Web Development Reading List #116

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Tools, Coding, Web Development Reading List
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About The Author

Anselm is a freelance front-end developer who cares about sustainable front-end experiences and ethical choices in life. He writes the WDRL, and is co-founder … More about Anselm ↬

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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.

You probably haven’t bought your Christmas presents yet. Usually we feel the need to buy a gift for friends and family. It often lets us buy random stuff that is often of no real value. Turning this around, I started to enjoy the evening with a hand-made dinner, small hand-made gifts and enough time for the loved ones. So far, this worked way better than any gift I’ve ever bought in a store. So don’t stress yourself if you haven’t found anything yet — time, attention and doing things together can also be a great gift. Have a nice weekend!

News

Microsoft open sourced their JavaScript engine Chakra. This is a lovely step and means that we’re likely to see a solid alternative to V8 now as they want to support Node.js as well. Great move by the Edge Dev team.
Mozilla just announced this week that they will stop developing Firefox OS for Smartphones. It’s sad to hear the news since Firefox OS has brought us many new web technology APIs but it’s also understandable that it had no opportunity chances among the big players.

chakra-kangax-opt-preview — Microsoft has open sourced their JavaScript engine Chakra.(View large version)

General

As PHP 7 is out now and many providers already support it (it cut my response time by half on wdrl.info), here are some of the best resources to learn more about the new version.

Concepts & Design

In many cases we’re just using icons because they look nice and could replace text. But we barely know how simplicity in icons plays a vital role for a good experience.

Security

There are so many things to take care of these days that we sometimes are not aware how much impact something has. But we should really not underestimate the leak of credentials. An article explains the worst things that can easily happen, how severe it is, and what you have to do if it happened to you.

JavaScript

If you always wanted to find out what makes a function asynchronous in JavaScript, the article is just what you need.

CSS / Sass

This is probably the most minimal (~157 bytes) CSS grid system for modern browsers, using Flexbox.
Dave Rupert shares his approach of having intrinsic placeholders with the element.
Typekit published a practical guide on Open Type features on the web. It’s telling us when we should use certain features and when to not use some of them. A pretty good hands-on guide with good live-examples.

Work & Life

Kai Brach has written about the challenges and importance of doing meaningful work. And we’re experiencing that having a personal touch around what you do is what people want to hear. Because we have an overload of information, we are in need of an opinion of someone we trust.
Corey Vilhauer gives some advice for everyone out there to personally feel better and live a better live without changing much. You just need to adjust your mindset and remember yourself to re-frame things properly.

Go Beyond…

We’re now in an interesting time where we can read bold statements from people like Arnold Schwarzenegger about our environment, sustainability and the need to change something. I love the fact that more and more well-known people find proper words to describe the problem in an understandable way while politics often still fail on that.
Now, if you’re up for doing something small to reduce your impact on the environment, here are a few great tips to do that.

And with that I’ll close for this week. If you like what I write each week, please support me with a donation or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via e-mail, RSS and online.

Thanks and all the best, Anselm