Web Development Reading List #187: Webpack 3, Assisted Writing, And Automated Chrome Testing

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.

This week, we’ll explore some rather new concepts: What happens if we apply artificial intelligence to text software, for example? And why would a phone manufacturer want its business model to be stolen by competitors?

News

General

  • Samim shares insights into how assisted writing tools are using machine learning to understand and generate the human language. While the article focuses on how we can reimagine word processing software with machine learning and better algorithms, we can also learn a lot about improving our own writing style.
Assisted Writing
Translating text into the style of famous writers is just one of the things machine-learning-powered assisted writing tools can do. (Image credit)

Tools & Workflows

  • Eric Bidelman shares how we can use headless Chrome for automated testing, in this case to run your Mocha and Chai tests via the Karma test runner. As a bonus, he also explains how this works on a CI-server.

JavaScript

  • React Express is an all-in-one guide to modern React application development. Perfect for people who want to get into React development and understand the differences between the various approaches.
React Express
The React Express guide covers everything you need to know to write a React app.

CSS/Sass

Work & Life

  • Kristian Glass wrote an article about making decisions and owning them — something I constantly fail at in private life and could still improve in business life.

Going Beyond…

  • The ethical smartphone vendor Fairphone wants Apple to steal its idea of building devices that don’t rely on resources sourced with child-labor or under inhumane working conditions. So far, Fairphone has built two variants of smartphones, and as an owner of the Fairphone 1, I’m convinced that it’s possible to manufacture ethically better devices.

—Anselm

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (mrn)