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Angular, Autoprefixer, IE11, and CSS Grid Walk into a Bar…

I am attracted to the idea that you shouldn't care how the code you author ends up in the browser. It's already minified. It's already gzipped. It's already transmogrified (real word!) by things that polyfill it, things that convert it into code that older browsers understand, things that make it run faster, things that strip away unused bits, and things that break it into chunks by technology far above my head.

The trend is that the code we author is farther and farther away from the code we write, and like I said, I'm attracted to that idea because generally, the purpose of that is to make websites faster for users.

But as Dave notes, when something goes wrong...

As toolchains grow and become more complex, unless you are expertly familiar with them, it’s very unclear what transformations are happening in our code. Tracking the differences between the input and output and the processes that code underwent can be overwhelming. When there’s a problem, it’s increasingly difficult to hop into the assembly line and diagnose the issue and often there’s not an precise fix.

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Creating and Manipulating PDFs with pdfrw

Patrick Maupin created a package he called pdfrw and released it back in 2012. The pdfrw package is a pure-Python library that you can use to read and write PDF files. At the time of writing, pdfrw was at version 0.4. With that version, it supports subsetting, merging, rotating and modifying data in PDFs. The pdfrw package has been used by the rst2pdf package (see chapter 18) since 2010 because pdfrw can “faithfully reproduce vector formats without rasterization.” You can also use pdfrw in conjunction with ReportLab to re-use potions of existing PDFs in new PDFs that you create with ReportLab.

In this article, we will learn how to do the following:

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The Most Awesome Online Teachers for Learning Web Development

For the past few months, I have been on a learning spree looking to enhance my existing coding skills and also learn new programming languages and frameworks. In this process, I have watched a countless number of video tutorials and online courses that pertain to programming and, specifically, web development.

In my quest to become a better developer, I’ve come across several awesome “teachers” who aren’t just excellent programmers but awesome educators and have the art of explaining complex and difficult concepts.

Learn Modern Web Programming with the Best Online Teachers

This is an attempt to highlight the best instructors on the Internet for JavaScript, React, Redux, Node.js, Firebase (database and storage), Docker, Google Golang, Typescript, Flutter (for mobile app development), Dart, Git, Webpack and Parcel bundler.

I’ve taken courses by every single instructor mentioned here (PDF) and recommend them highly.

Awesome Web Teachers
Language / PlatformTeacher / Course
React.jsAndrew Mead, Maximilian Schwarzmüller, Stephen Grider, Ryan Florence, Scott Tolinski, Elijah Manor, Brian Holt, Dave Ceddia, Kirupa Chinnathambi
Advanced JavaScript / ES6 / ES2017Anthony Alicea, Wes Bos, Mark Zamoyta, Tyler McGinnis,  Mosh Hamedani, Kent C. Dodds, Kyle Simpson, Kyle Robinson Young, Brandon Morelli, Cody Seibert
ReduxDan Abramov, Shaun Pelling, Bucky Roberts, Cory House
Dart & FlutterMary Xia & Matt Sullivan, Stephen Grider, Maximilian Schwarzmüller, Filip & Emily Fortuna
Docker / KubernetesJake Wright, Stephen Grider, James Lee
Webpack / Parcel web bundlerAndrew Mead, Lawrence Whiteside, Sean Larkin, Petr Tichy, Brad Traversy, Max Schwarzmüller
Node.jsMaximilian Schwarzmüller, Stephen Grider, Andrew Mead, Azat Mardan, Anthony Alicea, Samer Buna
Git & GithubTrevor Miller, Alex Garret-Smith, Tom Preson-Werner, Daniel Shiffman
Go LanguageTodd McLeod, Stephen Grider, Derek Banas, Jon Calhoun, Harrison Kinsley
TypeScriptTodd Motto, John Lidquist, Basarat Ali Syed, Marius Schulz
Firebase / FirestoreDavid East, Doug Stevenson, Shaun Pelling, Todd Kerpelman, Steve Kinney
Google Chrome Dev ToolsPaul Irish, Surma, Umar Hansa, Jon Kuperman
GraphQLAndrew Mead, Stephen Grider

Also see: Learn How to Code Online

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The Best Places to Download HTML Templates for your Website

Are you looking for responsive, beautiful and professional looking HTML templates for your next website but don’t have the budget? Well, here are a couple of free resources on the Internet where you can regularly find good templates for use in your web projects without restrictions.

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Dribble is a popular community of designers for them to showcase their work online. In addition to posting screenshots of their work, designers also upload the HTML / CSS version of their projects for anyone to use. You should bookmark the freebie and the freebies tag on Dribble to never miss these projects.

Creative Market is a marketplace for website templates, themes, fonts and other design assets. It is a paid store but if you join their email newsletter, they’ll send you free design stuff every week in your inbox that can be downloaded directly to your Dropbox. And they are mostly good.

HTML5 UP is created by the same developer that built Carrd, one of the most useful websites on the Internet. HTML5 UP is a treasure house of beautiful templates built sans the heavy Bootstrap or Material framework. All web templates are available in the Creative Commons license so can you can use them in any way with attribution.

website-theme

Envato’s Themes Forest is a premium marketplace for website templates but if create a free account with them, you get to download all the freebies that are published on their homepage every few weeks. These are paid items that the authors have made free only during the duration of the promotion to gain visibility in the marketplace.

OnePageLove is a curated directory of single page websites and they have a dedicated section for HTML templates that are free to download.

UpLabs is another online marketplace and community where creative designers share their work. The “web” section offers a variety of HTML templates that are free for both personal and commercial use.

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Manoela Ilic’s Codrops houses the most creative collection of work for web designers as well as developers. Every single project on this site, be it an image slider or a checkout page, is unlike anything you’ve seen before and the source code is up for grabs on Github.

Freebiesbug, as the name suggests, curates web freebies including fonts, PSD designs, stock photos and, of course, HTML templates. Look for the “exclusive” tag and you’ll discover HTML/CSS templates that the designers have chosen to share exclusively on this website.

And the final resource in my list that is worth adding to your bookmarks is Codepen. Chris Coyier started Codepen as a playground for writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the web browser but the project has evolved into a huge community of front-end developers that are putting the code in public which are free to fork and download.

PS: If you are aware of any good resource for free web templates that we missed in the above list, please let me know at amit@labnol.org – thanks!

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