A roundup of Advent Calendar sites of interest to web designers and developers. From accessibility to UX, coding challenges to Perl, there really is something for everyone this December. Today, Rachel Andrew brings you calendars which are true community efforts, often with the bulk of the work falling to an individual or tiny team, with no budget to pay authors and editors. So, please join us in supporting these efforts, share the articles that you enjoyed reading, and join the discussions respectfully. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, you can certainly learn a lot of new things over the next 24 days.
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When you prepare for your next presentation, use these tips on how to tweak your slides and your talk so that everyone gets the most out of it. In this article, Allison Ravenhall brings you tips that will make a big difference to your whole audience. Your slide content, design, and how you present can all affect how well the crowd gets your message, if at all. This is particularly true for those with physical and cognitive conditions. Making subtle changes to what you show and your script will help all attendees to get the most out of your hard work.
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Rachel Andrew writes about her involvement with the CSS Working Group, and why she feels it is important that web developers understand what is being worked on in CSS, and have a way to offer feedback.
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If you haven’t contributed to an open source project before, MDN is a brilliant place to start. MDN has been documenting the web platform for over 12 years and is a go-to resource for many. Its strength is the fact that it is a very straightforward, and an excellent way to give back to the community if you have ever found these docs useful. And the best part is that anyone can contribute and help to improve it. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains how.
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In this article, Ricky Onsman brings you a list of current podcast for web designers and developers that our Smashing community listens to. We had what can only be called a very strong response both in number and in passion, and we’re pretty sure that any web designer or developer will find a few podcasts in this lot that will suit their particular listening tastes.
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WordPress is a free and open-source software (also known as FOSS) project. There are plenty of ways you can contribute some of your time back to the WordPress project without having to look at a line of code. Pick your favorite, and you’re off! You would be surprised to find that there are many ways that people can contribute back to the project without even writing or understanding a line of PHP. Interested? Then let’s get cracking, shall we?
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The recent Global Diversity CFP Day aimed to help more people submit their ideas to conferences and get into public speaking. To help encourage people to write and submit to CFPs, Global Diversity CFP Day aims to help underrepresented people submit proposals to speak at conferences. In this article, Rachel Andrew rounds up some of the best takeaways along with other useful resources for new speakers.
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We all learn lessons as we make our way through life and work. Ricky Onsman thought it might be useful to find out what kind of advice folks in the community have found to be particularly valuable. Some of the following advice focused exclusively on web work, some on work in general, and some on life in general.
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Productivity tips always make for a popular topic for an article, as everyone is looking for the silver bullet, that one weird trick that turns you into a productivity machine. So, we asked the community on Twitter and Facebook to share their best productivity tips, and in this article Racheal Andrew is going to round these up alongside some things she’s learned that work well for her. Let us know your own advice in the comments, or tell us the popular tip that would never work for you!
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When Denys Mishunov was invited to speak at one of the best front-end conferences in Europe, he felt like he did not deserve to be at that conference. And he didn’t even know that those feelings of his had a name! This is called impostor syndrome and it is a real psychological issue, rooted deeply in many of us. If we do not pay attention to its symptoms, if we blindly follow its triggers, then we can get into real psychological trouble. The good news is that, even though there is no pill for it, we can change out attitude towards it. Simply acknowledging the feeling can help to neutralize its effect.
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