Web Dev Reading List #123

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? 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.

This week I mostly spent time on fixing bugs, improving a deployment workflow and on getting another new front-end project structured. One major takeaway from this was that it’s good to have a proper deployment workflow in place already in the early stages of a project.

We should document appropriately in git what has been done in a commit instead of sleazily writing “changed [XY] because of [some arbitrary reason]”. By doing so, it becomes easier for myself, or someone else, to identify bugs at a later stage.

News

  • Opera 35 has been released and brings CSS Font Loading API improvements, Fetch API data: and blob: URL scheme support, Touch and TouchEvent constructors.
  • So Facebook will shut down Parse at the end of the year and Burke Holland explains why the company basically builds a house of cards. Of course, Facebook is not the only one, and Firebase or Heroku are building a similar lock-in we shouldn’t rely on with our products.

General

  • What could be simpler than returning HTTP status codes? Yet, we often do not care about returning the correct code, although it would massively improve the quality of your web application or website. There is a great specification for common statuses available for HTTP, and you should make use of it to help users, browsers and third-party crawlers identify the status of web content.

Concepts & Design

Nick Keppol’s post about Apple’s new font family San Francisco teaches a lot about specific typographic details
Nick Keppol’s post about Apple’s new San Francisco font family contains a lot of valuable insights into typographic details.

Tools

Security

Accessibility

JavaScript

  • Lately, there’s a lot to read about functional programming in JavaScript. Elm claims to help us with functional programming and Dennis Reimann now wrote up a step-by-step guide on how to get started with Elm and functional front-end development.
  • Feature.js is a fast, simple and light­weight browser feature detection library. It has no dependencies and weighs only 1kb minified and gzipped. It automatically initializes itself on page load, so you don’t have to. However, what it doesn’t do is run tests while initializing. It will only run them when you ask it to.
  • No, not another ES2015/2016 article. This one, however, is a great primer on how to build modules in JavaScript. You can use its approach without a tooling library like Babel, but if you want to know how it’s done in ES2015, the article has got you covered, too.
Writing JavaScript modules
Preethi Kasireddy has written a great primer on how to build modules in JavaScript. Image credit: Iwan Gabovitch

CSS / Sass

Work & Life

  • A Navy SEAL held a speech at a university and told the students how we can change something in the world if we change our mindset.

Going Beyond…

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

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (mrn)