source etiquette [csst-tricks].

An interview with Michael Meeks ahead of an upcoming talk he’s giving on re-structuring giant, ancient codebases for new platforms - focused on making LibreOffice work everywhere [fosdem]. For everyone’s sake I hope that subject isn’t that familiar.

Take Charge

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

JavaScript engineer [Help Scout], remote.
Midlevel full-stack developer [ReCharge], 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].

Hero Image

Design/UX/product

You should never forget that the user is a hero [heydesigner]. Yeah! Especially you - the person reading this sentence. You’re definitely a hero. Me? Sidekick. Or maybe an Alfred type. Maintaining the Batcave, that sort of thing.

How to use writing in your design process [medium/dropbox-design].

A Sketch template for summoning monsters [gumroad].

Overwatch Your Back

News/business

Weekend read: Bloomberg’s gone deep on the lengthy fall of Travis Kalanick [bloomberg].

Ever the contrarian, Slate has a take on why Apple’s “we’re spending so much money and creating so many jobs in the United States” announcement is mostly business as usual [slate].

Playboy’s suing BoingBoing for linking to a post - they claim the act of linking itself was a breach of copyright [eff]. I tend to link to things, so I am extremely interested in this case.

Women are judged to be better at coding, assuming their gender is hidden [theguardian]. If it’s not, men’s efforts are judged better. I’m sure that’s just the result of thousands and thousands of coincidences though, not a super awful real effect.

Twitch has a deal with Disney, new tools for producers, in a clear fusion cannon shot across YouTube’s bow[arstechnica]. That clumsy mixed metaphor was designed to imply I knew anything about Overwatch, by the way.

Speaking of, YouTube’s monetization changes this week will likely shut out new creators, who might have to use Instagram or Twitch to make their names [wired].

Oh, and esports federation ESL One just signed a deal with Facebook to broadcast tournaments via the social network’s new social “Watch” feature [wired]. Platforms are evolving, content will move to various places. So it’s the web then?

41 (I counted them) lessons learned reading Tim Ferriss’ new book Tribe of Mentors [medium/personal-growth].

Aladdin Sane

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

This piece - Uncanny Valley published in N+1 Magazine [nplusonemag] came up again today. I read the whole thing before breakfast - it’s quite good! But very bleak, I hope no-one who reads it relates to it too strongly.

The 29 stages of a Twitterstorm in 2018 [buzzfeed] is this week’s best satire.

Kapwing [kapwing] lets you add “trendy” sound effects to video. I wouldn’t normally include it, but it has a pretty good Chewbacca effect.

A former Angry Birds marketing head wants to build the world’s longest undersea tunnel [buzzfeed]. I think deep down we all want to build gigantic impractical tunnels everywhere, I'm just glad he's making his dream a reality.

Finally, Aladdin’s Whole New World scene, with realistic audio (wind) [youtube/inappropriateusername].

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

Thanks to everyone who reached out following my little Versioning 2.0 announcement post the other day. The new direction is super exciting, and I'm looking forward to sharing more with you as we go.

ANYWAY, I'll spend the weekend thinking about all of that, and also learning more about Overwatch. I'm more of an experiential learner, so look out for my Twitch stream soon!

See ya Monday.