In case you missed it, we launched the Smashing Podcast just a few weeks ago — a bi-weekly podcast that is moderated by our dear friend and colleague, Drew McLellan. And so it’s time for another monthly update! Join us as we share the latest news and highlight the things we have enjoyed reading over the past month.
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Development workflows can easily get out of hand and start causing confusion and friction within teams — especially as they get bigger in size. There have been too many times when our code review was just about noticing that missing comma or the failing tests that never run before pushing to a remote repository. Thankfully, there are tools that can take this friction away, make developers’ workflows more straightforward and help us concentrate on the things that actually matter the most. Thanks to git and the hooks it provides, we have a great variety of automation with which we can set our development workflow and make our lives easier.
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Arguably the worst way to teach the fundamentals of programming, is to describe what something is, without mention of how or when to use it. In this article, Ryan M. Kay discusses three core concepts in OOP in the least ambiguous terms so that you may never again wonder when to use inheritance, interfaces, or abstract classes. Code examples provided are in Java with some references to Android, but only basic knowledge of Java is required to follow along.
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Welcome to another monthly update to keep you all in the loop about all things smashing. Today, join Iris Lješnjanin as she share the latest news and highlight the things we have enjoyed reading over the past month. In the fast-paced industry that designers and developers work in, it’s important to stay up to date as much as possible. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back with monthly updates to help you stay on top of things.
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Data import has historically been a time-consuming and frustrating task, especially for products that depend on ingesting a lot of data from users. That’s why many developers include CSV importers in their apps — to spare users from having to manually copy data from a spreadsheet into their database. But let’s face it: traditional data import solutions haven’t always been great. That’s why, today, Suzanne Scacca is going to look at how Flatfile helps you create a better import experience for your users, team, and product.
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In a lot of cases we can do these things with CSS —just not on the web. For example, CSS is also used for print formatting via user agents designed for outputting to PDF. In this article, Rachel Andrew looks at some common layout patterns that we can’t yet do on the web and the CSS Specifications that might let us achieve them in the future. While most of her articles are about things we can do, this one is about things we can’t but that perhaps we might be able to do in the future. Take a look.
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In the fast-paced industry that designers and developers work in, it’s important to stay up to date as much as possible. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back with monthly updates to help you stay on top of things. This is the first monthly update that the Smashing team will be publishing, to highlight some of the things we have enjoyed reading over the past month.
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The web has seen an incredible evolution in the last decade: new HTML/CSS features, browser improvements, and design techniques. Ever since releasing Grid Inspector, the Firefox DevTools team has been inspired to build a new suite of tools to solve the problems of the modern web. In this article, Victoria Wang will tell you everything about all 7 tools and take a peek at potential future projects, with stories from the design process and practical steps for trying out each tool.
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Whether it’s you adding Webmentions, removing tracking scripts from a website, recycling plastic, picking up trash from the street to throw it into a bin, or cycling instead of driving to work for a week, we all can make things better for ourselves and the people around us. We just have to do it. For his monthly reading list, Anselm Hannemann summarized what has happened in the web development world in the past few weeks. From browser news and UI/UX to privacy, tooling, work and life.
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The market is filled with site builders that promise to be universal solutions for any design challenge, but when it comes to practice, they fall short on both the design and development side. Only a few tools actually keep their promises. In this article, Nick Babich reviews Webflow — the next-generation tool for building a sophisticated web experience that allows users to design, build, and launch websites visually.
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