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Behind the CSScenes, November 2022

Is it Fall? Winter? I don’t know, but I woke up with snow in the front yard this morning and felt like it was time to write a little update about what’s been happening around CSS-Tricks this past month, as we’re known to do from time to time.

First up is the CSS-Tricks Newsletter! It’s starting to feel like we’re getting our rhythm down after months of hiatus. The last edition went out at the very end of October. That’s the third consecutive month we’ve been able to shoot it out which I’d call a big win for consistency. Nah, it’s not the weekly cadence we had before, but that’s something we’re aspiring to as our team continues to establish itself.

Speaking of which — we have a new team member! We brought Andrea Anderson on board. She’s a well-established technical editor and we’re lucky as heck she’s here. While she might work on a CSS-Tricks piece from time to time, her main focus is working on content that’s integrated into DigitalOcean’s Community site.

Oh, and while we’re on the topic of DigitalOcean’s Community, check out this Developer Markepear post deep-diving into DigitalOcean’s writing process. Seriously, it’s an incredibly deep dive that gets into the way tutorials are outlined and structured, the UX of navigating the tutorial archives, and even the delicate interplay between the content and advertising in each article.

I really like how DigitalOcean’s tutorials are described as “give-first” content that “has a smell of value all over it.” It speaks volumes about the team’s work ethic, which I can personally attest is top-notch. It’s really the reason DigitalOcean and CSS-Tricks make a great match.

Advertising is also pretty top-of-mind for us right now. When we ran a survey the other month, we knew that there’d be concerns about how CSS-Tricks ads would be affected after the DigitalOcean acquisition. Would we remove them? Make them all about DigitalOcean? Keep everything as-is? I mean, CSS-Tricks has traditionally relied on an advertising model to keep the lights on, but now that it’s backed by a company, how much do we really need to rely on ads at all?

Turns out many of you like the ads, according to the survey. They’re sort of like product recommendations baked into the site, and I think that’s a testament to Chris’s effort to make sure ads are (1) promoting good stuff and (2) are relevant to the front-end work we do. Case in point: we recently swapped out a bunch of DigitalOcean ads to promote Cloudways hosting after DigitalOcean acquired it. Those ads didn’t do so well, so we swapped the DigitalOcean ones back in, which were already doing quite well.

(The advertised deal is pretty darn good, by the way… $200 in free credits to spin up your project.)

The work to move CSS-Tricks from WordPress to the same CMS the DigitalOcean Community uses for its content is still in progress. A lot of the work is still mapping WordPress content fields to the new CMS. That’s no trivial task when we’re talking about a website with 7,000-odd articles over a 15-year span. That’s going well, as is the initial site architecture. Next up, we need to figure out how we’re handling WordPress blocks, replicating their features, and creating an inventory of all that we need to carry over. Phew!

New faces!

As always, we tend to have a few new faces on the site each month as we work with new guest authors. This month, we welcomed Krzysztof Gonciarz and Lorenzo Bonannella. Check out their articles and give ’em a high five for sharing their work. It takes a lot of work to write, not to mention some courage to put your ideas in front of other people. So, thanks a bunch Krzysztof and Lorenzo!

Meet Mojtaba Seyedi

I thought catching up with one of our long-time writers would be a nice way to cap off this month’s update. And few people have contributed as many articles to CSS-Tricks as Mojtaba Seyedi. You may not see his name pop up in the archives all that much, but it’s only because he spends so much time in the Almanac.

I asked Mojtaba a few questions about his work and he graciously responded with these answers…

Your very first article with us was a roundup of plugins for the Sublime Text editor way back in 2017. What made you think to publish it on CSS-Tricks?

I used to be very passionate about the Sublime Text editor and its plugins. I could always find a plugin to ease the pain whenever I was tired of doing repetitive tasks. I would show my co-workers how interesting whatever plugin I was using was and encourage them to use it.

One of my New Year’s resolutions back then — in 2017 — was to publish an article on CSS-Tricks. I always thought the idea had been highly technical. It never occurred to me I could simply create a list of Sublime Text plugins that I happened to find useful for development! Nowadays, I can see how the high bar I had set was preventing me from writing about something that I loved.

There was a brief moment when I considered giving up on that first article. I had psyched myself out thinking that there were tons of other posts already covering the exact same thing. But out of curiosity, I Googled some of the top Sublime Text plugin posts, and surprisingly, I didn’t see any of the plugins I was writing about. So, that’s how I submitted my first article on this website!

You’ve written a total of 35 articles for CSS-Tricks, 33 of which are in the Almanac. What do you enjoy about writing technical information like that?

Almanac entries are referenceable. We keep coming back to them to check the syntax of a property or a selector. For example, we might need to visit the background shorthand property to remember whether the background-position value goes before or after the slash (/). References never get old, which is why the Almanac is special to me.

Along the same lines, documentation is challenging. One of the challenges of writing for the CSS-Tricks Almanac is reading and understanding the W3C’s specifications. For example, when I wanted to write about the mask-border property, the CSS spec was practically my only source. I needed to figure out all the aspects of that module and how different values behave in different situations because there were scant examples in the wild. I enjoy that sort of challenge and feel great when I can turn my findings into something tangible that other developers can understand and use in their own work.

There’s also the joy of completeness. Documentation allows me to get deep into details that might not make it in a typical article. I get satisfaction when I’m able to grasp a property or selector and explain it in my own words. The CSS-Tricks Alamanc gives me that opportunity.

What can you say about the editing process for those who haven’t gone through it?

First, enjoy a clean and easy process. The CSS-Tricks editorial team will help you improve it and make it better than you can on your own.

Also, be sure to edit your draft first. Always edit the article yourself before submitting it. The more ready your writing is, the more time it gives the editor to help you improve your work. If the editor needs to spend a lot of time fixing basic grammar and spelling, that’s time that could have been spent pushing the idea further with feedback and other considerations.

And, of course, learn from your mistakes. Be open to learning while you’re in the editing process. The editorial team here is very experienced and helpful. I try to review what they have changed in my article and put them into practice in my next writings. I would love to thank Geoff, from whom I have learned a lot about technical writing.

Do you have any tips for someone thinking about submitting an article proposal?

Do not overthink the idea. Your article doesn’t have to be rocket science. Anything you know well enough to write about can be helpful to others.

Another piece of advice: do not underestimate yourself. When Chris Coyier invited the community to contribute to the CSS-Tricks Almanac, I told myself there were many more qualified people who could do that, even though I had experience writing CSS docs. And yes, many folks were (and maybe still are) more knowledgeable than me. But as it turned out, I could be a part of this because I was willing to try.

Another big deal is to not worry about repeating others. Your idea doesn’t have to be unique. You can write about something others have written about in a new and different way. Your point of view and perspective matter! Your approach to solving a problem and how you explain it might be different in a super helpful way.

And finally… what’s your favorite CSS trick?

My favorite trick used to be centering an element by setting display: table on it and letting auto margins do the rest. Nowadays, with CSS becoming much more awesome, I can do the same trick with min-content and without an additional wrapper.

I’m sure there is a blog post or article about this same topic somewhere on the web. But I would like to write about it here on CSS-Tricks. See? I want to share my own perspective with you and I want to explain it in my own way.

Have something you want to share on CSS-Tricks? Send us your pitch!

Behind the CSScenes, November 2022 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Behind the CSScenes, October 2022

Well, hey, welcome back to Behind the CSScenes! These posts are like little check-ins we’re doing each month to give you a peek behind what we’re doing here at CSS-Tricks, as well as a chance for us to pause and celebrate a few things.

Last month, we shared a small taste of a redesign for this very site. Thanks to all the folks who wrote in to comment on it! Seems the overwhelming response is pretty dang positive, though the background color was a mixed bag of reactions.

There’s more work to do, of course! This month, we have a little more to share with you on the development side of things, plus a roundup of some recent activity around here. So, let’s dial in Haley Mills for the latest.

Content updates

[Haley:] September was a busy month for our team! We published 16 articles by guest authors and another 15 by folks on our team. In addition to these, we’ve been updating many of the older articles, including adding freshly-linked resources. We’ve already updated over 50 articles and will continue these efforts as part of our day-to-day work. Thank you to the team and the awesome authors who contributed this content!

To build on our efforts to provide front-end developers with the tools they need, I’m also super excited to share that we are starting to kick the tires on new guides. Guides have been a free, helpful resource to the CSS-Tricks Community since the first one was published in 2019, and we’ve known from day 1 that we need to keep this tradition going. Since this is a new process for our team, we want to ensure that the workflow for authors is completely snag-free before opening it up to the public to apply. Until then, we will be working with hand-selected authors to bring you new guides on a variety of topics.

Have a suggestion for a guide that you’d love to see? Let us know in the comments!

Finally, you might’ve heard the news that CloudWays is joining DigitalOcean and is offering a $50 credit to folks in our community! While our top priority will always be to provide platform-agnostic resources to CSS-Tricks readers, you can expect to see helpful content about CloudWays in the future because we truly believe that their managed solution could be a great fit for the community.

Thanks for reading the content updates! Next up we have our senior web developer, David Berg, with an update on the back-end work we’re doing to move CSS-Tricks to a new CMS.

What’s happening on the back end

[David Berg:] The DigitalOcean team is actively working to pluck CSS-Tricks from WordPress and drop it into the same hand-rolled CMS we use for our other sites, including DigitalOcean’s library of tutorials. Don’t worry! CSS-Tricks will still be the same standalone site at the same domain, hyphenated and all. But it’s a ton of work, as you might imagine!

If anything has been challenging so far, it’s been aligning the WordPress data from the current site with the structure of our internal system. Our team currently uses a properly vetted, maintained, and organized PostgreSQL database that interfaces with the client through an array of in-repository services over which we maintain tight code control and quality. The WordPress database structure is unintuitive — at least to me and our team — and has required our team to find obscure and maybe overly complex solutions to mash these things together.

That said, migrating CSS-Tricks content over to our in-house solution allows us to ensure the integrity and future-proofing of complex database relationships. Through this process, we can slim down the time it takes to query the database, improve efficiencies of three (or more)-dimensional relationships, and accurately model new relationships according to new features we might develop down the road.

In short, that means we will no longer be reliant on a monolithic WordPress instance to serve a response to every request. We can statically export all the publicly accessible content to a CDN, with the services handling edit operations only when needed.

It’s easier to submit article proposals!

[Haley:] Speaking of a more robust back end architecture, something else happening behind the scenes is a new form for guest authors submitting article proposals to us for publication.

We used a form before this one, but we had it tied up with Jira in a way that helps us manage the proposals and keep track of where they are in the editing flow. That integration was crumbling right before our eyes, so we went with a Typeform-powered version instead.

CSS-Tricks guest writer application front page.

While it might seem like a fairly minor thing, it’s a big deal as far as making it easier to share your proposals and making sure nothing falls through the cracks — so we have fresh new front-end content to publish for you on a consistent basis!

Oh, and if you happen to submit a proposal (and you should!) please let us know if you see any opportunities for us to make it even easier and more helpful.

Passing it back to Geoff with my favorite part of these updates: author highlights!

Some fresh new faces around here

[Geoff:] The articles you read here at CSS-Tricks are written by folks like yourself. It’s amazing just how gosh darned smart this community is and all the ideas that get passed around here. In fact, we welcomed 5 new voices this past month:

What a great bunch, right? Give ‘em all some love for taking time out of their busy lives to share their wisdom and clever tricks with the rest of us. And a shout out to familiar faces, like Temani Afif, Preethi, Ollie Williams, and Mojtaba Seyedi for all the hard work they continue to do that keeps pushing this thing we call front-end development forward.

High fives to all these folks, and to you for reading. ✋ We wouldn’t be doing this without y’all.

Behind the CSScenes, October 2022 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Behind the CSScenes, September 2022

Those of you who have been reading CSS-Tricks for a while may remember that we used to publish a little thing we called CSS-Tricks Chronicles. Our friend Chris Coyier would write up a reflection from the past couple of months or so, and it was a great way to get a pulse on what’s happening around CSS-Tricks, the site, and what the team is doing.

We like that and want to keep it going. It’s a new era, though! So what we’re going to do is welcome you back to what we’re now calling Behind the CSScenes. You’re going to meet some new and familiar faces in these updates, starting with Haley Mills, who is kicking off the very first issue.

How’s the transition going?

[Haley Mills:] Before we dive in, let me start by introducing myself! My name is Haley, and I’m the manager of Content Integration here at DigitalOcean. I’ve been at DigitalOcean for 5 years and previously worked on our editorial team, helping authors publish all sorts of topics through our Write For DOnations program. 

Many folks here at DigitalOcean (including myself) are avid readers of CSS-Tricks, and we still have to pinch ourselves for how lucky we are to be entrusted with this community. We recognize that CSS-Tricks is a critical free resource for devs across the world, and my goal is to keep it that way. 

  • Since the acquisition, we have published 95 pieces of new content and look forward to growing that number.
  • In the month of August, we performed maintenance on 6 existing pieces of content.

That said, change is to be expected when passing a torch.

I think we all know that no one can replace Chris’ voice — it’s a big reason why CSS-Tricks is, well, CSS-Tricks. His ability to have you laughing while learning something new is a skill that few can compete with. I know many of you miss his writing because you told us so in a survey (which we’ll get to in a bit), but it also opens up a huge opportunity for us all to take the torch and continue doing what CSS-Tricks does best:

Find creative solutions to problems and share them with the world. Chris brought people together this way on CSS-Tricks — and you can give back, too.

Your blossoming idea could turn out to be what the Flexbox Guide is for me and so many other people, so I humbly encourage you to reach out in our Guest Writing Form and talk to us about your topic ideas. We have two awesome editors, Geoff and Brad, to help you shape and bring your ideas to life to share with the CSS-Tricks community. In addition to paying you for your contribution, we will now also make a matching donation to a tech-focused charity of your choice.

Next up, we have Product Manager Karen Degi with some survey result highlights.

The results are in…

[Karen Degi:] In June, we shared a survey to collect feedback to help shape the future of CSS-Tricks. We received almost 900 responses, including some great written responses that helped us understand what CSS-Tricks means to the larger community. 

Many of you also volunteered to talk to us directly, which has us thinking about the best way to gather those thoughts. If you’re one of those folks, know that we haven’t forgotten about you and still want to hear from you. We just want to make sure we approach this in the most effective way!

The survey confirmed some things we already suspected and brought new things to our attention. The top few things that grabbed our attention are:

  • Engaging, high-quality content is at the heart of CSS-Tricks. We’re working to make sure that we continue investing in in-depth guides on front-end topics, as well as providing short articles about quick tricks and tutorials with embedded demos.
  • You love RSS! As we continue investing in CSS-Tricks and bringing new functionality, we’ll make sure we keep an eye on how our changes affect the RSS feed.
  • You come to CSS-Tricks to learn, to be entertained, and to do your jobs better. You do not come to CSS-Tricks because you’re excited about being sold…well, anything, really. Although we think DigitalOcean is pretty great, and we’ll probably continue to talk about ourselves where it makes sense, we understand that we need to do so in a way that is honest, trustworthy, and connected to your needs as a front-end enthusiast.

Next up is Logan Liffick, Senior Digital Experience Designer, with redesign updates.

A redesign is in the works!

[Logan Liffick:] If you’ve worked on the front end — or really anywhere on the web, you’re bound to know CSS-Tricks. It’s where I, and many others, started the journey. So, when I was asked to spearhead a redesign for the site, it was nothing short of an honor. Without a doubt, undertaking a brand update for something so familiar to so many is a challenge of incredible magnitude

If I were to do justice to this project, I’d need to pay tribute to the original. That mentality became the underlying theme of my work, and any effort to rejuvenate took inspiration from existing patterns and styles from the site.

  • Slideshow of Redesign Preview

Upon first glance, you’ll notice the fresh coat of paint. Past that, you’ll recognize the site reads more “editorial” than before. This was a purposeful decision to accentuate existing type stylings and, more importantly, to pay homage to the essence of CSS-Tricks as an informational resource. 

Preserving the element of “fun” was also top of mind. Sprinkled throughout the site are various snippets from the actual CSS “tricks” shared on this site — for example, there’s going to be a little Easter egg tucked inside a sticky footer using Preethi’s slide-out effect that’s my personal favorite, a fantastic suggestion from Geoff himself. Gradients are now a core color-way in the system, and border-radii have been rounded out. 

We wanted to give ourselves permission and space to explore an open-ended and malleable system far into the future, which lines up nicely with the overall mission and goal of CSS-Tricks: to explore what’s possible with CSS. This is just the beginning, there’s so much more to see, do, and learn with CSS-Tricks living in our (digital) ocean.

Next is Geoff with author highlights!

New authors!

[Geoff:] We’ve added a few new faces to our growing list of guest authors who have contributed to CSS-Tricks:

You may have also seen our editor Bradley Kouchi’s name pop up a couple of times, and you can expect to continue seeing him on a semi-regular basis.

That’s 16 new authors! You can be one, too, by filling out our guest writing form.

On a related note, I’m pleased as punch that we still get regular contributions from a large band of familiar faces from before the DigitalOcean acquisition. Just look at all the fine folks who’ve continued to share their great ideas with us:

Big shake-ups like the one we’re going through today can be scary. Seeing these familiar names in article bylines has helped me a ton as far as continuity and consistency go. CSS-Tricks still seems very CSS-Tricks-y to me, and that’s a big deal.

Until next time…

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek behind the CSScenes! We’ll do it again… and again and again. As you can tell, there’s a lot of activity happening around here, which means we’ll have lots to share in the next edition.

Oh, and if you’re one of the many who’ve told us just how much you miss the newsletter, it’s still here! We’re sending it just once a month while we get back in the swing of things, and you may very well need to re-subscribe to get it (we had to do a lot of scrubbing after the keys to the site were handed over).

Thanks for reading!

Behind the CSScenes, September 2022 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Java: Why Core-to-Core Latency Matters

Last year we had a global shortage of microchips; today, I feel there is a worldwide shortage of software developers. Like many other software companies, Chronicle Software is rapidly expanding and interviewing candidates. We usually ask candidates to demonstrate a good knowledge of core Java, and then we cover slightly more advanced concepts, such as the use of volatile memory, memory barriers, and fences. While it is important to have a high-level understanding of these concepts when writing concurrent code, it's surprising how few Java developers with 10+ years of experience have a deep knowledge of the underlying hardware. An initial goal of Java was to “write once, run anywhere,” but does that mean we should not be sympathetic to the hardware? 

Java has done an excellent job at shielding developers from their platform; it is not unreasonable that most developers would rather solve their business problems than become overly burdened with the internal workings of their silicon. However, some sectors, such as fintech, benefit from fast software with predictable latencies, where every last microsecond can make a massive difference to their bottom line. For these sectors, it can be beneficial to have a reasonable grasp of the underlying hardware and basic knowledge of the areas described in the following sections.

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Deployment of Low-Latency Solutions in the Cloud

Traditionally, companies with low-latency requirements deployed to bare-metal servers, eschewing the convenience and programmability of virtualization and containerization in an effort to squeeze maximum performance and minimal latency from “on-premises” (often co-located) hardware.

More recently, these companies are increasingly moving to public and private “cloud” environments, either for satellite services around their tuned low-latency/high-volume (LL/HV) systems or in some cases for LL/HV workloads themselves.  

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How to Leverage Method Chaining To Add Smart Message Routing in Java

We are going to use the open-source serialization library Chronicle Wire. Let's assume we have some data that we want to send to a particular destination; we don't want to pollute our business data structures with the routing information. In the future, the routing information could be removed or changed based on external factors such as system failover or horizontal scaling.  

 Having a separation of routing and business messages is nothing new; after all, JMS has been doing it for years with their createObjectMessage (below): 

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How Does Kafka Perform When You Need Low Latency?

Most Kafka benchmarks appear to test high throughput but not low latency. Apache Kafka was traditionally used for high throughput rather than latency-sensitive messaging, but it does have a low-latency configuration. (Mostly setting linger.ms=0 and reducing buffer sizes). In this configuration, you can get below 1-millisecond latency a good percentage of the time for modest throughputs.

Benchmarks tend to focus on clustering Kafka in a high-throughput configuration. While this is perhaps the most common use case, how does it perform if you need lower latencies?

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CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXX

Just a little link roundup of some off-site stuff I’ve done recently. As I’m wont to do from time to time.

DevJourney Podcast

#151 Chris Coyier from ceramics to CSS-Tricks and CodePen‘

Chris took us from playing on his first C64 to his bachelor of arts in ceramics and back to web development. We talked about the different positions he held along the way and how they slowly but surely led him toward web development. We brushed over the creation and recreation of CSS-Tricks, learning in the open and what a good day looks like.

Podrocket Podcast

Rocket Surgery: Kaelan and Chris Coyier compare notes

Are you up to speed on all of this new CSS stuff? Chris Coyier and Kaelan compare notes on CSS and frontend development (they also discuss MDN plus).

CodePen Radio

I’ve been back to hosting the episodes of CodePen Radio this year, every week. Here are some recent episodes.

https://blog.codepen.io/feed/podcast/

I will randomly do the podcast as a video some weeks and call it CodePen Radio on TV! Here’s Adam Kuhn and I doing one of those videos. You’ll see a new intro animation on it that Adam himself did.

ShopTalk Show

Dave and I are six months away from doing this weekly for 10 years!! Again, some recent shows:

https://shoptalkshow.com/feed/podcast/

Some of the shows have been centered around a series called JavaScript in 2021.

The biggest change around ShopTalk is our Patreon + Discord which has been very awesome.

The post CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXX appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXIX

I’ve been lucky enough to be a guest on some podcasts and at some events, so I thought I’d do a quick little round-up here! These Chronicle posts are just that: an opportunity to share some off-site stiff that I’ve been up to. This time, it’s all different podcasts.

Web Rush

Episode 122: Modern Web with Chris Coyier

Chris Coyier talks with John, Ward, Dan, and Craig about the modern web. What technology should we be paying attention to? What tech has Chris used that was worth getting into? Flexbox or CSS Grid? Is there anything better than HTML coming? And what tools should developers be aware of?

Front-end Development South Africa

Live Q&A session with Chris Coyier

Audience

Evolving as podcasting grows with Chris Coyier of ShopTalk Show

Craig talks to Chris about what it’s like being an online creator (podcaster, blogger, software and web designer, etc.). Chris talks about the lessons he has learned and what it’s like to have a weekly podcast for ten years. They also talk about podcasting trends in terms of marketing, topics, and the future outlook of the industry.

Cloudinary Devjams

DevJams Episode #2: Fetching Local Production Images With Cloudinary for an Eleventy Site

Watch our hosts Sam Brace and Becky Peltz, as well as our special guest host Eric Portis, interview Chris Coyier about his recent development project. With Eleventy, Netlify, Puppeteer and Cloudinary’s fetch capabilities, he was able to create a microsite for his famous CSS-Tricks.com site that showcases various coding fonts you can use. Find how he did it by watching this episode!

The post CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXIX appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXVII

Chronicle posts are opportunities for me to round-up things that I haven't gotten a chance to post about yet, rounded up together. It's stuff like podcasts I've had the good fortune of being on, conferences I've been at or are going to be at, happenings at ShopTalk and CodePen, and more.

My talk at JAMstack_conf

We recorded a live episode of ShopTalk Show as well:

A guest on The Product Business Podcast

Happenings at CodePen

As I write and publish this, we're rolling out a really cool new UI feature. Wherever you're browsing CodePen you see grids of items. For example, a 6-up grid of Pens. Click them and it takes you to the Pen Editor (there are some shortcuts, like clicking the views number takes you to Full Page View and clicking the comments number takes you to Details View). Now, there is a prominent action that will expand the Pen into a modal right on that page. This will allow you to play with the Pen, see it's code, see the description, tags, comments... really everything related to that Pen, and without leaving the page you were on. It's a faster, easier, and more fun way to browse around CodePen. If you're not PRO, there are some ads as part of it, which helped justify it from a business perspective.

Other newer features include any-size Teams, user blocking, and private-by-default.

Oh! And way nicer Collections handling:

Part of life at CodePen is also all the things we do very consistently week after week, like publish our weekly newsletter The CodePen Spark, publish our podcast CodePen Radio, and produce weekly Challenges to give everyone a fresh prompt to build something from if you could use the nudge.

Upgrading to PRO is the best thing you can do to support me and these sites.

My talk at FITC's Web Unleashed

My talk at Craft CMS's dotall Conf

I was on a panel discussion there as well: The Future of Web Development Panel with Ryan Irelan, Andrew Welch, Matsuko Friedland, Marion Newlevant, and myself. Here's that video:

Conferences

I don't have any more conferences in 2019, but I'll be at a handful of them in 2020 I'm sure. Obviously I'm pretty interested in anything that gets into front-end web development.

Remember we have a whole calendar site for upcoming front-end development-related conferences! Please submit any you happen to see missing.

The only ones I have booked firmly so far are Smashing Conf in April / San Francisco and June / Austin.

Happenings at ShopTalk

We don't even really have "seasons" on ShopTalk Show. Instead, we're just really consistent and put out a show every week. We'll be skipping just one show over the holidays (that's a little nuts, honestly, we should plan to take a longer break next year).

We're edging extremely close to hitting episode #400. I think it'll end up being in February. Considering we do about a show a week, that's getting on eight years. Questions like: Are we played out? Are people finding us still? Are people afraid to jump in? Are people as engaged with the show this far in? - have been going through my mind. But anytime we mention stuff along those lines on the show, we hear from lots of people just starting to listen, having no trouble, and enjoying it. I think having a "brand" as established as we've done with ShopTalk Show is ultimately a good thing and worth keeping on largely as-is. We might not be as hot'n'fresh as some new names in podcasting, but even I find our show consistently interesting.

Some of our top-downloaded shows in the last few months:

Ducktapes

I was on an episode of the Duck Tapes Podcast they called SVG with Chris Coyier:

The post CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXVII appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXVI

This is one of these little roundups of things going on with myself, this site, and the other sites that are part of the CSS-Tricks family.

I was recently in Zürich for Front Conference. It was my first time there and I very much enjoyed the city and the lovely staff of the conference. I was terribly jetlagged for my opener talk so I feel like I didn't quite nail it how I wanted to, but whattyagonnado.

It's named "How to Think Like a Front-End Developer" but it's really more like an adaptation of "ooooops I guess we’re full-stack developers now."

I've packed in several more conferences this fall:

  1. - Web Unleashed - Toronto, Canada
  2. - Dot All - Montreal, Canada
  3. - ARTIFACT - Austin, Texas - Use coupon code LASTCHANCE200 for this one.
  4. - All Things Open - Raleigh, North Carolina
  5. - JAMstack_conf - San Francisco, California

Speaking of conferences, if you know of any coming up that aren't on our master list of front-end related web conferences, please do a pull request or contact me.

If we've got anything at ShopTalk Show, it's consistency! I don't even remember the last time we've missed a week, and I enjoy making the show just as much now as I ever have.

Perhaps my favorite show of late was just chatting with Dave about what technology we would pick if on a greenfield (from scratch) project under different circumstances.

But mostly we chat with folks like Tyler McGinnis, Adam Argyle, Rachel Andrew, and Lara Hogan.

We're moving right along at CodePen as well!

  • You can now export Pens with a build process, meaning after an npm install, you have an offline version of CodePen to work with. Need to spin up a little processing environment for like Markdown/Sass/React/Babel? Just set up a blank Pen that way, export it, and you've got it.
  • We're building more and more of CodePen in React, and I think we're past the tipping point where the value in that becomes more and more clear. It's a good technological fit for our type of site. For example, we re-wrote how items are displayed and grids-of-items across the site. So now we build some little feature into it like "pinning" items, and it instantly sprinkles out to all the grids on the entire site. Same with filtering and view options.
  • Along those same lines, little moments like this feel very satisfying to me. That's related to our "Private by Default" feature.
  • We released a feature so you can block other users if it comes down to that (as well as report them to us).
  • We released some high contrast syntax highlighting themes that are both more accessible and darn nice to look at.

I got to be on Giant Robots!

We started an Instagram account at @real_css_tricks. The plan is just little educational tidbits.

The post CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXVI appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXV

I like to do these little roundups of things going on with myself, this site, and the other sites that are part of the CSS-Tricks family.

I spoke at Smashing Conf San Francisco.

There's a video! I can't embed it here because of privacy settings or something, so here's a link to the Vimeo.

It's an evolution of my "How To Think Like A Front-End Developer" talk. That's kinda how I like to roll with talks. Give the same one for about a year, but every time it's different as I learn more.

I was on the One Month podcast.

Chris Castiglione and I chat about:

  • How Chris Coyier learned to code
  • What’s a front-end developer?
  • What resources does Chris Coyier use to stay up to date on web dev?
  • Lessons learned from over 300+ episodes of the ShopTalkShow Podcast

There's a full transcript available.

We've released a number of new things on CodePen.

Quick hits:

And, as always on CodePen, we have a new CodePen Challenge, a new CodePen Spark (newsletter), and a new CodePen Radio (podcast) every single week.

I'm speaking at some upcoming conferences.

The front-end conference website got some upgrades.

We keep a list of all conferences out there related to the topics we write about here on CSS-Tricks! All things front-end web design and development!

It's a little 11ty site on Netlify, where you can contribute to anytime — particularly by adding conferences that fit the vibe that you know about.

Notably, every conference listed has a permalink (example). We did that so we could play around with dynamically generating images for them. It's super basic right now, but it was fun to play with. Dynamic CMS data is fed into an SVG, then also converted to a PNG at build time. Fancy. My hope is to upgrade the CMS to allow for cool custom backgrounds for each conference and then use them in these generated graphics.

Also, each conference has a little button where you can email it to somebody via Netlify functions, like we wrote about.

Jobs are $100 off in May

You know we have a Job Board here on CSS-Tricks. It's powered by the CodePen Job Board, which also powers the ShopTalk Show Job Board.

The price of posting a job is reduced from $299 to $199 just in May and runs for 60 days instead of 30.

Post one!

Dave and I have talked with people like Heydon Pickering, Jessica Ivins, Scott Jehl, and Guillermo Rauch on ShopTalk Show.

It's a great podcast, really ;). You should subscribe.

I bought a new bike!

A Specialized Vado (eBike). Cool right?

The trip from my house to work is a short bike ride, but it's a fairly dramatic elevation change, and my big ass is not capable of hauling itself up there. It's much easier with this, even with a couple of loaded saddlebags and a toddler on the back of it.

The post CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXV appeared first on CSS-Tricks.