Web Development Reading List #189: Sync Via Push API, RTL CSS, And The Disaster Factory

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.

Do you feel stressed from time to time? I do. Recently, I experimented with meditation and yoga, just to see if and how they work. There’s a lot of advice you can find online and they all claim to transform your life entirely.

Let’s be honest: yoga is great for calming your mind and exercising your body muscles, while meditation is a great way to reset your mind after a stressful day. Nevertheless, I think neither one of them can really prevent you from being stressed. I also don’t think they can solve all of your problems. But as with many things in life, they’re definitely two of the things out there that can help you improve your personal life, and probably help you calm down a bit and get you more relaxed.

News

Tools & Workflows

  • TagUI is a general purpose tool for automating web interactions. The author is currently working on the Chrome headless support to make this great tool even better. With the help of TagUI, you can easily write automated tests with a simple click and other actions.

CSS/Sass

  • CSS Database is a comprehensive list of CSS features and their positions in the process of becoming implemented web standards, made by Jonathan Neal.
CSS features
What's next for CSS? This list has the answers. (Image source)
  • Christoph Reinartz shares the Trivago story of CSS right-to-left support on their service.
  • Jens Oliver Meiert shares why you should probably stop using CSS browser resets. Of course, this is a controversial topic but some of the examples show that it’s often not needed. Do you know every rule that is inside normalize.css? And how many of these elements do you use on your project? I’d bet there are quite a few normalizations in there that don’t apply to your project.

JavaScript

Work & Life

A mini moment of mindfulness
Meditation can give you a little uplift, that helps you to spread happiness to the people who you come into contact with in your daily life. Isn’t that a bit like a cup of tea? Particularly if you’re making one for someone else, too.

Going Beyond…

  • The Disaster Factory” is an essay by Greg Knauss about programmers living in worst case scenarios and why we have responsibility in our jobs and would be happy to be hugged by friends.

—Anselm

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (mrn)