DESIGN

Optical adjustments in components

Every time you look at a computer interface, your brain is trying to fool you. No matter how hard you try to make things look aligned, the eye of the beholder will often disagree.

WEB DEVELOPMENT

Scroll to the future

Everything you always wanted to know about implementing scrolling but were afraid to ask. We have scrolled to the bottom of modern web specifications to take you on a whirlwind tour of latest CSS and JavaScript features that make navigating around a single page smooth, beautiful and less resource-hungry.

JAVASCRIPT

Designing very large (JavaScript) applications

A (long) transcript of a talk about JavaScript applications, seniority, routing and bundling, empathy, and much more.

DESIGN

Distributing scalable Sketch libraries

How can we build complex symbols, distribute them and keep changes in sync with all of our users?

REACT

D3 & React

This has been the most impressive talk of the morning. How D3 and React can work together (without competing for the DOM) to create unbelievable data visualisations.

REACT

setState Machine

How to use State Machines in React to make your application's UI deterministic, predictable and automatically testable, managing the state of the components with Automata.

THINK

The Eponymous Laws of Tech

“I decided to collect some of the little nuggets of wisdom attributed to people. Found in conference talks which I then repeat in meetings to sound smart, the Eponymous Laws of Tech are sometimes humorous observations and sometimes based on real academic research.”

TOOLS

Corporate Ipsum

Designed to facilitate the needs of corporate paper-pushers everywhere.

Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews. Iterative approaches to corporate strategy foster collaborative thinking. Organically grow the disruptive innovation via workplace diversity and empowerment.

MANAGEMENT

Facilitating Awesome Meetings

Meeting facilitation is a critical leadership skill that’s often overlooked. Excellent meeting facilitation means that the attendees know why they’re there, they get equal participation time, and your meeting’s goal or deliverable is achieved in a timely and productive way.

THINK

The Cobra Effect

The cobra effect occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse, as a type of unintended consequence. The term is used to illustrate the causes of incorrect stimulation in economy and politics.

FONTS

Songwriters fonts

Write songs as the ones who inspired you before.
The Songwriters fonts have been created to give musicians inspiration. Writing lyrics with the handwriting of influential songwriters helps imagination to develop.
Being in the mood of Bowie, Cobain, Cohen, Gainsbourg, Lennon, might be purely imaginative… but that's precisely the point.

TEXT FORMAT

TSV, better than CSV

Lately, I’ve been getting a few questions on why one should use .tsv files since CSVs are “standard” and virtually everyone knows how they work — so I wanted to clarify this once and for all.

FRAMEWORKS

Yep, JavaScript Moves Fast. Build Your Component Library Anyway.

Here’s a question I’ve heard a few times recently: “What if we create a component library in React/Vue/Angular/whatever and a new component technology replaces it?”. Cory House has the perfect answer.

SECURITY

The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user

A very subtle way to scam a user in adding their credit card number to the wrong account on Netflix (or other services). Be careful out there!

CSS

Working with the new CSS Typed Object Model

CSS now has a proper object-based API for working with values in JavaScript. The days of concatenating strings and subtle bugs are over!

LIFE

Six strategies to learn anything

“I was lucky to have understood, early in my life, how my brain works and how to take advantage of that knowledge. These are the strategies I used that made the biggest difference to me.”

MODELS

Margaret Hamilton, NASA's First Software Engineer

When it comes to Margaret Hamilton's career, she literally shoots for the moon. Hamilton discusses joining NASA as their first software engineer and creating the software that launched the Apollo 11 first manned mission to the moon.

MODELS

Beatrice Vio, wheelchair Paralympic fencing champion

Beatrice Vio cultivated a passion for fencing when she was five years old. At 11, she contracted severe meningitis. In the hospital, the doctors gave her an unimaginable choice: keep her limbs and risk death, or amputate all four to ensure survival. She chose life.

DESIGN SYSTEMS

Creating Themeable Design Systems

Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

LONG READ

Sixty-Four Teeth

I hated my parents for making me get braces at thirteen — until guilt took over at my father’s own crooked teeth.

WORK

What comes after senior developer?

How to deal with the problem that there seems to be an upper limit to technical careers: at one time in our career we have a decision to make if we want to keep being technical or moving into management. It sounds odd, but there is a lot of truth to it.

EVENTS

Presenting Work With Confidence

In a couple of weeks Mike Monteiro, renowned (and controversial) designer, speaker and author, will held a workshop in London. He will share his techniques and ideas on how to deliver effective presentations, how to ask for feedback and how to "take charge of the room".

AGILE

Notes & pics of the Agile Manifesto meeting

Alistair Cockburn shares some more notes and pics of the Agile Manifesto meeting.

UI

Handling spacing in a UI component library

Building a highly consumable UI component library is no easy feat and this article will focus on one particularly tricky aspect of it: outer component spacing.
By outer, it means spacing that is not internal to a component.

PYTHON

Breaking a wine glass in Python

Kirk Kaiser tried to write a program to detect the resonant frequency of a glass, and break it…

ALGORITHM

An ongoing series of nonverbal algorithm assembly instructions

IDEA is a series of nonverbal algorithm assembly instructions by Sándor P. Fekete, Sebastian Morr, and Sebastian Stiller.
They were originally created for Sándor’s algorithms and data structures lecture at TU Braunschweig, they publish them here so that they can be used by teachers, students, and curious people alike.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Using Deep Learning to improve FIFA 18 graphics

Game Studios spend millions of dollars and thousands of development hours designing game graphics in trying to make them look as close to reality as possible…

COLORS

The crazy stories behind 6 of the world’s rarest colors

There’s a rare collection tucked away in the Harvard Art Museums–but not of art. It’s the Forbes Pigment Collection, a vault of more than 2,500 pigments from across the world[…]

PROJECT

Project from hell

A few years ago, I was hired to work as a consultant on a software project for a large French tech company.
What I have witnessed there is beyond everything I could possibly have imagined in terms of software engineering.

CSS

CSS in the Age of React: how we traded the cascade for consistency

With hundreds of engineers, developers and designers working on Yelp, ensuring visual consistency across Yelp is a challenging task. We’ve been migrating our web components from Yelp Cheetah to React…

REVIEW

A Review Process

"[…]in the spirit of sharing what I’ve learned and where that’s led me, here is an overview of our current system, how we’ve structured it and the philosophy behind it."

JAVASCRIPT

How JavaScript works​

A nice blog post about the rendering engine and tips to optimize its performance.

DESIGN

V6: Color

A new approach to one of my biggest design weaknesses, using basic color theory, HSL, and Sass.

CAREER

A career cold start algorithm

Over time, I realized that the natural instinct to push for early impact leads many incoming leaders into challenging relationships as they expose their knowledge deficit and waste time.
So, I developed an algorithm that has helped me ramp up quickly…

MENTAL HEALTH

A day in the life of someone with OCD

One of the hardest things about living with OCD is feeling unsupported.
People tell you to ‘get over yourself’ and insist it’s ‘not that bad’.
That’s because people tend to associate OCD with someone who likes organizing their drawers or colour-coding their wardrobes.

CSS

Using CSS variables correctly

CSS Variables are now supported in all modern browsers and people are starting to use them in production.
This is great but they’re different from variables in preprocessors and I’ve already seen some examples of people using them without considering the advantage they offer.

JAVASCRIPT

Habits of Successful React components

In this post Jack Franklin shares a set of guidelines that he has come up over the last few years, and that he tends to follow when writing React components.

LIFE

How to Build Any Habit

There are four steps to building a habit: clarifying, pairing, measuring, and iterating. Using this framework, Helen Tran was able to go from couch potato to physique competitor and long-distance hiker, bilingual to trilingual, and designer to design manager.

UX

The microcopyist: cancellation, confirmation, conflagration

Via Alla Kholmatova
How to write microcopy for destructive actions. Not so easy as it may look like.

DATA VISUALISATION

Interactive Clan Map of Scotland

An interactive map of Scotland, where you can see not only each clan's history and motto but alto their tartan! 😍

DESIGN

Is your design flexible?

It’s one thing to create consistency in the design DNA for one brand,
but what to do, when you need to create consistency thought out 350 websites across eight different brand DNA's?

PERFORMANCE

Better performance: the case for timeouts

What happens when services are slow or unavailable?
Well, you can’t process search queries, or payments, but your app would still be working “fine” — right?

That is not always the case, and I want to run a few benchmarks to show you how a little tweak, timeouts, prove beneficial when dealing with external services.

JAVASCRIPT

Fear, trust and JavaScript: When types and functional programming fail

Many developers working with JavaScript borrow useful ideas from functional programming and strongly-typed programming languages […] these ideas together in JavaScript, however, they come with severe trade-offs, work together poorly, and ultimately fail in the goal of effectively transferring trust from developers to code and tools.

APPS

Gifski – Convert videos to high-quality GIFs.

A macOS app for the gifski encoder, which converts videos to GIF animations using png quant's fancy features for efficient cross-frame palettes and temporal dithering. It produces animated GIFs that use thousands of colors per frame.

HACKING

The lottery hackers

A long, but engaging story on how gaming the lottery seemed as good a retirement plan as any.

PERSONAL GROWTH

Seeing vs. reading

The key to creativity.

TYPOGRAPHY

Future Fonts

An innovative way to license typefaces while they are still in progress: access to experimental styles designers are currently working on, a good selection of fonts for a small price. For type lovers, by type lovers.

BECAUSE IT'S FRIDAY

The "Memento Mori" Project

In this technical write-up, Marco Cedaro tells how his new pet project Memento Mori was born, and how it was set up. Very interesting approach, kudos Cedmax!

SELF IMPROVEMENT

Making Peace with Personal Branding

Via Mohammad Rajabifard
I think of personal branding as anything that helps people find out about you and your work. Is no substitute for doing high-quality technical work; it’s just the means by which you can share this work with a broader audience.

WORK

Aspect of in-company communication for innovation

In the context of communication, transparency usually means availability of information regarding company vision, goals and project specific details. Transparency is crucial to internal communication because it breeds trust, accountability, and open dialogue.