SERVERLESS

Create your own Serverless API

A great tutorial on how to use a platform for serverless functions (in this case Azure, but can be anything) to create your own APIs.

TYPOGRAPHY

It’s a Myth That All Capital Letters Are Inherently Harder to Read

You read by anticipating the letters that will be in words, and then recognizing those letters. All capital (uppercase) letters are slower for people to read, but only because they aren’t used to them. Mixed case text is only faster to read than uppercase letters because of practice.

HACKING

Fixing the Netflix Volume Slider

“A while ago, I joked around with my friend about something we like to call ‘frustration driven development’, which seems to be the most effective method in certain situations. Sometimes the level of disappointment in user experience makes us go to great lengths, which is what this post relates to.”

DESIGN

Cross-Platform Styles with Style Dictionary

Amazon's Style Dictionary is a tool that allows the generation of cross-platform design tokens (useful when you need to share design primitives between different platforms or projects, and recently at the core of almost every design system). Here a clear and thorought presentation about how it works and how to use it.

JAVASCRIPT

An introduction to the JavaScript MutationObserver API

I had a play with the JavaScript MutationObserver API recently and came away very impressed.
I’m already considering all the places I could probably tidy up code by making use of them. In case you haven’t heard about them before, here’s a little primer.

DESIGN

Designing with data

Things to keep in mind as a UX designer working with data.

CLOUD

Developer trends in the cloud

Currents is a quarterly report on developer cloud trends that we created to share our knowledge with the broader community.
For the fourth edition, we surveyed nearly 5,000 respondents from around the world about themselves, the tools they use and the challenges they face.

DESIGN

10 small design mistakes we still make

We forget that human mind changes very slow, and the knowledge you have about human behaviour will not go old for at least 50 years or so.
To make it easy for you, we need to keep consistent with a couple of principles that will remind us of how to design great products.

DESIGN

What every product designer should take away from Lyft’s new UI

If you Google why search bars are at the top, a Quora post with this exact question pops up. “Users have been trained to expect a search (if there is one) at the top. It’s a convention that a designer breaks at their own risk,” says the top answer.

A product designer at Lyft did exactly this, and in a magnificent way.

JAVASCRIPT

This one line of Javascript made FT.com 10 times slower

It started off with an alert, telling us that the error rate for the Front Page application is above the 4% threshold…

GROWTH

Ten principles for growth as an Engineer

"An engineer I’d managed for over a year moved to a new team. In one of our last 1:1s, I mentioned that he’d recently done some good project management.
He replied that he’d had an epiphany about self-direction; he’d decided that he needed to own everything about his work, not just his code, to make sure his projects succeeded."

CSS

The div that looks different in every browser

It's not that Martijn Cuppens used User Agent sniffing, CSS hacks, or anything like that to make a quirk div.

REACT

Defining component APIs in React

The following is a collection of thoughts, opinions, and advice for defining component APIs that are meant to be more flexible, composable, and easier to understand.
None of these are hard-and-fast rules, but they’ve helped guide the way I think about organizing and creating components.

ART

Stack Trace art

An artist wannabe discovers his own art – turning programming exceptions into beautiful drawings.

DESIGN SYSTEM

Distinct design systems

DO WE HAVE too many design systems?

GROWTH

Growth Engineering at Netflix

Netflix has over 125 million members worldwide. The number of global broadband households is over 1 billion and the number of daily internet users is over 4 billion.
Growth Engineering is key to making Netflix more accessible for people around the world.

WEBPERF

New Reddit performance

When we talk about performance, we’re really talking about four different things:

The speed at which we render content in the browser
The speed at which the API returns results
How long it takes to load up and process the required javascript
How long it takes the browser to receive the first byte from the server

GRAPHQL

GraphQL building blocks

A great presentation about GraphQL by Phil Pluckthun

WEBPERF

Too old to rocket load, too young to die

Rocket Loader is in the news again.
One of Cloudflare's earliest web performance products has been re-engineered for contemporary browsers and Web standards.

ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT

How (and why) should managers code?

If you’re writing an all-time top five list of controversial engineering management topics, I can almost guarantee that the question of whether managers should be coding will find a place on the list.
I’m very firmly in the camp of managers who do, and believe they should, code but it’s entirely understandable why so many people come down on the other side of the issue.

SECURITY

How I used a simple Google query to mine passwords from dozens of public Trello boards

It's all said in the title. And it's all so unbelievable. But sadly is also true (I personally checked). 😨

FUN

Current state of webdesign

This is supposed to be a fake. But actually is also soooo true. This is really the state of "web-design" nowadays 😄

JAVASCRIPT

What I've learnt reading Jason Miller's source code

A tour of useful JavaScript tricks from his minimal open-source projects

KOTLIN

5 reasons why N26 is moving to Kotlin

Like any modern technology company, we use many tools to bring our banking platform to life.
Many of our backend services, for example, are implemented in Java. And our engineering team has tried out both Scala and Typescript — but later decided it wasn’t for us.

GAMING

My teenage video game obsession wasn't 'gaming disorder'

"I was a gay teen in the 1980s, hiding from a terrifying world in an arcade.
The WHO's push to uniquely pathologize gaming won't help people like me."

PROGRAMMING

What to know before debating Type systems

Type systems are commonly classified by several words, of which the most common are "static," "dynamic," "strong," and "weak."
In this article, the author addresses the more common kinds of classification.

AI

OpenAI Five

"Our team of five neural networks, OpenAI Five, has started to defeat amateur human teams at Dota 2"

PROGRAMMING

Learnable programming

Designing a programming system for understanding programs

GOLANG

50 Shades of Go: traps, gotchas, and common mistakes for new Golang devs

Go is a simple and fun language, but, like any other language, it has a few gotchas…
Many of those gotchas are not entirely Go's fault. Some of these mistakes are natural traps if you are coming from another language.
Others are due to faulty assumptions and missing details.

TALENT

Talent introductions in tech​

"I do a lot of introductions between talented technologists in my network and trusted companies or (more rarely) external recruiters.
I recently got some feedback that greater transparency in how I connect people would be useful.
Please enjoy (and help me refine!) my current process, as well as some thoughts about how I plan to change this process in the near future."

DESIGN

The new design tools on the block

While Sketch, Adobe XD, Figma and Invision Studio are all building the same product with slight differences in their focus areas and execution, some new cool kids just arrived to ease painful parts of our workflow.

JAVASCRIPT

Vintage concepts, fresh applications — CS-in-JS

What happens when you take a classic Computer Science concept and apply it directly to modern web/app development, in particular Finite State Machines and React for UI state management?

THINK

The Machine Fired Me

It was 7am when my phone rang. Instead of an alarm, it was my recruiter disturbing me from a pleasant dream. It was too early for a phone call or to be caught off guard, so I did not answer…

JAVASCRIPT

Understanding Generators in ES6 JavaScript

ES6 introduced a new way of working with functions and iterators in the form of Generators (or generator functions). A generator is a function that can stop midway and then continue from where it stopped.

REACT NATIVE

React Native at Airbnb

In 2016, we took a big bet on React Native.
Two years later, we’re ready to share our experience with the world and show what’s next.

CSS

The Algorithms of CSS: Sources

The Algorithms of CSS, a presentation from CSSConf EU 2018.

BUSINESS

Netflix: inside the binge factory

Netflix is hiring everybody in and out of Hollywood to make more TV shows than any network ever has, and it already knows which ones you’ll like

DATA

The insane amounts of data we're using every minute

More than 470,000 tweets, 2.1 million snaps and 50,000 Instagram photos are posted every 60 seconds.

UX

You have the right to remain silent

Here’s a story about how subtly things that seem “good” can also be harmful. What might our Miranda rights be for software?

REACT

Advanced React Component Patterns

Kent C. Dodd has updated his comprehensive list of useful coding patterns (requires paid membership, but it's worth every penny).

FRONT-END

5 years of OpenComponents

Matteo Figus tells the story of how OpenComponents went from a simple internal project to a successful open-source solution for the distribution of micro-frontends. 🙌

DIVERSITY

Where are the Women?

A passionate talk about the diversity in the technology sector, and in the society in general. Where we are, where we should be, and why it matters. 💜

MACHINE LEARNING

Deep Learning in JS

Amazing talk, amazing slides, amazing speaker. One of the most impressive and clear presentations at JS Conf EU. It made the core concepts of machine learning clear and accessible to everyone.

PSYCHOLOGY

Impostor Syndrome Type 2

I then realized I had what I jokingly called “Type II” impostor syndrome: my fear of being a fraud is replaced with the anger of demonstrating I can do it.

UI

Gallery of programmer interfaces

These images bear witness to the passionate work of so many people striving to improve programming.

NODEJS

Keeping Node.js fast

When it comes to performance, what works in the browser doesn’t necessarily suit Node.js.
So, how do we make sure a Node.js implementation is fast and fit for purpose?
Let’s walk through a hands-on example.

TYPOGRAPHY

Alphabet in Motion

Each year the project 36 Days of Type invites graphic designers, illustrators, typographers, and artists from around the world to submit their own alphabet-based designs during a 36-day typographical marathon. Designer Ben Huynh submitted animated letters for each day of the open call which he combined into a short film.

TYPOGRAPHY

Type Safari in Farringdon, London

A type safari is an expedition inside a specific territory in order to research and record the different graphic signs you can find inside this area — commercial signs, road signs, graffiti… The goal is to find the signs that tell the story of a place, but also to look after the signs that would be “a treasure”, a typographic inspiration.

DESIGN SYSTEMS

Design Systems Survey

Insights into how and why design systems are used in our industry, the challenges of design systems, and what makes this impactful, systemic work worth doing.

TOOLS

Reinventing Version Control with Glitch Rewind

Rewind is the simplest, easiest, most fun user interface for version control ever.