Web Development Reading List #170: Hamburger Alternatives, Libsodium In PHP And Choosing Profit

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.

As web developers, we need to rely on our knowledge, and choosing solutions we’re already familiar with is often the most convenient approach to solving a problem. However, not only technology is evolving but also our knowledge of how to use it.

For a while, we thought it’s best to use base64 encoding for inlining assets into CSS files, for example, and that loading JavaScript asynchronously will make websites faster. With more evidence and research, however, we came to realize that we were wrong. We should take this as an occasion to remind ourselves to question our habits and from now on ask ourselves if the solution we have in mind for a given problem really is still the best one we could choose.

Concept & Design

Alternatives to Hamburger Menus
Labels combined with icons could be an alternative to the hamburger menu. Levi Kovacs explores what else you can use instead. (Image credit)

Security

Web Performance

JavaScript

  • Jack Franklin explains context in ReactJS applications — something that’s discussed a lot in the community and often defined in many different ways. Jack explains why it exists, when to make use of it, and how you can avoid using it.
  • In his essay about JavaScript start-up performance, Addy Osmani explains what slows our web apps from booting up.
  • With all the talk about CSS in JavaScript and markup in JavaScript, we had quite some discussions lately. However, these topics were mostly discussed in the context of React applications. Now there’s a holistic approach to keeping everything in one place for vue.js: your markup, your logic, your styles. An interesting concept that could be very useful for vue.js web applications.

Work & Life

Depend less on each other
Basecamp’s Jason Fried advocates for separating the gears and depending less on each other in a company.

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 email, RSS and online.

— Anselm

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (mrn)