Hey,
Welcome back after my vacation to a wonderful list of links this week. Before I let you read all the amazing content—admittedly, it’s a long update—I want to leave a personal announcement for you. This week I launched my personal project called Colloq—a new conference and event service for users and organizers. If you’re going to events or organizing something or are interested in the recorded content of conferences, you may be interested in it and I’d be happy if you join the service.
News
- WebKit just got support for the Touch Bar Web API. It’ll use the
menuitemtags and will be interesting how websites will use that feature. Anyways, it’s still only in WebKit trunk and will likely land in Safari earliest next year. - Adobe published Adobe XD 2 this week, including Design Specs, layout grids, assets export as JPG, and more.
Generic
- Kailash Ahirwar has created a resource containing the Essential cheat sheets for machine learning and deep learning engineers. A massive resource and very recommended if you’re working with any of these engines.
- David Yates’ plea about RSS: there’s nothing better is a thoughtful column that praises the idea of the good old technique called RSS over the siloed, algorithm-driven feeds of social media services.
UI/UX
- Right-To-Left development is quite hard already but designing for mobile design is a challenge.
Web Performance
- Vlad Krasnov took the privileged chance of being able to compare the newest server processors at Cloudflare and wrote up what he found out. The result is pretty interesting: Qualcomm achieves a similar performance to the fastest Intel processors but only needs about 30% less power, sometimes even less. So while there might be some issues with software incompatibilities with the newer chips by Qualcomm, it’s going to be interesting what happens on the server market. Because at large data centers it’s quite important to save energy—not only because our planet benefits from less power consumption but also because it’s simply cheaper.
- David Jonathan Ross compared normal web font file sizes to a variable font file and the result is a spectacular up to 44% of file size savings, depending on how many font styles are used on a website.
- Nikita Prokopov shares how a single option that Chrome benefits from and promoted has ruined his web application’s performance.
- Andrew Betts took all his knowledge about the great feature in HTTP and summed it up in his article “Understanding The Vary Header”.
Accessibility
- Scott Vinkle shares how we can create accessible React apps.
- Laura Kalbag has written a whole book called “Accessibility for Everyone” and here’s a short extract, explaining how to plan for accessibility.
JavaScript
- Lea Verou shares how we can use different remote and local resource URLs with Service Workers.
- Dustin Driver explains on the basis of the Firefox Debugger how to use a browser’s debugger and go beyond
console.log. - Jake Archibald wrote about an important change by Netflix which now works without client-side React. This makes the site more robust and still benefits from the advantages of React.
CSS
- Vincent De Oliveira shares about the amazing CSS
element()function, currently only available in Firefox but that might change. And it’s not even a new function, but it allows us to use images from the HTML DOM in our CSS e.g. for a background-image.
Work & Life
- 200 universities just launched 560 free online courses. And here’s the full list.
Go beyond…
- This article appearing on the Guardian is an interesting one. To see that people working at tech giants like Facebook is seen negatively by a growing portion of people is something I didn’t expect. The article also shares that people working for such companies nowadays are even ashamed of their job, which means that at some point a certain amount people changed their minds about how they see tech giants and their ethical behavior and how they deal with users’ data. An interesting change regarding how most people craved to land a job at some of these companies only until this year. This is certinly a topic that will be interesting to follow over the near future.
Anselm