Web Design: The Next Generation

Friday, January 5, 2018

The Next Generation

Seed Money

Front-end

First up, if you haven’t dived in yet, a guide to learning CSS Grid [learncssgrid].

QSS [tomhodgins.github] is a simple query syntax for handling element queries in CSS.

Shards [github/designrevision] is a modern, free Bootstrap 4 UI toolkit.

react-seed [github/uruit] is a pretty literally-named React seed project.

While we’re talking starter projects, ReactPWA [reactpwa] is an upgradeable boilerplate for PWAs. Server-side rendering, speedy pages, optimized UX - all that stuff.

React v Vue, Reason, Storybook: just some of the top JavaScript trends in 2018 [x-team].

And React and Vue may be mortal enemies, but React-Vue [github/smallcomfort] lets you bring them together to make something great.

Smashing Magazine seems to be pretty focused on performance right now! Here’s Vitaly Friedman’s front-end performance checklist [smashingmagazine].

The Next Generation

Mobile/back-end/programming

A guide to rendering CSS on the server, for your Next.js apps [scotch].

How eBay went beyond just HTTPS. HTTP/2, service workers, the whole nine yards [ebayinc].

Last year I included a post on a dev producing a Blockchain-based Redux clone. An update on that experiment - state is now shared and preserved [swizec].

Just add Christian Slater - a repo that purports to contain all the hacking tools used by Fsociety in Mr Robot [github/manisso].

How Conclave, a decentralized, real time, collaborative text editor, was built [hackernoon].

gitMask [gitmask] anonymizes your GitHub commits by acting as a proxy.

Path-Breaking

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

Ruby and JavaScript developer [Pathable] remote.
Product designer [FullStack] 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].

After After Effects

Design/UX/product

Some video game user experience awards [blog.prototypr]. A good reminder that UX is everywhere!

A guide to taking your After Effects animations to CSS transitions and keyframes [smashingmagazine].

How to do the “discovery” part of the design cycle on the cheap [alistapart].

How to think about developing the UX for enterprise apps [sitepoint].

The Melting Pot

News/business

Some updates below on recently-discovered processor security flaws Spectre and Meltdown. Stay safe out there everyone!

Amazon and Google are saying fixing the flaws won’t slow down their - and therefore much of the web’s - infrastructure too much [gizmodo].

How to make sure the flaws don’t ruin your life [lifehacker]. (Apple’s response is here, since it came out after that article was released) [support.apple].

In other news, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal challenge for 2018 is to fix Facebook [recode]. Good idea, CEO of Facebook!

An ex-NSA hacker is building an AI to find hate symbols on Twitter [motherboard.vice]. That is one AI I feel a bit sorry for.

6 pre-made Trello boards that’ll help you get big goals done [trello].

On a similar tip, one Wired author details the self-improvement chatbots they spent a week interfacing with [wired]. I signed up to Woebot, mentioned in the article, after reading it, I’ll let you know if I become a much better person!

30 new top-level domains designers and developers may find useful [webdesignerdepot].

Super Duper

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

Remember that weird star we found that was sometimes eclipsed by something? And everyone - me, for example - got excited because they thought it might be an alien structure or a swarm of structures or something awesome?! Well, it pretty much definitely isn’t that [motherboard.vice]. Curse you, science!

A checklist for cleaning up and preparing all your digital stuff for the year [smashingmagazine].

And a comprehensive guide to making your home router secure [motherboard.vice].

Watch an AI learn and pretty much master Super Mario Bros. [thenextweb] and despair for the future of the world.

This Chrome extension gives you the real price of an Airbnb stay, accounting for fees [chrome.google].

Finally, if birds left trails in the air, this is what they would look like [nationalgeographic]. 50/50 beautiful/terrifying.

There it is, the first week of Versioning for 2018, done and dusted! Aside from a bit of sadness over one of my fav sci-fi concepts not being a reality (yet!), I think it went fairly well.

Over the weekend I'll be doing some UX research (playing video games) and dusting off my Christian Slater impression (any excuse). Also - looking away every time I see a bird in the sky. I don't like their (imaginary) trails, not one bit.

I hope you have a similarly busy weekend planned, see you in the ol' inbox on Monday!