Hey,
what a bright and sunny winter day it is here today. Every Thursday, my list of links grows to its maximum before I go through all of them and only put in the most relevant of the week. Reading all that great stuff is fun and while I found out about new technologies, tricks or best practices I enjoy being part of such a great community. But our industry, our work-life balance, all that isn’t perfect for everyone and always. Here’s this weeks list—as usual with a grain of highly inspirational content:
News
- Well, if you weren’t scared by the NSA yet here’s a report that will: According to the source nearly every hard drive has been intercepted and infected with NSA software.
- Firefox finally toggled the preference for
<picture>to on by default in the Nightly builds. That means it’s finally coming mid May to the stable Firefox release. - IE enabled HSTS. Read here why that’s a great thing and why HSTS is so important. And IE also integrates asm.js into the Chakra engine.
Concepts & Design
- Yelp is getting a new design. And Jerry Cao gives you some insights on the design process and the power of minimalism.
- You still can Improve Validation Errors with Adaptive Messages.
Generic / Tools
- Plumin.js lets you create and manipulate fonts directly in the browser and ith JavaScript. That’s a really cool way to adapt fonts to your needs. Currently only supports OTF file export.
- DoIUse applies CanIUse rules to a specified website and gives you an overview on what support is missing on the website.
- It’s important that browser vendors seek feedback from web developers and why developers should report their use cases and issues.
- https://github.com/fabrik42/responsive_mockups
Security
- Detecting and exploiting path-relative stylesheet import (PRSSI) vulnerabilities. Ugh, that’s a pretty interesting case.
- If you want to read more on Privacy Concerns and Spyware, Laura Kalbag collected a week’s summary on the ind.ie blog.
- Do you have a disaster management plan? Basecamp finally has and it’s handled super-smoothly. They switched to another data center without a single user noticing it a few days ago to test it.
Web Performance
- A curated list of web performane optimization tools and resources.
- A lot of interesting details on font loading had been shared in the previous months by Zach Leatherman. His colleague, Scott Jehl now wrote up the whole story into a blog post explaining what’s probably the best technique to load web fonts these days.
- After Flipboards’ web release and React an interesting discussion on the performance of the DOM arose. I think we definitely need to take action on speeding up the bloated old DOM.
HTML / SVG
- Have you seen the Polyman or the Polylion? Here’s the whole story of how it’s been made.
- Speaking of SVG: How to do a better SVG fallback with the picture element and handle the art direction case as well.
- How to create animated SVG Charts without big libraries.
JavaScript
- Cypress is a test engine that runs unit and integration tests in your browser. It has instant feedback, painless debugging and you can go through step by step. Really promising.
- Well, it’s relatively easy to detect and track users with AdBlockers with your analytics software. While I don’t like this it can be useful to determine if ads are still worth it or if you need to rethink your advertising / revenue model. Also the approach only works if the plugin doesn’t block your analytics service as well.
- Only recently I told you about 6to5, a JavaScript ES6 to ES5 transpiler. After joining forces with other libraries, they now renamed the project to Babel.
- How to deal with error handling in JavaScript Promises.
- A reminder that Progressive Enhancement is not at all about if JavaScript is available.
CSS / Sass
- How Medium created their print stylesheets and makes the articles on it a great offline reading experience.
Work & live
- As works expands to the time you schedule for it it’s important to set goals for your meetings. That way meetings can get way more productive.
- Advice to a younger me by Josh Clark.
- Doesn’t it sound awesome to have open salaries and that everybody in the company knows what each other gets per year? Well, turns out it’s very challenging and less exciting than it seems.
Go beyond…
- You should take vacation every 3 to 6 months is not enough. Next time you do, you should really make it a difference.
- With careers it’s the same as climbing the highest mountain. But we can not expect monotonic growth in our career.
- We must get past “being busy” to be a good thing. Actually, when someone constantly says “I’m so busy” this is a bad sign.
And with that I’ll close for this week. In case you like what I write each week, please support me via Flattr, gratipay or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.
Thanks and all the best,
Anselm