Web Design: Rolling in the Deep

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Preconnect Four

Front-end

First up, the top 10 most common JavaScript errors in more than 1000 projects, and how to avoid them [rollbar]

Tips and tricks for making your ES6 code shorter and more readable [dev].

And a guide to optimizing CSS and JavaScript for faster sites [sitepoint].

What’s new in Vue Devtools 4.0 [medium/the-vue-point].

Great tools for building better PWAs [medium/@sureshdsk].

CSS Gridish [medium.freecodecamp] is an open source tool for helping teams learn CSS Grid.

Preconnect hints can make your site faster [viget], so you should pre-read about them so you can be pre- successful.

How to style a form with Tailwind CSS [css-tricks].

Center Stage

Mobile/back-end/programming

Best practices for staging environments [increment].

How to make sure your PhoneGap apps look good on an iPhone X [blog.phonegap].

A GraphQL primer [smashingmagazine].

Awesome Scalability, a collection of resources on designing scalable systems [github/binhnguyennus].

Podcast: How Netflix supports DevOps at scale [thenewstack].

The Oculus Rift team invented a new unit of time defined in C++, Flicks [github/oculusvr], for use in tracking VR apps.

Rolling in the Deep

Design/UX/product

Adele [adele.uxpin] is a repository of public design systems and pattern libraries.

Flat UI Colors 2 plenty of palettes, for a total of 280 handpicked colors [flatuicolors].

The January update for AdobeXD is a pretty big one. [theblog.adobe] with third-party integrations, support for Dropbox previews, better performance with large files, and more.

A look at empathy mapping, the first step in design thinking [nngroup].

5 important website metrics, and how to design for them [webdesignerdepot].

The language of UX [uxdesign].

How Atlassian approaches illustrating balanced and inclusive teams [medium/designing-atlassian].

It Is Rocket Science

News/business

Today in important, incredibly cute, science news: scienticians cloned a couple of baby monkeys and they’re adorable [arstechnica].

Australia looks to be close to passing legislation making it easier for law enforcement agencies to access communications on encrypted services [computerworld].

Community-developed broadband - rather than the major ISP status quo - is officially a thing, with 750 examples in the United States [motherboard.vice].

Face-swapping technology is free, very sophisticated and easy to use for people without a technical background. Right now, that’s being used to put celebrity faces on pornstars, but convincing fake news and general hoax-ery is also on the cards [motherboard.vice] which is scary. (That article is SFW, but has a few swears and general bleak vibes.)

Netflix is now worth more than US $100 billion [money.cnn]. Surprising, but I guess Stranger Things have happened. (I’m sorry.)

Burger King just provided the best explanation of net neutrality so far [theverge].

Wow, get a load of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy as it test-fires! [motherboard.vice]

4 great self-care tips from from 8 Silicon Valley women [medium/girl-geek-x].

Tips on how to take a digital detox [blogs.dropbox].

Accidentally Get Rich or Die Trying

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

Sick of waking up your overseas Slack team members when you mention them in passing - just give them a Klingon name[theverge]

Duck Duck Go now has iOS and Android apps, and a Chrome extension [duckduckgo] for making private searching, browsing and general living a little easier.

A VR film just got a 7-figure deal at Sundance [wired]. It’ll premiere on Oculus Rift. This feels fairly momentous.

Speaking of VR, soooo… apparently Elton John announced his retirement from touring with a crazy, CGI-filled VR film? [wired]

Finally, the latest Bitcoin millionaire? 50 Cent. By accident [theverge].

There's Versioning for ya - I hope it was suitably inspiring and invigorating. Some worrying stories there, I'll admit, but the 50 Cent finding millions of dollars behind the couch kinda helped cheer me up.

I'll have some more for you tomorrow. Some milestones to add to your diary - Monday will be our 800th edition (wow!) and Thursday is set to be the launch of the new, reader supported Versioning! I'll make sure I rest ahead of next week, that's for sure!

See ya tomorrow 👋