How To Boost Media Performance On A Budget

9 min read Business, Performance, User Experience Saved for offline reading Share on Twitter, LinkedIn How do we get media performance right while staying within performance budgets? Let’s take a look at the recent stats and data around performance budgets, video playback performance issues and s

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Learn CSS Flexbox by Building 5 Responsive Layouts

Here's a practical guide to help you learn CSS Flexbox in 2021 by building 5 responsive layouts. Let's dive right in.🥇 We need a blueprint when constructing a house. In the same way, we need a blueprint to layout our content across our browser.

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SVG Generators

In a new series of posts, we highlight some of the useful tools and techniques for developers and designers. Last weeks, we’ve covered CSS auditing tools, CSS generators and accessible front-end components. This time around, let’s look at SVG generators — for everything from shapes and backgrounds to SVG path visualizers and SVG → JSX generators.

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10+ Best Node.js CMS Platforms To Use In 2021

NodeJS is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast and scalable network applications. Previously, whenever someone mentioned CMS, your mind would have thought of platforms like Joomla, Drupal, etc. But now, Node.js-based CMS platforms are the talk of the town.

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Upgrading to React 17 and Webpack 5

I have been working with React for several years now. So far, after each release, it always excited to try out new features. But this wasn’t the case with React 17. It was advertised as a No New Feature release.

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Simple tips for writing clean React components

In this post, let’s go over some simple tips that will help you write cleaner React components and scale your project better. First, let’s start with an antipattern that you should avoid.

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5 Different Tools for Frontend Monitoring

As developers, we always push our limits to test our applications before they go live. As we all know, no matter how far we test, runtime issues are inevitable. Therefore, monitoring every aspect of the application is a must.

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Cypress Web Automation

In this article, we will discuss Cypress, an open-source test automation tool for testing web applications. Compared to Selenium, Cypress has more advantages. Introduction Cypress is an open-source test automation tool for testing web applications.

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From semantic CSS to Tailwind - Refactoring the Netlify UI codebase

The React codebase that powers app.netlify.com is about five years old. During these five years, the focus has mostly been on high-speed growth, as most start-ups do. For this reason, what started with organised PostCSS gradually grew to become a complex and entangled global CSS architecture with a lot of specificity and overrides.

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Why Agile Transformation Fails | AgileIndy 2021

– Okay, so we’re gonna talk about today is this thing I call “Executives Guide to Why Agile Transformations Fail.” And if you’ve been following my stuff, there’s really kind of a fascinating evolution of this story.

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Tips and Tricks for Giving Talks

One of the things I’ve missed during the pandemic is the opportunity to meet and collaborate with fellow designers and product thinkers at conferences and workshops.

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Debugging Libraries: JavaScript Edition

DevTools provide a great debugging environment, with visual breakpoints, watchers, file navigation, and more. Visual Studio Code is another great option. In order to learn more and understand which files you should be debugging, you can run npm edit to open a package in your favorite text editor.

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React API evolution

React is ~8 years old. I remember the day when I saw the first demo — I was amazed at how genius yet how simple it was! I still carry that excitement to this day. During this time React changed a bunch, but its core ideas have sayed the same.

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Handling Text Over Images in CSS

You might come across a UI component that has text above an image. In some cases, the text will be hard to read depending on the image being used. There are some different solutions like adding a gradient overlay, or a tinted background image, text-shadow, and others.

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CSS Auditing Tools

How large is your CSS? How repetitive is it? What about your CSS specificity score? Can you safely remove some declarations and vendor prefixes, and if so, how do you spot them quickly? Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on refactoring and cleaning up our CSS, and as a result, we stumbled upon a couple of useful tools that helped us identify duplicates. So let’s review some of them.

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Just-In-Time: The Next Generation of Tailwind CSS

One of the hardest constraints we've had to deal with as we've improved Tailwind CSS over the years is the generated file size in development. With enough customizations to your config file, the generated CSS can reach 10mb or more, and there's only so much CSS that build tools and even the browser itself will comfortably tolerate.

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Use Logpoints!

There's sometimes a tribal attitude about how web developers should be debugging their code and solving problems. There's the console.log loyalists, then there's the debugger/breakpoint maximalists.

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23 Node.js Best Practices For Automation Testing

If you are in the world of software development, you must be aware of Node.js. From Amazon to LinkedIn, a plethora of major websites use Node.js. Powered by JavaScript, Node.js can run on a server, and a majority of devs use it for enterprise applications.

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Canvas vs SVG: Choosing the Right Tool for the Job

HTML5 Canvas and SVG are both standards-based HTML5 technologies that you can use to create amazing graphics and visual experiences. The question I’m asking in this article is the following: Should it matter which one you use in your project? In other words, are there any use cases for preferring HTML5 Canvas over SVG?

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The State of User Research 2021 Report

For our 2021 report, we collected responses through our newsletter and social media channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook) and by posting in Slack, Facebook, and LinkedIn communities. The breakdown of responses from our own channels versus external communities was an even 50/50 split.

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How to Screen Record on Your Chromebook

Recording your smartphone or computer’s screen can be useful, but sometimes you have to download third-party apps to do it. Fortunately, Chromebooks have a built-in tool that makes it easy to create screen recordings with no extra software required.

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Awesome Git Aliases

Git is an amazingly powerful tool. It can keep track of all the code you write, let you organize your work into different branches, help you seamlessly work with other developers, and even let you time travel and make changes.

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Smart Optimization Techniques: Lazy Loading with React

If you’ve ever worked on a medium-to-big web application, you’ve more than likely noticed that the bundle size (the amount of JavaScript code shipped to the browser) is an ever-growing monster.

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Vodafone: A 31% improvement in LCP increased sales by 8%

By running an A/B test specifically focused on optimizing Web Vitals, Vodafone found that a 31% improvement in LCP led to 8% more sales, a 15% improvement in their lead to visit rate, and a 11% improvement in their cart to visit rate.

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Handling User Permissions in JavaScript

So, you have been working on this new and fancy web application. Be it a recipe app, a document manager, or even your private cloud, you‘ve now reached the point of working with users and permissions.

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Communicating Effectively with Your Business Partners

Shoup: I'm Randy Shoup. I want to talk to you about communicating effectively with your business partners. I'm currently a VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at eBay. I've also been an engineering leader at Google, and Stitch Fix, and WeWork.

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Unit Testing Components in React Navigation 5

The release of React Navigation 5 drastically changed how navigation is structured for React Native projects. One major change with this release was the introduction of useNavigation.

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Micro Frontends Using Webpack 5 Module Federation

Webpack is a well-established static module bundler for modern JavaScript applications. It has more than 57k stars on GitHub and over 13 million weekly downloads from npm registry. It released version 5 on October 10, 2020, which brings a number of changes:

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How We Use Golden Paths to Solve Fragmentation in Our Software Ecosystem

“His spice-induced visions show him a myriad of possible futures where humanity has become extinct and only one where humanity survives. He names this future ‘The Golden Path’ and resolves to bring it to fruition.

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Multi-Tenant Architecture

In a multitenancy environment, multiple customers (tenants) share the same application, running on the same operating system, on the same hardware, with the same data-storage mechanism. The distinction between the customers is achieved during application design.

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Through the pipeline: An exploration of front-end bundlers

This last week I spent a lot of time buried deep in the documentation of parcel, rollup, and esbuild. I've been on a quest. Mainly one that starts from a place of being fed up with webpack being slow and unwieldy to configure and manage.

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NFTs are both priceless and worthless

It is no longer possible to ignore NFTs, the crypto off-shoot that can tie intangible assets to specific, unalterable tokens. Interest in NFTs (non-fungible tokens) has spiked over the last year, and is now breaking into the mainstream with several headline-grabbing deals.

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Estimating Software Budgets – Don’t Confuse Precision with Accuracy

As part of my job as Managing Partner at Atomic Object, I talk to clients who approach us with projects they’d like us to work on. A large portion of that work is spent creating detailed cost estimates.

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How to Build React Forms the Easy Way with react-hook-form

Nobody enjoys creating and re-creating complex forms with validation, React developers included. When it comes to building forms in React, it's essential to use a form library that provides a lot of convenient tools and doesn’t require much code.

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The New King of Bundlers Is Here: All Bow Before Vitejs

Back when I started coding, JavaScript was used only to add some fancy effects to your website. Remember that trailing effect you could add to your mouse? Or how you could change the colors of your links during a hover event?

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How to Use Breakout Rooms in a Zoom Meeting

Zoom meetings can very easily feel overwhelming when there are a lot of people involved. A feature called “Breakout Rooms” can help large groups by allowing people to break off into smaller groups. It’s a handy trick to know.

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10 Ways to Combat Project Burnout

Have you ever been on a project where you can’t seem to catch up? You’re limited on time but there is too much to do? Or you’re struggling to make progress on a hard or nebulous problem? If so, you may be on the road to burnout.

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The 6 levels of autonomous driving, explained as fast as possible

Welcome to Shift Basics, a collection of tips, explainers, guides, and advice to keep you up to speed with mobility tech. Autonomous driving isn’t quite as clear cut as it sounds. Despite many vehicles claiming to have self-driving capabilities, they aren’t all the same.

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SmolCSS

Create an intrinsically responsive grid layout, optionally using a CSS custom property to extend to varable contexts. Each column will resize at the same rate, and break to a new row if the width reaches the --min value.

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NFTs are a dangerous trap

Like most traps, they’re mysterious and then appealing and then it’s too late. An NFT is digital treasure chest, a status symbol and an apparent item of value.

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3 Tips for Handing Off a Large Project

I recently finished up a project where I and a coworker worked to help maintain a large codebase. We not only were tasked with fixing bugs, adding new features, and cleaning up confusing code.

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REST vs GraphQL: Making the Right Choice

Understand the core differences between REST and GraphQL when designing APIs, and consider four simple points to help you decide between these options. Origins in a Facebook Case Study In order to better understand the "REST vs. GraphQL" debate, it is useful to look at where GraphQL originates.

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React Testing Library – Tutorial with JavaScript Code Examples

This post will help you to learn what React Testing Library is, and how you can use it to test your React application. This tutorial will assume you already know some basic JavaScript and understand the basics of how React works.

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Elegant Frontend Architecture

Software design and architecture is not something you can install with npm. If you disagree, nothing is stopping you from installing an opinionated JavaScript framework that can solve all your problems with a CLI generator.

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Let’s Create a Custom Audio Player

HTML has a built-in native audio player interface that we get simply using the audio element. Point it to a sound file and that’s all there is to it. We even get to specify multiple files for better browser support, as well as a little CSS flexibility to style things up, like giving the audio player a border, some rounded corners, and maybe a little padding and margin. But even with all that… the rendered audio player itself can look a little, you know, plain.

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Not all developers want to be leaders — but here’s how to help the ones that do

Offer support to developers who want to grow. Founder & CEO, DevSquad — Phil began his entrepreneurial journey when he was 17, starting and exiting his own SaaS business.

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Manage technical quality

If there's one thing that engineers, engineering managers, and technology executives are likely to agree on, it's that there's a crisis of technical quality. One diagnosis and cure is easy to identify: our engineers aren't prioritizing quality, and we need to hire better engineers or retrain the ones we have.

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Bitwarden Is the Best Free Alternative to LastPass

LastPass is a veteran in the password management industry. It’s dependable and easy to use. But LastPass’s free plan doesn’t support cross-device sync. If you’re looking for a free LastPass alternative, Bitwarden might be the best option. Here’s why.

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The New React 17 JSX Transform

Despite the fact that React 17 didn’t bring any code-changing updates, it has changed a lot under the hood. One of the most noticeable changes is the new JSX Transform.

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Better git diffs with FZF

The setup instructions in this article are for Mac, but you should be able to do this on Linux and Windows Subsystem for Linux. Hat tip to Kevin LaFlamme for showing what’s possible with FZF. You should follow him here. Sometimes I find the git diff command a little inconvenient.

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